Power Relations and Comparative Regionalism

Europe, East Asia and Latin America

Min-hyung Kim, James A. Caporaso, Min-hyung Kim, James A. Caporaso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000421002
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Three trends have dominated the political economy of integration during the last two decades: globalization, economic nationalism, and regionalization. This book explores comparative regional integration, focusing on both intra­ regional integration and relations among regions in the context of power.

The most common focus of integration studies has been on the logic of cooperation, but there is another logic of integration: power. The relevance of power today is represented by the relations within the Eurozone, especially between creditors and debtors. By the same line of reasoning, integration in Asia cannot ignore the respective roles of China, Japan, and Korea, nor the unresolved disputes about Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the islands in the South China Sea. This edited volume addresses the role of power in regional integration in three contexts: (1) the role of hegemonic external actors (the US and China) in regional integration; (2) the role of core states within regions (Germany, China , Japan, and Brazil); and (3) the role of noncore states- smaller and middle­ range powers (Italy and Greece in Europe; South Korea and Malaysia in Asia; and Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Paraguay in Latin America).

This book will benefit students and scholars of international relations and comparative political economy, especially those with an interest in integration studies and comparative regionalism.

1Introduction

James A. Caporaso and Min-hyung Kim

Rise and decline of comparative integration studies

While the field of comparative regional integration has flourished in recent decades, comparative research involving the European Union (EU) has been in decline. The EU is decreasingly relied upon as a comparative benchmark with other regional organizations (Sbragia 2007; Acharya 2007b). It is argued that the distinctiveness of the European experience—the two world wars, the decline of nationalism, the willingness to pool sovereignty, the high levels of supranational institutional development—all make for a distinctive background that discourages wider comparisons. In addition, the growth of a variety of experiences with integration in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is challenging the European template as “the” model for regional integration. The contemporary decline of the European model stands in stark contrast to the early years when the rise of regional integration theory and research took shape within a comparative context. This is puzzling. The transition from a young to mature science is usually accompanied by movement from a focus on single cases to comparison of similarities and differences across a wide variety of cases. In the field of regional integration scholarship, we find the opposite, at least with regard to comparisons with European integration projects.

A robust comparative research program was launched in the early years of integration scholarship. The Deutsch et al. research program (1966) included national unification attempts, some successful and some not, along with international unification experiments across many different continents. Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the US, Italy, and Germany were among the “domestic” cases examined in detail. The Anthology International Political Communities (1966) had chapters on the European Economic Community (EEC), the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), and the East African Common Services Organization (EACSO) in which Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya shared a range of services (Nye 1966, p. 407). Haas wrote a much-cited article, “International Integration: the European and the Universal Process” (1966), comparing integration in Europe with non-European and indeed non-Western integration attempts. Haas and Schmitter (1966), in the same volume, wrote about integration in Latin America, chiefly LAFTA, and made projections about unity based on theoretical and inductive lessons drawn from Europe.

In the same year as the above anthology came out, Amitai Etzioni published his Political Unification: A Comparative Study of Leaders and Forces (1966). In it he engaged the ambitious task of comparing four attempts at international unification—the West Indian Federation, the United Arab Republic (Syria and Egypt), the Nordic Union, and the EEC (today’s EU). Etzioni’s study is still noteworthy for the way he laid out his analytic categories and the careful empirical analysis in light of these categories. In addition, his design, what later was called structured focused comparison, was noteworthy for the range of variation on independent and dependent variables. Instead of looking only at the successful integration attempts, Etzioni included cases of stagnation and failure. He thus avoided the unintended censorship that occurs when we truncate variation by only examining successful cases. Indeed, out of his four cases, only the EEC turned out to be a clear example of a successful attempt at regional integration. This is a methodological lesson we could learn from today.

Beyond the “founding fathers”—Deutsch, Haas, and Etzioni—there is abundant evidence that the field of comparative regional integration was not only alive but growing. A second generation of integration scholars arose from the graduate students at Yale and Berkeley, among them Puchala, Alker, and Russett (at Yale working with Deutsch) and Schmitter, Lindberg, Scheingold, and Ruggie (students at Berkeley). Joseph Nye, who received his PhD at Harvard, was also caught up in the spirit of regional integration theory and contributed numerous works on regional integration in Africa (1966, 1968).

