Research project | Updated 04/06/2009 

Notre Europe’s project on comparative regional integration.

Several years ago the then President of the European Commission Romano Prodi suggested, perhaps rather rashly, that the European model of regional integration was an export item. Certainly, given that political integration and the concomitant institutional creations in the EU are the most advanced in any regionalisation process, there is a tendency to see the EU as a reference point. In the case of projects, say for an Asian Monetary Unit, this makes sense, for given the total lack of any other example, the euro imposes itself by default.

A reference point, however, is not the same thing as a model as an examination of other regional projects suggests. It is precisely to bring out the vast differences - and many common points - in different forms of regionalisation that Notre Europe has initiated a project examining regional integration in three other major geographic regions: East Asia, South America and Africa. The first two of these studies have now been completed and are available online, while the third on Africa has just been initiated and will be published during the summer of 2007.

In much of the literature on regional integration processes throughout the world a distinction is made between de facto economic regionalisation and de jure institutional regionalisation. Unfortunately, it is often forgotten that these are ideal types or templates, neither of which exists in reality in a pure form. Even in East Asia where institutional regionalisation is very weak, and regionalisation for most observers would appear to be essentially economic, the role of State actors cannot be ruled out. On the contrary, the very ‘embeddedness’ of the State in the economies of many nations engenders politically driven forms of regionalisation, albeit of a more informal kind. A similar comment could be made concerning South America.

A common theme in the two studies is to situate regionalisation at the “meso” or intermediate level between domestic imperatives and the exigencies of globalisation. It is by teasing out the interplay between these three levels that the authors of these two nuanced and detailed studies provide an innovative contribution to our understanding. In doing so, they provide us with further keys to understanding the role of the European Union as an international actor in relation to other regions.

Support

GARNET, a network of excellence financed by the European Commission within the 6th Framework Programme for R&D (FP6), supports Notre Europe by assisting the mobility of Timo Behf for the purposes of the research project on Europe and World Governance.