Regional governance and legitimacy in South America: the meaning of UNASUR

Over the last decade, rapid changes to development models and market rules have led—yet again—to a revision of the meaning of regionalism, bringing to the fore the role of regional organizations in anchoring democracy and supporting progressive social policies. This is particularly the case in South America, where the presence of regional organizations in public policy‐making is a subject of increasing scrutiny. This article examines new forms of politically sensitive regional governance in South America, focusing in particular on the case of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). It shows how contemporary South American regionalism bypasses the questions of trade and investment that dominated earlier schemes of regionalism in order to focus on shoring up democracy and managing the regional social deficit. The article explores UNASUR's actions in two policy areas: supporting the regional democratic norm and health policy. UNASUR, this article argues, is developing a hybrid form of output‐focused legitimacy that rests on a combination of credible commitments to welfare promotion, especially for the poor, and the pursuit of collective public goods, alongside a robust defence of quite minimal but uncontroversial standards of procedural democracy across the region. The analysis challenges the view that regionalism has failed in South America and identifies instead the emergence of a new sort of highly political regionalism. We call for UNASUR to be taken more seriously in the literature on comparative regionalism and, indeed, for a revision of how regionalism more widely is understood in Latin America.     

East Asian ideas of regionalism: a normative critique

Little was done to challenge nationalist assumptions in the name of regionalism. Regarding nationalism as a sensitive matter best left to a later stage of regionalism, they [advocates of regionalism] did not focus on how nationalist outlooks in the media and elsewhere stand in the way of both regionalism and internationalism.

Gilbert Rozman (2000: 18)

With an increasing regional integration and development, there are many competing ideas of, and proposals for, regional development in Asia. This article examines the historical evolution of the idea of regionalism, the meanings of Asian regionalisms, variations of Asian regionalisms and their impact on regional cooperation in East Asia. It discusses Mahathir's idea of neo‐Asianism, Japanese new Asianism, Chinese ideas of regionalism, and variations of Korean ideas of regionalism. It also examines a normative basis of regionalism with special reference to the sovereignty question. The paper concludes that behind East Asian regionalism is nationalism which constitutes driving forces for regionalism; that two competing orders (Asia‐Pacific regionalism versus pan‐Asianism) create different expectations and visions of how East Asia region should evolve and they are in tensions and lead to different directions; and that East Asia lacks a convincing and acceptable normative framework.1     

Books Received

While improving the “hard” resources of the physical infrastructure is important to facilitating cross-border trade, studies of global supply chain logistics performance suggest that expanding the focus to include “soft” infrastructure resources will be critical for future gains. Border management is increasingly important to North American trade facilitation, yet little is known about what constitutes the soft infrastructure of border crossings or how to design and manage this infrastructure for improved performance. Hence, this study uses an exploratory research design to examine the nature and dimensions of the soft infrastructure of border crossings. The research relies on a grounded-theory analysis of primary data collected in an exploratory case study of two border crossings between Alberta, Canada, and Montana, US.     

How Japan matters in the evolving East Asian security order

This article argues that Japan matters crucially in the evolving East Asian security order because it is embedded both in the structural transition and the ongoing regional strategies to manage it. The post‐Cold War East Asian order transition centres on the disintegration of the post‐Second World War Great Power bargain that saw Japan subjecting itself to extraordinary strategic constraint under the US alliance, leaving the conundrum of how to negotiate a new bargain that would keep the peace between Japan and China. To manage the uncertainties of this transition, East Asian states have adopted a three‐pronged strategy of: maintaining US military preponderance; socializing China as a responsible regional great power; and cultivating regionalism as the basis for a long‐term East Asian security community. Japan provides essential public goods for each of these three elements: it keeps the US anchored in East Asia with its security treaty; it is the one major regional power that can and has helped to constrain the potential excesses of growing Chinese power while at the same time crucially engaging with and helping to socialize China; and its economic and political participation is critical for meaningful regionalism and regional integration. It does not need to be a fully fledged, ‘normal’ Great Power in order to carry out these roles. As the region tries to mediate the growing security dilemma among the three great powers, Japan's importance to regional security will only grow.     