Why did the early work on regional integration, work in which different parts of Europe played a central role, fail to serve as a template for future research on comparative regional integration? Indeed, research and theory on the EU often moved in different directions from regional integration research in other arenas. It was not simply that non-European efforts at regional integration were not as “advanced” as their European counterparts—that itself is not an obstacle to comparison—but that many did not see in these experiments an evolution toward European outcomes. The differences were not merely quantitative (differences of degree) but also of quality and quite likely moving toward different ends. Why the divergence? Before moving to our central focus, the role of power in regional integration, we ask about the reasons behind the failure of the field of regional integration to continue its initial move in a comparative direction.

Obstacles to comparison

Why did Europe, specifically the EU, not become a template for comparative regional integration studies? Perhaps the biggest reason is that, in terms of using the EU as a benchmark for broader comparisons, the EU became a victim of its own success. Early studies of transactions among the member states of the EEC, and the emergence of complex interdependence, gave way to a focus on regional institution building. Subsequently, the focus on building institutions in the European Coal and Steel Community and EEC in turn gave way to the “EU as polity” approach (Hix 1994).

Analysts were quick to point out that the EU resembled other domestic polities, especially federal ones, more than other regional international orders. Thus, the relevant conceptual frameworks were provided by comparative politics rather than by international relations (IR). Policy-making, judicialization, and implementation replaced decentralized bargaining and the management of cross-border transactions. A highly institutionalized legal order replaced anarchy (Hobbesian or Lockean) as a frame of reference. Alberta Sbragia (1992) made the case for the EU as an example of a federal (multilevel) system in which competences were spread across member states, sub-national units, and the institutions of the EU. The multilevel governance approach of Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe (2011) added to the general thinking that the EU was a political system resembling a domestic polity more than a decentralized international organization. The shift from an IR framework where the main problems were seen as coordinating the actions of independent nation-states within a weakly institutionalized international system gave way to a perspective more informed by comparative politics with its emphasis on policy-making within a commonly accepted institutional environment. While this shift in frameworks is understandable, it signaled a rift between the study of the EU and regional organizations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The EU may not be “an N of 1” but for many it is a “bridge too far.”

Second, both nationalism and concerns about sovereignty, though far from absent in the European setting, were muted in comparison with other settings. This is perhaps most true for regional integration in Asia—Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, South Asia. Henry Kissinger (2014, pp. 172–174) reminds us that what we glibly call Asia today is composed of 50 sovereign states that have never been united by a common religion (even a religion splintered from the same roots), a common empire such as the Holy Roman Empire, a shared enlightenment, a common development model, or common enemies. This viewpoint is confirmed by numerous regional integration scholars (Acharya 2007a,b; Murray 2010). Acharya (2007a, p. 373) argues that while the European integration experiment arose in the context of nationalism’s spectacular failure, in the Asian context integration and nationalism have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship (Murray 2010, pp. 605–606).

The new regionalism

The diverse literature under the rubric, the new regionalism was in some ways a reaction to the Eurocentric model of integration. As the model for European integration shifted from putting restraints on balance of power politics in the European state system to creating institutions that required shifts in attention, competence, regulatory and fiscal power from the member states to EU institutions, the European model became less and less relevant. It was, and continues to be, the dynamics of European integration themselves that account for the diminishing returns to comparative research on regional integration.

The academic study of European integration went through several stages that made using Europe as the comparative baseline increasingly untenable. The earliest phase, during the 1950s and 1960s, was dominated by the work of Ernst Haas (1958) and Karl Deutsch and his collaborators (1966). To radically summarize their differences, Haas insisted on a central place for the emergence of new political institutions in the centers of regional power. For Deutsch, transactions of all kinds—economic, social, symbolic—were the key. Once individuals interacted, they would develop a “we-feeling” and start to undertake political initiatives. However, Deutsch had very little to say about these institutions. True, he discussed the differences between pluralistic and amalgamated security communities but institutional details of these two general types were submerged in discussions of building a community. Critically, Deutsch did not dimensionalize his institutional approach, i.e., he did not identify the key dimensions along which integration was to move. If Haas work also failed to be explicit about the same issue, his students made up for it, as a cursory examination of Lindberg and Scheingold’s Europe’s Would-Be Polity (1970) makes clear. Haas’s approach won out, in our judgment, because of the central role of institutions.

