Region-Making and Cross-Border Cooperation

New Evidence from Four Continents

Elisabetta Nadalutti, Otto Kallscheuer, Elisabetta Nadalutti, Otto Kallscheuer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351764544
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the nature of regions and how they function, particularly at the local and micro-level. Whilst recent years have seen a resurgence in debates around the roles which regions can play in development, the focus has tended to be on 'macro' regional institutions such as the EU, ASEAN, ECOWAS or MERCOSUR. In contrast, this book offers a nuanced analysis of the important field of sub-regionalism and sub-national cross-border cooperation.

Region-Making and Cross-Border Cooperation takes a fresh look at both theoretical and empirical approaches to 'region-making' through cooperation activities at the micro-level across national borders in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The book aims to explore the role that institutional dynamics play at the micro-level in shaping local and global ties, investigate what the formal and informal integration factors are that bolster regionalism and regionalization processes, and to clarify to what extent, and under what conditions, cooperation at the micro-level can be instrumental to solving common problems.

Scholars and students within politics, sociology, geography, and economics would find this book an important guide to regionalism at a micro-local level perspective.

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Part I

Region-making and cooperation

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1 Regionalism after Europe?

A marginal question¹

Otto Kallscheuer

Provincializing Europe?

Publishing a volume on Comparative Regionalism does not seem a particularly original task today. One could motivate the importance of this topic by pointing at the growing relevance of regionalism worldwide; one might as well indicate the serious crises within the European Union, which is probably the most institutionalized version of interstate-regionalism today. Is this a paradox? It would then also concern the academic growth industry of regionalism studies: On the one hand, regionalism and its analysis has spread out for at least a quarter of a century. The end of the Cold War eliminated the Iron Curtain and lowered other systemic barriers to political, economic, cultural cooperation between neighbouring states. On the other hand, many hopes were connected with the expansion and/or diffusion of regionalization processes, sometimes understood as the adaptation of European successes in other parts of the world, but most of these expectations did not come true as expected. Is this a paradox? Another good reason for assembling the analyses and case studies in this volume.

A controversial picture presents, first of all, the European Union (EU), that for decades has been considered the most successful ‘regional’ compound between sovereign states. Judgements about its performance, stability and delivery of collective goods (welfare, security, peace) were never uncontroversial, but now they are beginning to shift – not only in the general (and electoral) public, but also in the study of International Relations. In the first half century of its existence, the European (Economic) Community (EEC/EC) was considered by many observers, by insiders and outsiders, not only as the ‘model-case’ for (macro-) regionalism in general, but also as a new form of transnational commonwealth, and even as a promising project for a future ‘post-national’ pattern of political integration (and ‘cosmopolitical citizenship’).² Wasn’t it also a promising template for other interstate regionalization processes in different parts of the world?

This bright picture of institutionalized ‘Europe’ was supported by its achievements and emulations: the EC/EU has not only experienced a rapid quantitative expansion from 12 to 27 member states, now including its former northern and (south-)eastern neighbourhood states. This high-speed enlargement only took three steps (1995, 2004, 2007), concluded within little more than a decade after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire. At the same time the EU fulfilled a political and quasi-constitutional quantum leap in its character by becoming a Political Union, with even a partial monetary integration and first steps towards a greater integration of the economic and fiscal policies of its member states. Turkey, Serbia and other states stood in line, aspiring admission to the club of EU membership.

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But then the EU seemed to become a victim of its own successes. The unfinished and controversial mechanisms to sustain monetary stability in the eurozone (and greater economic stability in the EU in general) began to falter after the international banking crisis of 2008; the ‘Greek debt’ controversy of 2010/2011 caused what was probably the greatest political crisis of the European Union up to this date,³ only to be possibly surpassed by a new crisis, the present refugee crisis, analysed in this volume by Jens-Uwe Wunderlich (Chapter 7). So, the last two years or so have witnessed the rise of an even sharper debate among internal and external actors and observers: not only about specific policies (monetary stability, European and national policies towards the growing number of war refugees and illegal migrants), but also about the character and ‘nature’ of the EU in general.