Regionalism, Iran and Central Asia

A combination of revolutionary ideology, trouble with neighbours and location in the Middle East, where regionalism is moribund, make the Islamic Republic of Iran an unlikely enthusiast for regional coalition-building. The impetus towards regionalism derives first and foremost from geopolitical considerations–the need to counter the US government's efforts to isolate Iran–but also from domestic dynamics; the regionalist discourse has lent an acceptable ideological colouring to an increasingly pragmatic foreign policy.
Iran's neighbours, however, share neither its geopolitical predicament nor its ideological complexion, and the actual implementation of Tehran's regionalist agenda has been based on functional cooperation, rather than on geopolitics and ideology. Trade promotion and the development of transport infrastructure to link Central Asia and the Caspian to Turkey and the Persian Gulf have been the most appealing areas for northern neighbours, and dominate the agenda of the Economic Cooperation Organization, Iran's main vehicle for multilateral cooperaton with Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Tehran's 1992 proposal for a Caspian Sea Cooperation Organization has so far been stymied by the littoral states' well-publicized disagreements over the sea's legal status, though their numerous multilateral meetings and handful of agreements suggest that the idea has potential in the medium–term.
Notwithstanding the meagre tangible results to date, Iran's tilt towards regionalism has had a positive impact. It has helped to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic in the eyes of its neighbours, contributed to the evolution of policy debate at home and prepared the ground for future multilateral cooperation.     

On the origins of border effects: insights from the Habsburg Empire

What are the origins of border effects on trade and why do borderscontinue to matter in periods of increasing economic integration?We explore the hypothesis that border effects emerged as a resultof asymmetric economic integration in the unique historicalsetting of the multi-national Habsburg Empire prior to the FirstWorld War. While markets tended to integrate mainly due to improvedinfrastructure, ethno-linguistic networks had persistent tradediverting effects. We find that the political borders whichseparated the empire's successor states after the First WorldWar became visible in the economy from the mid-1880s onwards,already 25–30 years before the First World War. This effectof a ‘border before a border’ cannot be explainedby factors such as administrative barriers, physical geography,changes in infrastructure or patterns of integration with neighbouringregions outside of the Habsburg customs and monetary union.However, controlling for the changing ethno-linguistic compositionof the population across the regional capital cities of theempire does explain most of the estimated border effects.     

The Permeability of the Middle East: The Predicament of Regional and Global Forces: a Review Easy

Book reviewed in this article: Persistent Permeability? regionalism, localism, and globalization in the Middle East: by Bassel F. Salloukh and Rex Brynen, eds. A History of the Modern Middle East: by William L. Cleveland Middle East at the Crossroads: the Changing Political Dynamics and the Foreign Policy Challenges: by Manochehr Dorraj, ed. Conflict and Peace in the Middle East: National Perceptions and United States‐Jordan Relations: by Hatem Shareef Abu‐Lebdeh Nation‐Building: A Middle East Recovery Program: by Jerry M. Rosenberg     

Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter‐)Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction

Abstract: The “Middle East” is a readily accepted geographical category throughout much of the world. However, within this ambiguous geographic entity, both the term and the idea of the “Middle East” are often rejected as western‐imperialist constructs. Through a critical examination of an extensive sample of maps produced within several Arab states of the “Middle East”, I found that the regional designation “Middle East” is nearly nonexistent, while the Arab Homeland is unequivocally a more common regional category. However, the “Middle East” did occasionally appear in a few maps. This paper provides an explanatory examination of the normative cartographic discourses in this region, and more focused analysis of the atypical maps of the “Middle East”. My analyses render unique insights into how the “Middle East” is both contested and re‐created from within a western‐imperialist defined region.     

新区域主义的发展及对中国区域经济发展模式的影响

在当今全球化与区域化趋势并存的时代,新区域主义以其强调区域竞争、保护地方经济社会多样性的主张,引起学术界的广泛兴趣。新区域主义源于20世纪80年代后期,这一期间国际社会经济环境的激烈变动,导致新旧区域主义在政治经济、国际贸易、经济系统、区域发展目标等方面存在根本的差别。在全球化和后冷战结构的制约下,新区域主义主要表现为大区域主义、小区域主义及国家内部的各类区域组织三种形式。论文针对中国现行的区域发展模式在新区域主义的冲击下,暴露出的薄弱环节,提出中国的区域经济发展战略应从三个层次展开。     

China's Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia and the Middle East

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims at connecting the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa through a combination of infrastructure projects and soft‐power programs. All of the six land bridges and maritime routes under the BRI extend westward, mostly passing through Central Asia and the Middle East on land or by sea. Cooperation with countries in these regions will, according to China's design, meet its domestic energy needs, and grow the country's economy. China recognizes, however, that in Central Asia and the Middle East, the risks posed by what it calls the “Three Evils” — terrorism, extremism, and separatism can impact the success of the BRI. They can also impact stability in its own adjacent areas, including Xinjiang. Therefore, in concert with the BRI, China is also identifying and deploying bilateral and multilateral diplomatic mechanisms aimed at security coordination with BRI countries in these two volatile regions. This article provides an overview of BRI developments in the two regions and examines some of the diplomatic mechanisms China is using to coordinate security and reduce risks.     

