The New Regionalism: Comparing the Development of the EC Single Integrated Market, NAFTA and APEC
Abstract
The study of regions in international relations has been a sometime thing, gaining scholarly attention in the 1950s and 1960s, dropping largely from view in the 1970s, and returning to focus quite dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ... ¶ This thesis involves three elements: a central contemporary element examining the re-emergence of regions in the 1980s; a second comparative element comparing the causal factors operating in three different regions; and lastly, a theoretical element examining the usefulness of current theory to the phenomenon of regionalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapters Two and Three discuss the relevant theoretical literature with a view to developing the propositions to be examined in the case studies. They examine three of the major streams of international relations theory - realism, liberal economics, and institutionalism - with a focus on what these contending theories have had to say about how regional groupings arise. Chapter Two looks at the relevant theoretical literature in the 1950s and 1960s while Chapter Three explores the more recent theoretical literature of the 1970s and 1980s. ¶ The rest of the body of the thesis tests propositions set out at the end of Chapter Three on the causes of the regionalist revival in the 1980s by way of three case studies, each one concerned with the actual development of regionalism in three different parts of the globe: Western Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific. ... ¶The thesis concludes with an analysis of the insights provided by the case studies into the theoretical debates examined in Chapters Two and Three. Finally, there is an attempt to use these insights to construct a theory accounting for the rise of the new regionalism.