regional organizations become transmission belts for global disciplines to the
national level through the depoliticizing and softening process of the region in
which regional policy coordination has become the ‘‘meso’’ link between the
national and the global. Regulatory regionalism sees regional organizations acting
as vehicles for regional policy coordination to mitigate risk while not undermining
national sovereignty. Indeed, there is a strong relationship between state form, the
global economic and political orders, and the nature of regional organization
emerging at the meso level in many regions of the world.
This institutional compromise is inevitable if the continuing tension between
nationalism and regionalism in East Asia (and other regions) is not to jeopardize
cooperation. The meshing of multilevel processes of regulation to reinforce the
connections between the international institutions (e.g. IMF and World Bank)
and regional institutions—for example between the Asian Development Bank and
the emerging instruments of regional monetary regulation in East Asia—have
developed strongly in the early twenty-Wrst century. Similarly, regional organiza-
tions pass down internationally agreed global market standards. In discursive
terms, ‘‘regional regulation’’ carries fewer negative connotations for sovereignty
and regime autonomy than ‘‘regional institution building’’ which, throughout the
pre-crisis days in East Asia, carried with it negative, European style, implications of
sovereignty pooling.
4 International Organization and the
Limits to Global Governance
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
International organizations exhibit a characteristic shared by many other kinds of
organizational structures. They tend to be extremely durable over time even to the
extent of having outlived their usefulness in some instances. There are reasons
for durability speciWc to each individual organization. But there are also more
generalized explanations. In addition to the obvious eVects of inertia, the devel-
opment of an internal bureaucratic dynamic and an organizational instinct for self-
preservation are worth noting. Notably, in an era of globalization, problem solving
becomes increasingly complex and less amenable to state-based resolution.
Policy problems are increasingly deWned as global, or trans-sovereign, problems,
especially in the domains of trade,Wnance, environment, and also security given
the changing nature of threat, human rights, and development. Governments,
especially in the second half of the twentieth century, developed a habit of seeking
international political institutions 625