Regional Organisations

12 Key excerpts on "Regional Organisations"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Modern Diplomacy

  • R. P. Barston(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 Regional Organisations and diplomacyRegional Organisations and diplomacyRegional Organisations and diplomacy Introduction Regions have traditionally been a significant feature of relations within and between states and other actors. In contemporary international rela- tions since 1945, Regional Organisations have been a key part at a coop- erative level of the mechanisms used to shape and develop international order. Much of those early efforts within and outside the UN were directed at post-war reconstruction and, for smaller newly independent states out- side Europe, issues related to social and economic development. Regional Organisations (ROs) have subsequently increased in terms of types and functions. The agendas of large continental ROs have expanded to eco- nomic development, trade, security, communications, regulation of trans- port, labour standards, and environment. Narrow or specific trade related regional groupings too have proliferated following the establishment of the WTO, laying the basis for the debate over the primacy of regional over multilateral governance. Since 2000 Regional Organisations themselves have become arenas for struggles for geopolitical influence and conflict, especially in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, as primary and other actors seek to create special con- sultative status, limit the influence of rivals or promote preferred strategic inter region link-ups. This chapter focuses on the diplomatic aspects of the operation and development of Regional Organisations since 2000. It begins with a com- parison with earlier regionalism developing after 1945, in order to pro- vide context and setting. The second section examines key aspects of the development of Regional Organisations since 2000, including membership, expansion of RO agendas, the role of external powers vis-à-vis Regional Organisations and the use of regions and regional actors as instruments in cultural diplomacy.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Future of the International Legal Order, Volume 1

  Trends and Patterns

  • Cyril E. Black, Cyril Black(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  As a result, the term "regional organization" has been used to describe regional as well as interregional, inner-directed as well as outer-directed, single-purpose as well as multi-functional associations. For the pur- pose of this study, the concept of a region and a regional organization will be defined rather narrowly. Geographical contiguity, perception of belonging to a distinctive community, interaction, interdependence, and common institutions will be considered the necessary criteria for a region. A regional organization will be defined as a permanent, both inner- and outer-directed multi-functional association, located in a particular geographic area, serving a number of states which are mu- tually interdependent and share certain common interests, needs, char- acteristics, and loyalties. ELLEN FREY-WOUTERS · 467 Two types of associations commonly called regional organizations do not fit the above definition and will be excluded from this study— collective security arrangements and inter-regional political groupings. The collective security arrangements, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the South East Asia Treaty Organization are primarily single-purpose associations, oriented toward externally motivated power factors. While on paper committed to the develop- ment of their regions, they have in practice made little or no contribu- tion to the political or economic integration of their regions. They are more or less transitory arrangements, and cannot be expected to play an important role in the near future. Inter-regional political groupings, of which the British Common- wealth and the Organization of American States are examples, have also proved to be insignificant as promoters of regional integration. In the case of the OAS, the great difference between the economic and political power of the U.S.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Security Governance of Regional Organizations

  • Emil J. Kirchner, Roberto Dominguez(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  et al. 2004; Kirchner 2006; Kirchner and Sperling 2007), can be successfully applied to other international/regional organizations. Fifth, a larger and more diverse group of organizations gives greater scope to the exploration of historical and/or geopolitical factors as determinants of cooperation within organizations and with regard to external activities of regional organizations, i.e. whether the domestic factors of regional organizations facilitate or inhibit regional or global security governance (Kirchner and Sperling 2010).

  There are some difficulties in delineating geographic regions, particularly when membership and remits of organizations are considered (see Table 1.1 ). While certain organizations like the AU and the EU have a strictly regional constituency, other organizations such as the OAS, the OSCE, NATO and the SCO draw their membership from different regions, if not continents. In contrast, some organizations, like Mercosur or the Andean Community of Nations, have a more sub-regional perspective. Furthermore, the remit or declared geographic focus of attention might confine a certain organization to a specific region while consisting of members from different regions or continents. This is the case largely with regard to the OAS and the OSCE and was for a long time the situation with regard to NATO. There is hence a considerable overlap between regional and international organizations in both conceptual and empirical terms.

