Arab Regionalism

Silvia Ferabolli

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317658023
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: International Relations

Arab regionalism details and examines the power relations involved in the making of an Arab region.

On an empirical level, this book concentrates on the drawing of topographic and ideational boundaries in the Arab region, on Arab regional organizations, on the functional cooperation among Arab states and institutions, and on the socio-cultural infra-structure that supports the Arab region making process, with a strong focus on post-1990 dynamics. On a theoretical level, this work makes a case for the analytical autonomy of "Arab" regionalism (as opposed to regionalism in the Middle East or in the Mediterranean) and for the necessity of approaching it as an actual process instead of a failed project. The attitude of debasement and erasure towards Arab regionalism that is common-place in the field of regional studies is replaced in this book for the acknowledgment that there is much more political coordination, economic cooperation and social integration in the Arab region than has previously been assumed.

Providing a fresh perspective on Arab regionalism, this book will be an essential resource for scholars and researchers with an interest in Regionalism, Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations.

1 Different approaches to regionalism in IR

DOI: 10.4324/9781315765631-2

Regionalism is not a new phenomenon. The lands constituting the Roman Empire, the possessions of Alexander the Great and even the Chinese Qin Empire are all instances of the “earliest accounts to regional constructions” – the military ones (see Tavares 2004). These lands, however, were brought together by force, and this is not the meaning IR scholarship usually attributes to regionalism. Indeed, “the advent of regions as cooperation among states is taken to be a phenomenon of a multi-numerical states-system, that which arose after the First World War and expanded after the Second” (Fawn 2009, 7, emphasis added).

The Organization of American States (OAS), dating back to the end of the nineteenth century, claims to be the world’s oldest regional organization. In fact, the League of Arab States was the first such “institutionalized” organization, since the OAS came into being only after the signing of the Charter of the OAS in 1948, whilst the Pact of the LAS dates back to 1945. This makes the LAS the oldest active regional organization in the world (and certainly one of the least studied).

For Samir Amin (1999, 58–59), the political-ideological regional constructions typical of the post-Second World War international system are instances of regionalism. He explains that this system rested on three pillars, with each one corresponding to a specific regional grouping in the world: first, “Welfare State and Fordism in the capitalist West”; second, “Sovietism in the Eastern countries”; and third, “developmentalism in the Third World”. Still according to Amin (1999) these pillars were in turn supported by corresponding political and/or military groupings: NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the Non-Aligned Movement. However, what differentiates this kind of regionalism from the kind that is typically examined by IR scholarship in the field of regional studies is the absence, or at least the non-priority, of cooperative ties between different social units with the explicit intention of fostering economic and social welfare (Palmer 1991). In this sense regionalism, in standard IR vocabulary, means cooperation (some may say integration, whilst very few suggest amalgamation or unification) among social units (usually states) to promote regional development (in economic and/or political, social and cultural terms). Indeed, these were the general objectives declared in the foundation documents of such organizations as the League of Arab States (1945), the Latin American Free Trade Association (1960), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (1967), the Caribbean Community and Common Market (1973), the Economic Community of West African States (1975), the Southern African Development Community (1980), the Gulf Cooperation Council (1981) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (1985).

The literature on regionalism from the 1960s to 1980s is very extensive, and a comprehensive description of it is not the task of this section. It may be sufficient to say that most of this scholarship is concerned with the European process, and that its limitations were overcome later by what was called a new “wave” of studies – those on new regionalism. According to Michael Schulz et al. (2001, 3), “the ‘new regionalism’ refers to a phenomenon, still in the making, that began to emerge in the mid-1980s, starting in Europe with the White Paper and the Single European Act and gradually turning into a truly worldwide phenomenon”. For Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell (1995, 16) it was

the developments in the European Community in the mid-1980s, set against a broader pattern of global economic change, and followed by the radical transformation of Eastern Europe and the USSR at the end of the decade which led to revived interest in new, and more ambitious forms of regionalism.

Indeed, the reasons behind the revival of political and academic interest in regionalism from the mid-1980s onwards were identified by Fawcett and Hurrell (1995). They included the end of the Cold War and the erosion of its alliance system, the negotiations of the Uruguay Round, globalization, changed attitudes toward economic development and democratization.

The already classic division between “old” and “new” regionalism in IR literature is not, however, accepted by everyone. For Claudia Fabbri (2005, 2) “new regionalism cannot be separated nor understood in isolation from old regionalism”. She explains that “the new is formulated with the old in mind given that experiences from old regionalism are inherited by the ‘architects’ of new regionalism and become part of the repertoire on integration” (Fabbri 2005, 4). From this quotation, it can be inferred that Fabbri uses “integration” (presumably regional) as a synonym for “regionalism”. Indeed, regionalism is used by and large by IR scholarship as a synonym for regional cooperation and even regional integration, even if some authors acknowledge slight differences between them. Schulz et al. (2001, endnote 3) state:

regional cooperation can be defined as an open-ended process whereby individual states or other actors within a given geographical area act together for mutual benefit in certain fields […] and in order to solve common tasks, in spite of conflicting interests in other fields of activity. It may be formal and involve a high degree of institutionalization, but may also be based on a much looser structure. [Regional integration] refers to a deeper process [since] ‘integration’ means forming parts into a whole. [original emphasis]

Still in the realm of synonymy, regionalism seems to envelop, in standard IR vocabulary, the concepts of regionhood (which distinguishes regions from non-regions), regionality (a region is something that every area on Earth can be, given suitable historical, geographical, economic, cultural and social conditions), and regionification (the social process of a region being reciprocally recognized as a region) as defined by Luk Van Langenhove (2003). Finally, the concept of security community, a transnational region comprised of sovereign states whose people maintain dependable expectations of peaceful change (Adler and Barnett 1998), is sometimes also used as a term analogous to regionalism.

