‘‘regional and other inter-governmental agencies’’ under the UN Charter (chapters
VI, VII, VIII, and IX) might have, and the operational partnerships of the United
Nations with its regional agencies.
Early scholarly debates about regionalism emerged from two sources: (a)
normative questions about the sustainability of the nation state as a vehicle for
eVective and peaceful human governance and an interest in functional and
technocratic imperatives for new forms of authority beyond the state; and (b)
the appearance of actual regional integration schemes in Western Europe from the
late 1950 s (the European Coal and Steel Community, the abortive European
Defence Community, and the eventual European Economic Community) that
became the intellectual laboratory for the study of regional organizations. Early
neofunctionalists (cf. Haas 1958 ; Schmitter 1971 ) used the European experience to
generalize about the prospects for regional integration elsewhere but this optimism
proved short-lived as analogous projects such as the Latin American Free Trade
Area and the East African Common Market failed.
This earlier work often saw regionalism as a defensive mechanism to reduce
dependence on the international economy. But more recently, scholars of the new
regionalism (see Gamble and Payne 1996 ) see it in a more proactive manner as a
means of greater access to global markets under conditions of globalization. It is no
longer about securing regional autarchy. States now engage in any number of
overlapping regional endeavors without sensing that there may be contradictions
in such a process. It is also a more inclusive process of regionalization than the UN
had in mind in its relations with its various regional agencies. The new regionalism
is a sociopolitical project as well as an economic one. The process of regionalization
also has structural consequences beyond the particular region in which it takes
place. Transregionalism is an increasingly important dimension of international
relations as institutions and organizations play larger mediating roles between
regions (see Hettne 1999 ).
It is at the meso regional level, between globalization and the nation state,
that increasing eVort has been applied to the management of transterritorial or
multiterritorial collective action problem solving. To date, moves toward regionally
integrated problem solving have been more active in Europe than in other parts of
the world. But this is not only a European project. Elsewhere, the growing linkages
between diVerent regional integration schemes are evident.
3.2.1 The European Union
The EU is the most developed example of a hybrid, multiperspectival, multi-issue
international organization to date. Its evolution was analysed largely through the
lens of neoclassical trade theory as it developed—from a free trade area, to a
common market, to an economic union—in classic terms (see Belassa 1961 ). But in
so doing, it made the separation of economics from the politics impossible. The EU
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