  Table 1.1 Members of regional organizations (January 2011)

  Crucial to the examination is the attempt to explore how organizations with different tasks and profiles perform across the four security dimensions, i.e. how organizations which were established with a distinct security perspective such as NATO and the OSCE compare in performance with those which were originally formed with a pronounced economic vocation, such as Mercosur. To ensure comparability in the assessment of the 10 organizations a common framework has been adopted which systematically traces developments in organizational goals and institutional innovations and in performance across four security dimensions. The data collection is based on official documents, secondary sources and, for some organizations, interviews with officials.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Re-Evaluating Regional Organizations

  Behind the Smokescreen of Official Mandates

  • Evgeny Vinokurov, Alexander Libman(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Part I Regional Organizations: An Analytical Framework 2 Typology of Regional Organizations 2.1 Terminology In this book, we concentrate on formal intergovernmental 1 regional organizations, excluding both informal coalitions and alliances (e.g., those emerging from climate negotiations or at the UN, WTO, and other multilateral groups) 2 and non-governmental organizations (e.g., NGOs for border regions, public–private partnerships, etc.). We place special emphasis on ROs with an explicitly declared economic focus. This does not mean that the RO only concerns itself with the economy. In fact, the argument of the book is precisely that many of the ROs we consider have a substantial non-economic agenda. Still, economic issues play a major role in the official agendas of most of the ROs we study. Thus, we exclude purely military–political alliances like the NATO, the Western European Union, or the post-Soviet Collective 1 ‘Intergovernmental’ refers to the fact that national governments are the founders and members of these organizations. It does not refer to the mode of decision-making (intergovernmental versus supranational). 2 Penttilä 2009. © The Author(s) 2017 E. Vinokurov, A. Libman, Re-Evaluating Regional Organizations, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53055-0_2 9 Security Treaty Organization. Our reference to a declared agenda is not incidental: we target organizations that officially represent themselves as economic ROs, i.e., organizations that claim that their economic functions are vital. Regional organizations we study in this book are a subset of regional agreements. Regional agreements also include signed treaties without any formal structures (secretariats etc.). Regional initiatives, as the term is used in this book, include both established and (to some extent) implemented agreements (and organizations) and agreements that have been proposed and even signed but not implemented.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Theory, Change and Southern Africa

  • P. Vale, L. Swatuk, B. Oden, P. Vale, L. Swatuk, B. Oden(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In the case of more organized cooperation, region is defined by the list of countries which are the formal members of the regional organization in ques- tion. The more organized region could be called the ‘formal’ region. In order to assess the relevance and future potential of a particular regional organization, it should be possible to relate the ‘formal region’ (defined by organizational membership) to the ‘real region’, which has to be defined in terms of potentialities, convergencies of different kinds and through less precise criteria. This is the stage where the cru- cial regionalization process takes place. The dynamics of this process can be described as a convergence along several dimensions, economic as well as political and cultural. This convergence may come about through formalized regional cooperation or more spontaneously. It is the result in terms of regionness that counts. At some point along this route, it becomes natural to talk about regional integration rather than regional cooperation. Regional outcomes The outcome of the regionalization process is region as acting subject with a distinct identity, institutionalized actor capability, legitimacy, and structure of decision-making. Crucial areas for regional interven- tion are organized conflict resolution (between and particularly within former ‘states’) and creation of welfare (in terms of social security and regional balance). This process is similar to state-formation and nation- building, and the ultimate outcome could be a ‘region-state’, which in terms of scope and cultural heterogeneity can be compared to the clas- sical empires, but in terms of political order constitutes a voluntary 90 Theory, Change and Southern Africa’s Future evolution of a group of formerly sovereign national, political units into a supranational security community, where sovereignty is pooled in the interest of all. This is basically the idea of the European Union as outlined in the treaty of Maastricht.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Discriminatory Clubs

  The Geopolitics of International Organizations

  • Christina L. Davis(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 The inter- section of these two perspectives lies in the selection of states for membership in regional organizations. 1. For some examples, see Milner and Mansfield, 1997; Solingen, 1998; Buzan and Waever, 2003; Mansfield and Solingen, 2010; Hooghe et al., 2016; Thomas, 2017. 257 258 chapter 7 Do regional organizations form around a prior regional identity or do they constitute this identity by formally bringing together a particular set of states? Could one know who belongs to Europe or Southeast Asia separately from the organizations among states? On the one hand, nobody would doubt that Switzerland is European, irrespective of its choice to remain outside of the EU. On the other hand, Estonia joining the EU and rejecting participation in the Commonwealth of Independent States brought to the forefront its identity in Europe over Eurasia and deepened its association with the European states and distance from Russia. When Bangladesh found its application to the Asso- ciation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) rejected, it led in the formation of a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Sri Lanka had once been invited to join the ASEAN and declined. These examples highlight the fuzzy boundaries of regional identity that become more clear as the result of membership decisions for regional organizations. Regional organizations represent a hard test of the theory about IGOs as a discriminatory club because these organizations have a primary member- ship criterion based on geography. 2 More so than in other organizations, there is a premise that membership politics would follow an objective criterion to welcome those from the region and exclude those outside of the region. Nevertheless, borders of regions are not objectively defined. This creates the opening for other factors to define a region through their role as condi- tions promoting regional organizations.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Contemporary Europe