The success of Haas’s approach had fateful consequences since the EU continuously developed its institutions. Institutional development in the real world required a theory of institutions and institutional research. The EU transformed itself from a decentralized consensual system that rarely went beyond the position of the least cooperative member to an increasingly rule-governed political system that worked like many national polities. The result was that the EU was increasingly treated as a constitutionalized polity (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970; Hix and Hoyland 1999; Stone Sweet, 2004) with close attention paid to the legal bases of decisions, strategic manipulation of rules, interaction between the European Parliament, Commission, and Council of Ministers, and the spatial location of legislative decision-maker. While we don’t quite yet have the EU equivalent of Donald Matthews “Folkways of the Senate” (1959) written about the European Parliament, it is not too far beyond our imaginary horizon.

If the “EU as polity” approach was a natural consequence of the institutional movement of the EU, it is not surprising that it drove a wedge between the study of EU and regional institutions in other parts of the world. The chapters of Hix’s book looked very much like the chapters one expects to see in any book about a national political system, e.g., political parties, interest groups, legislative politics, courts, democracy, parties, and elections. Yet the chapters applied not to France and Italy but to the EU itself as a political system with its autogenic properties. If this was the template for the study of regional integration in diverse settings around the world, it is not surprising that it was rejected since in general non-European countries had little desire to transcend national sovereignty and replace it with supranational institutions and loyalties.

EU integration studies became involuted, rarely even attempting to draw comparisons with other parts of the world. Still, the call to comparison persists and won’t go away easily. If the insistence on the EU as a baseline (or comparator) becomes too strident, scholars break away and develop their own models. If the severance costs are too great, the demand for communication and mutual exchange of views creeps back into the discussion. Neither extreme view seems tenable in the long run, the view that there is nothing new under the sun (all variables present in all places at all times) and the opposed view that temporal and spatial conditions (context) generate differences that preclude comparison.

As scholars in different parts of the world (Hettne 2003, 2005; Acharya 2007; Acharya and Johnston 2007; De Lombaerde et al. 2010; Soderbaum and Sbragia 2010) began to grapple with regional integration projects outside of Europe, they noticed immediately important differences. Non-European contexts might not be fertile terrain for discussing the “customs union issue,” the advantages and disadvantages of majority voting vs. consensus, or how long it might take to develop stabilization policies or fiscal policies. Aims were often more modest (enhanced cooperation in foreign policies), sometimes more ambitious (as in counter-hegemonic strategies), and often simply different. Persistent and across-the-board emphasis on domestic noninterference characterized expectations of the overall procedures of states and non-state actors in most new regional organizations. Convergence in the organization of domestic economies and governments was not demanded as it was in the EU in the run-up to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In Europe, transitions to democratic forms of government were demanded of new EU members in the 1970s and 1980s (Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Greece under military rule). Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries tolerated authoritarian rulers and emphasized domestic noninterference. In this sense, the true descendants of Westphalia, insofar as the stress on sovereignty and domestic noninterference was concerned, increasingly lay outside of Europe.

Our approach to comparative regional integration is similar to the new regionalism (Breslin et al. 2002; Hettne 2003; Soderbaum and Shaw 2003; Warleigh 2006; Telo 2007). Like the new regionalism, we think that the specific settings for regionalism are different across regions. In particular, we build on the new regionalism approach (NRA) that “regionalism must be placed within its particula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Germany and the Eurozone crisis: Power, dominance, and hegemony
• 3 American primacy, competition for regional hegemony, and East Asian regionalism
• 4 Hegemony and its discontents: Power and regional integration in Latin America
• 5 European integration, Asian subordination: U.S. identity and power in two regions
• 6 Hegemonic international system, revisionist consensus, and regional integration
• 7 Power and East Asian regionalism
• 8 Conclusion
• Index