European Union and New Regionalism

Competing Regionalism and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era

Mario Telò

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317139263
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Economía
• Categoría: Economía política

Stemming from an international and multidisciplinary network of leading specialists, this best-selling text is fully updated with new chapter additions. With the first edition prepared at the end of the last century and the second edition adding inter-regional relations, this new edition focuses on competing models of regional cooperation within a multipolar world and the role of European Union. This new edition offers: - A comparative analysis of regional cooperation and of both US-centred and EU-centred interregionalism. - A fresh exploration of key issues of regionalism versus globalization and the potential for world economic and political governance through regional cooperation, notably in hard times. - A vigorous response to conventional wisdom on the controversial EU international identity - An appendix on regional and interregional organizations. - A key resource for postgraduate or undergraduate study and research of international relations, European integration studies, comparative politics and international political economy. Taking into account both the expanded European Union and regional cooperation in every continent, this multidisciplinary volume comprises contributions from established scholars in the field: A. Gamble, P. Padoan, G. Joffé, G. Therborn, Th. Meyer, R. Higgott, B. Hettne / F. Ponjaert, F. Soederbaum, Ch. Deblock, K. Eliassen / A. Arnottir, S. Keukeleire / I. Petrova, S. Santander and M. Telò (editor).

PART I
Theoretical Perspectives

Chapter 1
Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism

Andrew Gamble

The end of the Cold War and the reunification of the world economy fuelled debate on the future shape of world order. Many of the changes that have taken place since then appear contradictory. There has been a marked trend towards globalization and the creation of a more interconnected world economy and world society. This has often been associated with the erosion of the power of nation states to govern their economies, and the rise of new forms and agencies of global governance. At the same time there has been a substantial regionalization of economic activity and the strengthening of regionalist projects launched by core states or groups of states. The hopes that had been briefly expressed after 1991 for a new world order which would transcend the conflicts of the past were dashed after the events of 9/11 brought awareness of new perils and new insecurities, and the application by the United States and its allies of a new security doctrine and the declaration of a new kind of war, a war on terror. The financial crash in 2008 precipitated a long-drawn out recession in the advanced Western economies and raised new questions about what kind of world order was possible or desirable (Gamble, 2009).

This chapter examines four different futures for world order, based on contrasting perspectives on the forces which are currently shaping it. All of them remain in play after the financial crash, although in a very altered context. They are:

• Borderless world – a cosmopolitan global economy, in which states wither away, and a benign global governance is instituted through markets and democracy;

• Regional blocs – division of the world into protectionist spheres of influence and rival civilizations controlled by a few great powers;

• American Empire – a world dominated by a unilateralist United States;

• New medievalism – a world in which there is no single source of legitimacy, but a complex set of levels and networks and jurisdictions shaping governance and identities.

1 Borderless world

The lack of agreement on the present nature of world order is a sign that a fundamental change is taking place in the way in which the world is ordered, but that we lack an adequate language to describe what is going on or to identify the new principles (Gamble, 2000). The old images and concepts remain powerful and seductive, none more so than the conventional international relations view of international politics as relations between states. However imperfectly the basic principle of the modern state system may have been realized in practice since it was enunciated in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, it has provided the dominant perspective on international politics for 350 years. This basic principle is the claim of supreme authority over a given territory. All local, particular and personal sources of authority are consolidated into a single public power within a defined territorial space. This public power has two key spatial dimensions: the boundary between the public and the private, and the boundary between the internal and the external (Ruggie, 1993a). This principle of territorial sovereignty depended on the repudiation of those existing universal forms of religious and political authority which denied it. The new doctrines claiming exclusive sovereignty for the prince over all matters within a territory, including its religious affiliation (cuius regio eius religio and rex in regno suo est imperator regni suo) did not go uncontested, but they were increasingly in the ascendancy from the sixteenth century onwards. They helped justify the dividing up of the world into states which claimed absolute sovereignty over the territory they controlled, recognizing no superior jurisdiction.