  • Richard Sakwa, Anne Stevens(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Regional activists and movements Regionalism and region-building cannot exist without active, vociferous and sustained support by at least some sections of the population in a region. Even in government-driven regionalization initia-tives the central government needs reliable political and economic partners at the regional level to implement the intended reforms of territorial governance and to take over the functions and responsibilities the central government wishes to devolve. In short, regional interests, desires and ambitions need protagonists who actively promote these interests and engage in political dialogue with other political institutions and organizations, as well as with the other economic, social and cultural interest groups which form the civic society of a regional polity. Regionalist movements have developed a multi-tude of organizational forms, depending on the nature of their specific regionalist motivations, on the nature of their demands, on the degree of popular support they enjoy, on the nature and extent of the resources – ranging from money via seats in parliaments to arms – to which they have access, and not least on the degree of radicalism prevalent among their members. There is no easy way to classify the various organizational arrange-ments of regionalist movements, as these move-ments are often heterogeneous in their composition and often comprise several individual organiza-tions. However, three elements are typically present in all regionalist movements: a leadership elite, a political organization, and a mass organization. The first element is a regionalist leadership elite. These are the actual regionalists, who are fully committed to the regionalist cause and are deter-mined to do everything they can to promote the region’s interests. Indeed, it is often they who decide what the region’s interests are – or ought to be – and then try to persuade others to follow their lead.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Regional Organisations and Security

  Conceptions and practices

  • Stephen Aris, Andreas Wenger(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  At a macro level, the global context has changed significantly in the last three decades, as has its interrelationship with regional contexts and spaces. During the Cold War, regional contexts as political spaces or identities had to compete with a much stronger global contextual organising principle than they had to post-1991. The Cold War introduced an ideological, geopolitical, economic, cultural and social bipolar dividing line and ordering principle into the global context. Set against this, intra-regional ordering, identity or geopolitical dynamics had to compete with this powerful extra-regional global one. However, the degree to which the global context informed the regional varied, with some regional contexts largely falling in line with the global, while others existed more independently. In these circumstances, there was only limited association, coordination and cohesion at a regional level, as the standoff at a global level between capitalism and communism, West and East, NATO and the Warsaw Pact tended to override the organisation of actors and contexts by regional dynamics. While, ROs did exist and function during the Cold War, in general the scope for ROs to define security conceptions and functions was relatively limited, and only expanded significantly with the end of the Cold War.

  As discussed in the introduction to this volume, there has been a generalised acceptance of the ‘regional’ as a significant ordering principle within the international system during the last two decades, although it also has to compete with other organising principles, as well as the continued dominance of the state as the prime referential unit. This emergence of the ‘regional’ as a primary focus has been further encouraged by the acceleration of globalising trends within economics and society. Greater interdependence has tended to produce overlapping interests, structures and networks that are at their strongest within a regional context. This trend also necessitates dealing with the ‘regionalisation’ of security threats, such as the region-wide functionality of militant groups, or organised criminal networks, and indeed a greater realisation of the interdependency between the security and general well-being of one regional actor and another. For example, in Chapter 6 Dent detailed how rapid economic growth and thus greater interdependency has seen ASEAN seek to build, via its ASEAN Plus formats, a stake and role in North East Asia due to the gradual development of mutual economic dependency, and related security issues between the North and South of East Asia.1

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Understanding Security

  • Mike Bourne(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Thus, it is important to explore how security practices and formations differ in specific geographically defined locations. What is a region? Defining regions may seem easy: one simply looks at a map and can see continental formations that group states together. However, a map is a poor guide to the regional character of security relations, as shared borders would place Russia and China in the same region, and shared neighbours would mean China and Finland are part of the same region, when it is self-evident that they are not. While simple geography is insufficient, geography matters 128 Understanding Security in more specific ways. Regions are conceived as subgroupings of the global relations of states where there are regular and intense relations among members that are qualitatively different to those with non-regional states: most notably, a degree of interdependence as well as geographical proximity (Nye, 1968). In addition, some argue that regions should be recognized as such by those within and outside them, and some degree of political, economic, cultural and linguistic similarities is also emphasized. In security studies, it is the existence of interlinked systems of power distribution or security interdependencies that is most prominently emphasized. Security regions are therefore theoretically informed constructs that apply and often modify global understandings of security. Indeed, many combine a neore-alist emphasis on the distribution of material capabilities and polarity with some elements of constructivism (Lake and Morgan, 1997; Morgan, 1997; Buzan and Waever, 2003; Frazier and Stewart-Ingersoll, 2010). Some rationalist approaches view regions as merely a level of analysis, a subset of the globe but reflecting the same purportedly universal patterns and logics of behaviour that are posited globally.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Craft of Governing