I may just enumerate here the well-known warning signs from within that announced the creeping EU crisis: first, one might mention the Brexit referendum and its still incalculable, unpredictable outcome; second, the growth of Euro-sceptical movements and nationalist/populist parties in almost all EU member countries; third, the contradictory visions about the EU’s proper ‘supranational’ role and identity – not least the several difficulties of this sui generis regional compound that is the EU to define its international role within the multipolar world-order’s present crises and near future.⁴

A cursory glance over the ‘state of regionalism’ in the world of today shows that not only formal regional cooperation among (at least) three state actors,⁵ which may be more or less institutionalized, has increased and become more common after the end of the Cold War, but also the ‘regionalist’ literature has bloomed – in Political Science and Political Economy, International Relations and Development Theory, and in International and Constitutional Law.⁶ Important journals, book series, handbooks (see Börzel and Risse 2016) and other collective volumes, introductions and controversies about regionalism(s) have been published during the last decade. Surely all this intellectual production does not concern only the exercise of academic performance and university cooperation programmes? It can also be seen as the ‘communicative infrastructure’ of regional cooperation organizations and the ‘intellectual software’ for regional integration institutions.

‘Regionalism’ already constitutes a whole academic growth industry of counselling, supervising and monitoring; the production of papers, surveys, scenarios and other discursive activities that take place inside the growing group of various think tanks and NGOs. Thereby the growth of ‘regionalism’ as a field for social science is feeding an intellectual environment for official regional organizations, in ‘parallel’ with areas of economic cooperation, political coordination and their intellectual monitoring, concerning various issues in the field of International Relations and ‘Area Studies’. Critical observers might even – to use Marxist terms – find some ‘ideological superstructure’ here.

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Brave Old World?

My own role in co-editing this volume was not that of a participant in any of the case studies, whose questions and findings we tried to relate to each other. I remain on the side lines, as critical bystander and external observer, who tries to figure out conceptual connections between today’s regionalist research and the history of political ideas. An observer who – as a ideally convinced European – is worried about the possible withering away of the EU’s potential.

The historical steps of the EEC/EC/EU regionalization process – from ‘Rome’ to ‘Maastricht’ or ‘Lisbon’ – have been important for the development of the expanding research field of international regionalist studies. Until today the EU model is still occasion for several versions of regionalization theory, from the centrality of interstate-cooperation to ‘neo-functionalist’ theories about economic integration (the ‘spillover’ of its functional benefits motivated greater political coordination and supranational institution-building) and new political models of regional, transnational (‘multilevel’) governance in an interdependent regional system. But can the EU still be seen as a model for regionalization processes on other continents? And why should this be important?

The normative ideal (surely not always the reality) of EU regionalization is not generic, but specific: it is federal and it remains contractual. This means that even the ‘quasi-constitutional’ sharing of state sovereignty within the Political Union must be a decision of all participants (here, of all member states) – explicit, conscious and reciprocal. Without this presupposed (surely not always realized) transparency of the whole process there would no reciprocity of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ within the Political Union, and its democracy postulate would have no institutional anchorage at the level of the Union itself, constituted by its treaties. But why should this be important?

This ‘European’ version of regionalism is not self-evident, but culturally and historically determined: it is ‘path-dependent’. Regionalism, understood as European federalism, remains profoundly marked by some of the basic (or ‘foundational’) normative codes of European history and Western self-understanding – especially by the isonomía of the Greek polis, by the biblical covenant, by the Roman rule of law (all three of them later re-elaborated and reformed by the European Enlightenment). And these components of the federal ideal do differ to a great deal – semantically and politically – from various other possible versions of regional integration. And they do so throughout history.

To give you but one important counter-example it would have to be a non-federal regionalism in its non-Western reading. I take one historical example and its interpretation: How should we understand the foundation of the First Empire in China, the Qin-dynasty (221–207 bce)? Was this decisive event, the substitution of feudal domination by a new central imperial administration, the fruit of a conscious break of the first emperor? Wang Fuhzi, the confucian philosopher of the seventeenth century, still popular in communist China today, proposed another interpretation (if I may follow the French philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien): it was only the ratification of hidden or ‘subterranean change(s), of silent transformation(s)’ (quian yi mo hua). Since most of the territories of the later Empire had already lost their feudal lords, rulers or masters, ‘the new system already had preexisted, before the imperial decision, which did nothing but systematize it’ (Jullien 2009: 168).