1.1 Globalization

This way of conceiving the international state system has had to be rethought because the idea of territorial sovereignty no longer captures the contemporary nature of political rule (Ruggie, 1993a). The rethinking has been gathering pace since the 1970s as more and more changes appeared which did not fit easily within the assumptions of the Westphalian perspective. It has produced an extensive literature around the new trends of globalization and regionalization, raising the question of whether the era of the nation-state is finally over. The nation-state has been declared an anachronism, facing forces which it can no longer control. A global economy is emerging, dominated by new actors, such as transnational companies, banks and NGOs. States are increasingly subordinate and reactive.

Yet globalization, as many have recognized, is not a new theory. Global economic forces and global markets have existed since the emergence of capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto 150 years ago Marx put forward one of the earliest and boldest theories of globalization, and he has been followed by many later writers, most recently world systems theorists (Wallerstein, 1974; 1984). World systems theory emphasizes the contradictory character of the world system as a (relatively) unified economy and a (relatively) fragmented polity. For theorists of globalization the world economy is best characterized as a global rather than an international economy. An international economy is made up of separate national economies, controlled to a greater or lesser extent by states. Nation-states are at the centre of this world. They derive their legitimacy and their power from their control over discrete national territories, populations and resources. Flows of goods, people and capital have to be sanctioned by political authority.

A global economy, by contrast, is one in which the fundamental units are not nation-states and national economies but patterns of production and consumption organized by transnational companies, operating across national borders, and not reliant on any particular national territory or government. Economic decisions are shaped not at the level of national governments but through the workings of the global financial markets and the patterns of international trade and production. Governments have to adjust their societies and economies to the changing requirements of the global economy, or risk impoverishment and isolation.

1.2 Hyper-globalization

The tendencies towards the creation of a global economy have existed since the beginning of capitalism, but they have been stronger in some periods than others. Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 the balance between transnational economic forces and national governments moved in favour of the former. The international state system and the principle of order which it embodied came under severe strain. Supporters and critics of the new global economy have argued that in this changed environment national governments lose their autonomy and become ciphers for global economic forces. A new cosmopolitan society emerges, unified around a single set of political, social, economic and ideological principles, in which there is no room for fundamental alternatives. History has ended (Fukuyama, 1989).

Strong versions of globalization (or hyper-globalization, as it is sometimes called) claim that borders are becoming obsolete. The nation-state is no longer an appropriate unit of analysis or agent of governance because economic activity in the global economy no longer coincides with political or cultural boundary lines (Ohmae, 1995). Yet the nation-state, although increasingly irrelevant, can still obstruct the development of the global economy. It uses its centralized powers to raise taxes and redistribute resources according to the pressures of special interests. The result is a cumbersome, inefficient bureaucracy which makes national government the enemy of the wider public interest in maximizing the conditions for prosperity and growth. The enthusiasts for hyper-globalization want the powers of the nation-state to be dismantled and the growth of region-states encouraged. Region-states are ports of entry to the global economy, typically urban conglomerates and their hinterlands, with populations of between 5 million and 20 million people; their borders are defined economically, rather than politically. They depend on the existence of resources and skills which are located close together, but not necessarily within a single national jurisdiction. Competitiveness is determined at the level of sectors and firms, not at the level of the national economy. The key policy issue is whether national governments have the will and ability to embrace the global economy and resist pressure for national policies of protection and subsidy. The only role for governments is to become market states (Bobbitt, 2002) and facilitate the globalization of their national economies. By doing so, they bring nearer the nineteenth-century dream of a global cosmopolitan society which is coordinated and managed without the need for politics, and in which national attachments have become insignificant.

1.3 Critics of neo-liberalism

The globalization thesis does point to some important and real changes which have been taking place in the world economy and have led to a weakening of nation-states and an erosion of their sovereignty, but critics argue that at least in its hyperglobalist form it is exaggerated. There is little evidence that a global economy is emerging which overrides the modes of governance organized through nation-states and exists independently of them (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Global economic forces and global markets are always embedded in governance, both state and non-state (Pierre and Peters, 2000). Forms of governance have been changing, but the global markets themselves lack the capacity to supply their own internal mechanisms of governance.

