Regions and Regionalism

Abstract

During the 1990s, there has been a notable surge of interest and activity in both regions and regionalism. One manifestation of this has been the renewed salience of regional conflicts such as those in the Balkans and the Gulf region, or in the former Soviet Union. At the same time, there has been a sharpened awareness of the possibilities of regional cooperation and institution-building. For example, a World Trade Organization (WTO) study published in 1995 listed over one hundred regional trade arrangements, ranging from the highly developed institutional framework of the European Union to limited and often specialized agreements between three or four countries (WTO, 1995, pp. 77–91). There has also been an increasing tendency in all parts of the world to search for mechanisms of cooperation in the political and security fields: for instance, in the case of South East Asia, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) developed in the 1990s from a loose association of countries with rather unclear regional objectives into a more elaborate and focused set of institutions with explicit aims in the political and security fields. In Latin America, there has also been a revival of the search for a regional identity in both the economic and the security fields (Hurrell, 1992).