Paths ahead for East Asia and Asia–Pacific regionalism

East Asia and the Asia–Pacific are core components of the global economy, and there have been important recent developments in the regionalism of both regions. After the 1997–1998 financial crisis, East Asian countries initiated more exclusive regional cooperation and integration ventures mainly through ASEAN Plus Three, but lately this process has stumbled. The Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum has also failed to make substantial progress. Attention has instead increasingly turned to free trade agreements (FTAs), yet these have hitherto been overwhelmingly bilateral in nature. There are still only a few truly regional FTAs in East Asia and the Asia–Pacific—and these are on a sub‐regional scale. However, various frustrations over the messy and fractious pattern of heterogeneous bilateral agreements led to the recent initiation of ‘grand regional’ FTA talks. The Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an Asia–Pacific‐based, United States‐led project while the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is an East Asia‐centred project. Each contains highly diverse memberships and the successful conclusion of TPP and RCEP talks is not assured. It is argued that, if negotiated, the RCEP is more likely to advance meaningful and effective regionalism than the TPP due to the former ascribing more importance to regional community‐building. Furthermore, bilateral FTAs already in force may over the long term transform into more comprehensive economic agreements that address new regional and global challenges such as energy security and climate change.     

Mental maps of global regions: identifying and characterizing “hard” and “soft” regions

ABSTRACT

This article presents the quantitative synthesis of mental maps that identify different types of world regions. It is the result of a large-scale survey conducted in 18 countries, based on a sketch map approach. The number, shape, and extension of these vernacular world regions vary according to countries, cultures, and the personal styles of respondents who drew the maps. However, when we collectively analyze the regions identified by respondents, we observe that the figures of global regions are more or less recurrent. While the most commonly used division of the world is into “continents”, we can identify “hard” and “soft” regions of the world. Whereas a “hard” region, such as Africa, can be recognized relatively unambiguously as a continent, “soft” regions may include numerous regional distinctions such as East Asia, Russia, South East Asia, and the Middle East. Our methodology involves defining a set of characteristics that discriminate between “hard” and “soft” regions (measuring spatial uncertainty and the relative vagueness of limits and fringes), then accounting for the correlation of these areas on the world map.     

The contested rescaling of economic governance in East Asia: a special issue

The special issue this article opens engages with an apparent conundrum that has often puzzled observers of East Asian politics—why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, multilateral economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. The authors argue that this ‘regionalism problématique’ has led to the neglect of prior and more important questions pertaining to how patterns of economic governance, beyond the national scale, are emerging in East Asia and why. In this special issue, the contributors shift analytic focus onto social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance in East Asia. The contributions identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance often neglected by the scholarship or erroneously viewed as stepping stones towards ‘deeper’ multilateralism.     

Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

Regionalism in Central Asia: New Geopolitics, Old Regional Order

Behind the rhetoric of regional cooperation, the Central Asian states have been embroiled with increasing frequency in conflicts among themselves, including trade wars, border disputes and disagreements over the management and use of water and energy resources. Far from engendering a new regional order in Central Asia, the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent basing of US troops in the region have served to entrench pre-existing patterns of regional cooperation, while highlighting the obstacles that have beset the regionalization process there since the mid-1990s. While all five Central Asian states have been attempting to use the renewed rivalry between Russia and the United States, which is being played out in the Central Asian region, to maximize their strategic and economic benefits, the formation of the United States–Uzbekistan strategic partnership has increased the resolve of the other Central Asian states (Turkmenistan excepted) to balance Uzbekistan's preponderance by enthusiastically pursuing regional projects involving Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. This regional dynamic has resulted in the steady gravitation of the centre of regionalism in Central Asia to the north from a nominal Tashkent–Astana axis to a more stable Astana–Moscow one, with possible repercussions for the poorer states of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The article examines the major constraints on regionalism in Central Asia, considering in particular the ways in which the personalist, non-democratic regimes of Central Asia have obstructed state–centric 'top–down' regionalism as well as informal regionalist processes 'from below'.     