In discussing globalization it is important to distinguish between, first, the trends which are extending and deepening connections of many different kinds (Perraton et al., 1997), and second, the normative political project, globalism, better known perhaps as neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2003), which promotes particular policies while ruling out alternatives. Globalization rhetoric has been increasingly adopted by state elites to justify substantial changes in domestic policies, particularly on public spending, welfare and industrial intervention (Hay and Marsh, 2001). But how constrained are national policies? Even if some of the changes which globalization highlights have altered the limits within which national governments may act, some argue that at most it has changed the menu of policies from which governments have to choose, rather than the ability to choose itself (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). From this perspective states still operate in an international rather than a global economy.

2 Regional blocs

The second perspective starts from this claim, that the new global economy has regional and national foundations (Zysman, 1996). Politics and the state remain of vital importance to the way in which the global economy develops and to the institutional and cultural variety within it. Far from globalization sweeping away all political structures, it is creating new ones. The political response to globalization has been the setting up of new structures and new projects. The emerging economic geography is regional rather than global, and a distinctive aspect of the emerging world order is the creation or consolidation of regionalist projects (NAFTA in the Americas, the EU in Europe and ASEAN in Southeast Asia).

The existence of these regionalist projects is clear enough, although they are very different from one another (Gamble and Payne, 1996; Hettne and Söderbaum, 1998; Breslin and Higgott, 2000b). A key theoretical and practical question is what they signify. Are they compatible with globalization, even steps towards it, or do they foreshadow a turn away from the cosmopolitan world economy and a return to closed, antagonistic regional blocs? The latter view has its roots in realist perspectives in international relations, both liberal and Marxist. At its heart is a pessimistic assessment of the workings of the international state system. Left to themselves, states will be single-minded and ruthless in the pursuit of their security; the normal state of international relations is conflict.

2.1 The interwar crisis

This is not a new view. Writing in the 1940s, E.H. Carr analysed how the world order sustained by British hegemony in the nineteenth century had fallen apart in the twentieth. Carr described this world order as ‘the golden age of continuously expanding territories and markets, of a world policed by the self-assured and not too onerous British hegemony, of a coherent “Western civilization” whose conflicts could be harmonized by a progressive extension of the area of common development and exploitation’ (Carr, 1946: 224). The First World War had shattered this world beyond repair. During the 1920s there was a tendency towards disintegration and fragmentation of larger political units, particularly in Europe, but this was quickly followed by the reorganization of the world into a system of regional blocs:

The more autarky is regarded as the goal, the larger the units must become. The United States strengthened their hold over the American continents. Great Britain created a sterling bloc and laid the foundations of a closed economic system. Germany reconstituted Mittel-Europa and pressed forward into the Balkans. Soviet Russia developed its vast territories into a compact unit of industrial and agricultural production. Japan attempted the creation of a new unit of ‘Eastern Asia’ under Japanese domination. Such was the trend towards the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of six or seven highly organized units, round which lesser satellite units revolved without any appreciable independent motion of their own. (Carr, 1946: 230)

Carr analysed the trend towards regional blocs in terms of power politics, distinguishing between military, economic and ideological forms of power, and interpreted world politics as a struggle for power between rival states. Classical Marxism reached similar conclusions in its analysis of the formation of regional blocs in the 1930s (Sweezy, 1942; Brewer, 1990).

2.2 Hegemonic breakdown

One of the implications of Carr’s analysis was that the breakdown of the world order in the 1930s and the formation of regional blocs followed inevitably from the collapse of British hegemony. This argument became the main theme of the hegemonic stability school which developed in the 1970s. The Great Depression in the 1930s was explained by the lack of a state capable of providing world leadership (Kindleberger, 1973b). The institutions of the liberal world order collapsed because of the inability of Britain to continue to play the role of hegemon and supply the public goods necessary to stabilize the global economy, and because of the absence of any other power able or willing to fill that role. The Second World War created the conditions for the emergence of a new hegemon, the United States, which produced the successful reconstruction of the world economy and the long period of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. But the gradual erosion of the economic supremacy of the United States meant that its hegemonic power began to decline in the 1970s, and it was no longer able to guarantee the conditions for a stable liberal world order. The results were the recessions and economic instability of the 1970s and 1980s. If no power is able to supply the public goods which a liberal world order requires then states will respond with mercantilist and protectionist policies, as they did in the 1930s. Many observers in the 1930s concluded at that time that the future belonged to national economies and regional blocs.

