This paper inquires into the effects of an emerging multipolar world upon economic regionalism. While IR scholarship has been making a strong case for the regionalization of world politics after the end of the Cold War, the fact that most of the rising powers are also the sole regional powers of their home regions has led some scholars to argue that the advent of multipolarity can only strengthen this general trend towards a more regionalized international order. In this contribution, I challenge these arguments by proposing an alternative way of thinking about how multipolarity is developing. The implications of this interpretation are that the emergence of multipolarity may actually generate powerful centrifugal forces within regions, which would have adverse effects on well-known forms of complex economic regionalism that diverse regional groupings have been implementing thus far. This applies particularly to the global south, where intraregional economic interdependencies tend to be weak. The proposition is tested through a case study and by examining empirical findings across several world regions.
More than a decade has passed since an intense research interest in Regional Powers arose in IR. However, this original impetus has of late notoriously tailed off. This was in part the result of an unfavourable international environment but also, I argue, of an exhaustion of the programme’s conceptual and analytical framework as such. This can be specially seen in three fronts. First, in the inability of the initial theoretical framing to account for new empirical observations, and an insufficient engagement of Area Studies research for revising these initial propositions; second, in a conceptualisation of global-level influences that has been too restrictive and theoretically impairing; and third, in the difficulties encountered by efforts to explain the formation of regional orders by leveraging regional powers as main explanatory variables. A second argument is that some of the fresh approaches needed to overcome these problems might be found in Comparative Regionalism.
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