As far as the similarity between the concepts of regionalism and regionalization is concerned, some authors argue that regionalism is usually associated with a programme and a strategy directed mostly by state-actors, while regionalization would imply undirected processes of social and economic interaction (Fawcett and Hurrell 1995; Hettne and Söderbaum 2000; Schulz et al. 2001; Wunderlich 2007). Others, (see Tavares 2004, 7) propound the idea that regionalism should be “approached as the theory that investigates the process of regionalization”.

Regionalism from a teleological perspective

Regardless of the kind of regionalism addressed by IR scholarship – old or new regionalism, regionalism as regional cooperation, integration, or even regionness – it was the seminal work of Bela Balassa, The Theory of Economic Integration (1961) that established the foundations of a specific way of assessing regionalism, through stages, levels and categories. In Balassa’s teleological narrative, economic integration can be categorized into five basic stages: first, free trade area; second, customs union; third, common market; fourth, economic and monetary union; and fifth, complete economic integration. States “progress”, from stage to stage, until reaching the desired full integration. In Balassa’s metanarrative, all processes of economic integration seek to achieve the same end that is full integration. The task at the researcher’s hand is to identify the stage a specific regional project has attained and this will enable the identification of what needs to be achieved to advance to the next stage of integration. Balassa’s metanarrative was endorsed by Fawcett and Hurrell (1995) in their construction of the concept of regionalism and by Björn Hettne and Fredrik Söderbaum (2000) in their construction of the concept of regionness. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (1998) also followed Balassa’s metanarrative in their construction of the concept of security community, which is largely used in IR vocabulary to make sense of regionalism as far as security issues are concerned.

In 1995, Fawcett and Hurrell realized that “even a cursory glance at recent debates suggests that the broad term ‘regionalism’ is used to cover a variety of distinct phenomena” (1995, 39). In an attempt to present a more precise definition of regionalism, they proposed to subdivide the concept into five different categories: first, regionalization; second, regional awareness; third, regional inter-state cooperation; fourth, state-promoted regional integration; and fifth, regional cohesion. The last category referring to “the possibility that, at some point, a combination of these first four processes might lead to the emergence of a cohesive and consolidated regional unit” (Fawcett and Hurrell 1995, 44), which is what the European Union is, according to the authors.

Hettne and Söderbaum (2000, 460), however, insisted on the necessity of emphasizing “the reality of regionalization behind the fetishism of formal regional organizations”. To achieve this objective, they proposed a new concept for the study of regions, the one of regionness, whose rationale involves “deciding if a particular region can be distinguished as a relatively coherent territorial subsystem from the rest of the global system” (2000, 461). In order to make this decision, one should be aware of the five levels of regionness defined by them: first, regional space; second, regional complex; third, regional society; fourth, regional community; and fifth, region-state. This last level was stated as denoting the constitution of “a group of formerly sovereign national communities into a new form of political entity where sovereignty is pooled for the best of all and which is radically more” (Hettne and Söderbaum 2000, 467). For the authors, this is what the European Union is.

Hettne and Söderbaum (2000) constructed their argument by differentiating their theoretical approach to regionalism, based on levels of regionness, from that of Adler and Barnett (1998, 30) of security community, defined by the authors as a “transnational region comprised of sovereign states whose people maintain dependable expectations of peaceful change”. For Adler and Barnett (1998), the emergence of security communities should be studied on a three-tier basis: tier one as the precipitating factors that encourage states to orient themselves in each other’s direction and to coordinate their policies; tier two as the “structural” variables of power and ideas and the “process” variables related to transactions, international organizations, and social learning; and tier three as the consolidation of tiers one and two leading to the development of trust and collective identity formation. Having defined that in a certain region (or trans-region) there is a security community, one should assess if that is a “nascent”, “ascendant” and “mature” one, or in which stage of development that security community is. In opening his contribution chapter for Adler and Barnett’s work, Ole Waver (1998, 69) firmly stated: “Western Europe is a security community”.

It is important to notice that the concept of security community is not usually used as a corresponding term to regionalism as regional cooperation, regional integration and regionness are. And it is so because general studies of regions (such as the Regional Complex Security of Buzan and Wæver (2003) and the Security Communities of Adler and Barnett (1998)) differ from studies of regionalism in a fundamental way. Whilst the latter asserts “its authority as an ‘imagined community’, a cognitive construct shared by persons in the region themselves”, the former is nothing but “the construct of one man – the allegedly sovereign author” (Neumann 1994, 57).

The acceptance of Balassa’s premise by IR scholarship – that all region making processes are heading to the same end-point – ...