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I cannot verify to which extent this interpretation of Wang Fuzhi’s concept of ‘silent change’ is correct – Jullien is far from uncontroversial in the French philosophical and Sinological debates (Billetier 2006). But it surely indicates another narrative of historical change: the institutional ‘takeover’ comes after the real change has already taken place, the new order only ratifies an already established change of order and domination. In other words, ‘region-building’ might come ‘after region-making’, but this way of region-making is not necessarily a transparent, conscious, reciprocal process.

I came to think about this Chinese interpretation of the way (or dao) of real change (Jullien 1996: ‘efficacité’) when I read Chen’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 5). Our Chinese colleague describes far-reaching real changes in some Chinese border regions, which occur before and beyond any institutional transformation: just a series of border towns that change character. These changes may not be totally ‘silent’, but perhaps the real transformation has already gone much further, much deeper than its formal acknowledgement. The European version of regionalism proceeds exactly the other way around: change has to be explicit in order to be reciprocal and contractual.

European regionalism, better spelled out as European federalism, was also one, perhaps the, decisive initial input for international regionalist studies. From a pro-European or federalist perspective – which also happens to be mine – it seems historically evident that the anthropological optimism of the ‘federalist spirit’ of militant thinkers like Altiero Spinelli, Jean Monnet, Eugen Kogon and others was one of the indirect, but influent causes for many successes of EEC ‘regionalism’.⁷

These European federalists later became the conceptual ‘sherpas’ of the EEC’s ‘Founding Fathers’, of Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, and Robert Schuman. So the ‘pragmatic idealism’ of Monnet, Spinelli and the other early European federalists stood at the beginning of many later political conceptions and their practical development: for example, of the whole idea about the diffusion of regionalization as a method of governance, and even some futuristic idealization of the EU as a supranational union; from cooperation to ‘ever closer’ integration in a future European Federation.

Later, after 1989/1990, these ‘foundational’ federalist hopes encountered serious delusions. Some of the ‘new’ members within the larger ‘eastern–western’ EU did not share the Western ‘federalist’ dream. A creeping political delusion was the natural reaction, not only among pro-European militants and political leaders of ‘Brussels’. The EU deception in the Greek crisis was no less disturbing for many of its observers, but also for scholars of European studies.⁸ Within the Academy, ‘federalist’ hopes also became objects of the usual postcolonial criticism (for their ‘euro-centric’ bias). Accordingly, former European studies were now quickly rebaptized as ‘regionalization’ studies, or value-neutral ‘comparative governance’ studies.

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Less clear, it seems to me, is when, exactly, the general outlook of European federalism as the ideal model for regionalism worldwide changed. We may mention the ‘Greek’ Euro-crisis as one of the crucial steps in that transformation. Its temporary and precarious ‘Eurocratic’ solution in 2011 meant an internal shift of the EU decision-making process about common budgetary and fiscal constraints and monetary stability policy, from parliamentary to intergovernmental institutions to institutions with large decisional autonomy, such as the European Central Bank (ECB), and to informal centres of governance (Kallscheuer 2013: 270–286; Vauchez 2016). But at that time the ‘horizon of expectation’⁹ for the EU as an expansive model of regionalism had already shifted dramatically within Europe itself, several years before the refugee crisis.

From a philosophical point of view, the European Union had been seen – and was awaited – as the first, tentative realization of a trans- or post-national commonwealth. The ‘quasi-constitutional’ architecture of the EU was understood in the (teleological) perspective of the political evolution of humanity from autocracy towards democracy, through the realization of a ‘federalism of free republics’, in the understanding of Immanuel Kant: not the unification of all mankind in one state, but its federal union in plurality, consisting of many republics that are connected and limited by the rule of law (the one law of reason), constituted for this thinker the political ‘end of history’. In today’s philosophical debate this perspective of post-national federalism is upheld most prominently by Jürgen Habermas (2005, 2011), and by some of his disciples. It remains prominent within political philosophy, even if it seems to have lost much of its attraction in political science. But it is important here to remember the fact that this ‘Kantian-Federalist’ model – politically usually understood in a liberal and/or ‘liberal socialist’ sense – was not the only existing ideal legitima...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Region-Making and Cross-Border Cooperation
• Routledge Global Cooperation Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface: Beware of Fake Regions – What We Can Learn From (Failed) Regionalisms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Region-Making, Cooperation and Its Normative Dimension
• Part I Region-Making and Cooperation
• Part II Evidence From Four Continents
• Part III the Normative Dimension of Region-Making Through Cooperation
• Conclusions
• Index