The Middle East Synchrotron Facility can bring Regional Cooperation

Over three years ago, Germany decided to gift the BESSY‐I, a 800MeV synchrotron, fully functioning since 1982 in Berlin, to the region of Middle East. The Middle East Synchrotron better known by the acronym SESAME (Synchrotron‐light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) will be the upgraded reincarnation of BESSY‐I. SESAME, the first synchrotron in the Middle East, is envisioned as a seed for a regional international research center, open to scientists in the region and beyond. The founders of the SESAME Project see a facility similar in purpose to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, which brought together numerous scientists from countries that had fought each other during the two World Wars. Scientific collaboration beyond the national boundaries has been a force for peace in the cold war. An account of events leading to these very significant developments is presented.     

The Interregional Location of Foreign Investors in Turkey

There are several dynamic factors that contribute to the reinforcement of the commercial relationships of Turkey. That is to say not only the strategic regional importance of Turkey, placed on the axis extending from the Far East to the Mediterranean side, Middle East and Europe, but also the new opportunities arising from the continuously developing relationships with the Balkan countries and the newly-established Turkish Republics, since the beginning of the 1990s, have been strengthening Turkey's commercial contacts. Istanbul has the communication networks and infrastructure required to develop into a regional centre. The major investments made in the communication sector during the 1980s have acted to develop the telecommunications infrastructure, thus supporting Istanbul's development into a regional communications centre. Today Istanbul has one of the world's most developed telecommunications infrastructures and this has given the city advantages in terms of expanding into international markets.     

Crossing Khorgos: Soft power,security, and suspect loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh boundary

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects deepen connections across Eurasia, the Sino-Kazakh border has been rematerialized in a manner that complicates the exercise of Chinese BRI soft power. On the one hand, the border city of Khorgos is being rebuilt as a bridgehead to facilitate trade and development between the countries; new infrastructure and spectacle at Khorgos and beyond works to entice Kazakhs to cross the border in pursuit of economic opportunities. At the same time, recent crackdowns on Muslims in China's Xinjiang Province has led to the detention and harassment of cross-border migrants with differentiated migrant statuses. Chinese security forces' continued anxieties about separatism in its borderlands imperil the developmental horizons the BRI project uses to entice Kazakhs. It also threatens the translocal development that a border conductive to mobility has provided for Kazakhs over the past thirty years. I argue that the BRI in northwest China fuses soft power rhetoric with territorial security practices in a way that is proving to be counter-productive. This is because border hardening can reactivate borders as “difference condensers” that draw from imperial and national legacies to reinscribe the othering of spaces and peoples beyond the border.     

IS THERE A NEW ‘TRUST’ IN INNER SCANDINAVIA? EVIDENCE FROM CROSS‐BORDER PLANNING AND GOVERNANCE

Inner Scandinavia is one of the Swedish‐Norwegian INTERREG‐A three sub‐programmes, and has been working in operationalizing cross‐border projects in the border area since 1994. To date, several cross‐border strategies have been implemented, one for each programming period of the INTERREG‐A programme. This article investigates whether these strategies can be regarded as a type of cross‐border planning mechanism in promoting territorial development of the border region. It does so by developing a typology, which captures the essentials of spatial planning, against the background of which the article also analyses Inner Scandinavia governance structures, which involves a whole set of interconnected territorial partnerships between five border counties: Hedmark, Østfold, Akershus (Norway), Värmland and Dalarna (Sweden). Here, the main goal is to see if the Inner Scandinavia governance structure, which was recently altered by the inclusion of the Hedmark–Dalarna cross‐border committee, also known as TRUST, is favourable to the implementation of a genuine and long‐term cross‐border spatial plan, with the ultimate goal of reducing the barrier effect and improving the territorial capital along the cross‐border region. Project dokuments and interviews indicate that the existing cross‐border governance model in Inner Scandinavia, led by the INTERREG‐A Steering Committee, produced substantial progresses in reducing the barrier effect, in all its dimensions, and in supporting the territorial development across the border area. Consequently, the role of other cross‐border governance structures should be confined to promoting the active involvement and mobilization of local and regional actors in the cross‐border cooperation process, and in implementing several cross‐border projects with local/regional significance.     

联合跨界合作演进特征及驱动机制研究

区域经济一体化发展背景下,为改善地区间贸易开放程度,提升整体竞争力和促进跨行政边界生产要素流动,欧洲、北美和东亚地区已形成多个联合跨界合作区域。传统区位理论认为边界地区不利于形成产业集聚,但联合跨界合作区域受行政边界渗透和隔绝效应的共同影响,面临"市场潜力"和"市场竞争"间博弈,因地制宜形成独特发展模式。从联合跨界合作的动因出发,对影响要素进行研究,总结了典型模式及其驱动机制。研究表明联合跨界合作需因地制宜,全面分析地区投入产出关系,根据实际情况选择适宜的空间管治模式。