One of the characteristics of regional bloc scenarios in the first half of the twentieth century and again today is that the nature of the conflict between the blocs is assumed to be a zero-sum game in which each bloc competes to increase its relative share of territory, resources and wealth within a global total which is fixed. In this neo-realist perspective regionalism simplifies and intensifies this conflict, by combining the most important states into more or less cohesive groups under the leadership of the dominant state in each region. The pressure on a region to become cohesive increases in relation to the success of other regions in unifying themselves. As each regional power seeks to maximize its wealth and extend its territory, the risk of economic wars rises, because in a zero-sum world each regional power calculates that conflict will yield more benefit than cooperation.

2.3 Critics of regional blocs

Gloomy forebodings of economic wars and holy wars (Huntington, 1993b) have reappeared in the last 10 years; but they are challenged by other scenarios which predict a future of increasing prosperity and peace, the settling of the ideological conflicts which have dominated world politics for 200 years and the universal acceptance of a common set of ideas about economic and social organization associated with the idea of a cosmopolitan global economy. On this view the clash of civilizations predicted by Huntington will not materialize because there is only one civilization – Western civilization – which is adapted for survival. The ethic of ultimate ends contained in Confucianism, Islam and Christianity all belong to the pre-modern stage of social development, and are destined to be left behind.

Liberal institutionalists further argue that as the world economy becomes more interdependent, it becomes rational for states to prefer cooperation to conflict (Keohane, 1984a). States increasingly face common problems which can only be handled through agreement on new institutions and rules. As interdependence deepens, so the risk of major economic or military conflict should decline. Democracies do not fight one another, so as democratization spreads, the less likely it becomes that conflicts between states will be settled in the future by resort to arms. New transnational institutions develop to mediate conflicts. These theories reject the assumption that states face a zero-sum game. Instead, they assume that there is a positive-sum game in which states can cooperate either through competition or through intergovernmental negotiation to increase the total output of goods and services available for distribution. Economic welfare can be improved for everyone so long as positional goods such as territory and resources do not become the focus of competition. An earlier Marxist version of this argument can be found in the theories of ultra-imperialism, the peaceful joint exploitation of the world by the united finance capital of the great powers (Brewer, 1990).

2.4 Regionalism and globalization

If the world is not facing a return to regional blocs, what explains the recent growth of regionalism and how far is it compatible with globalization? One of the problems is the different levels of analysis at which these concepts operate. Regionalism is a type of state project which can be distinguished from other types of state project such as globalism. Globalization and regionalization are not state projects but complex processes of social change which involve distinctive new patterns of social interaction between non-state actors (Gamble and Payne, 1996). State projects like regionalism typically seek to accelerate, to modify, or occasionally to reverse the direction of social change which processes like globalization and regionalization represent.

In practice, regionalism as a set of state projects intersects with globalization. The relationship between the two has come into particularly sharp focus with the end of the Cold War. The global economy in the 1990s developed not two but three cores: North America, the European Union and East Asia. The former core around the Soviet Union has disintegrated, allowing the three embryonic cores within the former capitalist world economy to emerge as the constituent elements of the new order, each with its own regionalist project. The relationships between these three cores and between the cores and their peripheries is both complex and diverse. No single pattern has become established. What they all share, however, is a commitment to open regionalism; policy is directed towards the elimination of obstacles to trade within a region, while at the same time minimizing trade barriers to the rest of the world. Policy debate has been conducted not between advocates of free trade and of protection, but between ...