  The contribution of Patrick Weller to Australian political science

  • R.A.W. Rhodes, Glyn Davis(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For decades after 1945, the study of international organisations was something of a niche interest, or even a dead-end. There was a prevailing mood of scepticism about the ability of international bodies and treaties to restrain states’ supposedly primal drive to maximise power above all else, an attitude that reflected experience of the failure of the League of Nations in the 1930s, and the paralysis of the United Nations during the Cold War thanks to superpower rivalry. While there was some tradition of legal and descriptive analysis of international organisations, as well as a modest body of analysis of roll-call votes in the UN General Assembly, these bodies were mainly seen as talk shops, with the ‘real’ politics happening elsewhere. One leading international relations scholar rhetorically asked why anyone would study the puppets, i.e. international organisations, when they could be studying the puppeteers, i.e. states. The work that international organisations did outside of the security realm, exactly the sort at the centre of Weller and Xu’s studies, was too often seen as exemplifying distinctly unglamorous ‘low politics’, as opposed to the ‘high politics’ of war and peace. Though there were important and often quite brilliant individual exceptions, with scholars including Inis Claude, Ernst Haas, and Robert Cox and Harold Jacobson researching in this area, until the 1980s those studying international organisations in international relations were a very select group. The end of the Cold War, the stop-start progress of European integration, and the general growth in the prominence and number of international organisations transformed this situation and stimulated a massive expansion of scholarly interest in this area.

  Two strands of scholarship in particular are important in providing foils and points of departure for Weller and Xu’s work on international organisations. The first draws heavily on microeconomics, applying a rational choice framework to explain the relationship between states and the international organisations they form. The second draws loosely on Weber’s writings on bureaucracy and rational-legal authority, as well as more general theory from the humanities and sociology that has come to be termed ‘constructivist’.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Regional Organizations in African Security

  • Fredrik Soderbaum, Rodrigo Tavares(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter VIII of the UN charter), the regional organization does not have the full range of external instruments of pressure (from sanctions to military intervention) and is therefore less likely to be successful. On the other hand, without the active involvement of the regional organization, the application of abstract UN principles may be too remote from the specificities of a conflict, lacking a close and deep understanding of local political dynamics. Furthermore, the immediate self-interest that a regional organization has in the establishment of peace is of a different degree of urgency from that of the UN.

  The relationship between the UN and the regional organizations is often a difficult one. Historically, it has oscillated between paternalism and partnership, and this pattern is still present today.6 Too often, the perspective from New York is that regional organizations can serve a useful purpose only if the situation is too complex or risky to be dealt with exclusively by the UN. This perspective not only casts a blind eye on the UN’s own limitations, viewing the regional organizations as second-best options, but actively contributes to weakening regional organizations by involving them only when the chances of success are poor.

  Bringing regional organizations together with the UN is not always an easy task, and in some cases may well be impossible. The situation in Zimbabwe, for example, has shown that the relevant regional organization itself, the Southern African Development Community (or key countries within it), has worked hard to avoid the involvement of the UN Security Council. In some other contexts, the regional organization has shown itself incapable of dealing with the situation. In Somalia, for instance, the relevant regional organization, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), has been practically paralyzed for years due to the simmering tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea. In the Congo, there is no single regional institution that could assume the responsibility for promoting peace in the Great Lakes region. In both cases, it is vital that the AU take on a more active role as an interlocutor with the UN.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Rethinking Regionalism

  • Fredrik Söderbaum(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  This plurality affects external behaviour and so it is important to ‘unpack the region’ and analyse how different regional actors engage in interregional activities with their coun-terparts in other regions. The complexity of the EU’s institutional structure has only recently come to the fore in the literature on the EU’s global role and in interregionalism. Rather than being designed consciously, the foreign policy machinery of the EU has emerged historically and reactively and there are several EU institutions with different mandates and views on interregionalism. Thus, the EU is by no means a monolithic entity, as it consists of many different actors and institutions – e.g. the Council, the Commission, the European Parliament, the Court of Justice and the individual EU member states. All have powers to engage in various types of interregional activities, although all are inter-connected. In addition, a large num-ber of special agencies and policy instruments are at play in various issue areas. This results in a patchwork of intersecting interregion-alisms, which are interlinked with multilateralism, bilateralism and regionalism; what Hardacre and Smith refer to as ‘complex interre-gionalism’ – the changing interlinkages of bilateral, regional, inter-regional and transregional relations developed between the EU and regions around the globe (Hardacre and Smith 2009, 2014). Regions in Interregionalism 185 Hardacre and Smith address the key institutional drivers of the complex interregionalism of the EU (the Commission, the Council, the member states and, more recently, the European Parliament) and analyse the implications of the differing inter-ests in interregionalism. There are inherent tensions between the focus and interests of different institutions within the EU, notably the Commission and the Council, as well as between EU central institutions and the member states.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book