Based on cutting-edge research, this edited volume examines how citizens and political elites perceive the legitimacy of regional integration in Europe and the Americas. It analyses public opinion and political discourse on the EU, NAFTA and MERCOSUR, arguing that legitimation patterns shape the development of regional governance.
In the late 1980s regional integration emerged as one of the most important developments in world politics. It is not a new phenomenon, however, and this 1999 book presents an analysis of integration across time, and across regions. Walter Mattli examines projects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, but also in Latin America, North America and Asia since the 1950s. Using the tools of political economy, he considers why some integration schemes have succeeded while many others have failed; what forces drive the process of integration; and under what circumstances outside countries seek to join. Unlike traditional political science approaches, the book stresses the importance of market forces in determining the outcome of integration; but unlike purely economic analyses, it also highlights the impact of institutional factors. The book will provide students of political science, economics, and European studies with a framework for the study of international cooperation.
Combining normative analysis and theory-driven empirical research in a comparative framework, this volume clarifies and explains the connections between regional international governance, legitimacy and democracy. It focuses on the quality of democracy and the legitimacy of policy making in multilevel regional systems. The volume offers a much-needed clarification of confusing concepts such as legitimacy, democracy and 'civil society' in non-national political systems. It critically assesses the quality of democracy and legitimacy within different Regional International Organizations (RIOs); it examines how networks of non-state actors become a kind of transnational civil society and assesses their potential for solving legitimacy deficits; and it investigates the impact of democratic conditionality in different RIOs. The contributors deepen our understanding of a relatively new non-state actor on the international scene - the regional international organization - and investigate the potential contribution of transnational non-state actors to the quality of governance at the regional level.
This scholarly and interdisciplinary volume sheds much needed light on the realtionship between national policies, regional integration patterns and the wider global setting. It covers regional patterns in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Individual chapters focus on topics ranging from industrial or financial policies to social welfare regimes, as well as broader assessments and comparisons of regional arrangements in a global context. The chapters point to the diversity of regional patterns in the world economy and the continuing importance of national regulatory structures, yet they also point to the common pressures of globalisation felt by all, especially in the domain of capital markets. With broad coverage and clear but sophisticated analysis this new book will be vital reading to all those seeking to clarify their understanding of the contemporary regional/global paradox.
Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 2,0, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, course: Debates on European Integration, language: English, abstract: The European integration has been in progress since shortly after the Second World War. Already in 1946, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill held a speech in Zurich and within this speech he expressed the idea of France and Germany as the constituting countries of a European Union. At this time, the patriotic French press was outraged about this idea. But already in 1949 the Council of Europe was founded, and only two years later in 1951 the European Community for Steel and Coal was created and became effective in 1952. In 1957, the member states of the ECSC signed the Treaty of Rome to start the European Economic Community (EEC) (Schmuck, n.a.). The European integration has been a unique process (Rosamond, 2006, S. 450) that lead also to a separate field of studies, the European integration studies. Even though Europe is unique and the integration process that has been taken place there is unique as well, efforts to compare the process in Europe with integration processes in other regions of the world were undertaken. I will tackle the matter with this regard. This paper will be concerned with the integration process in Europe compared to integration processes in Latin America. My motivation to do this arises from the fact that I am a Brazilian student and thus have a Latin American origin and I am studying in Germany, which is in my opinion and most probably not only in my opinion the most important constituting country of the European Union. It is not only the biggest economy in Europe but it is also one of the few constituting states of the predecessor of the EU the already mentioned ECSC and the EEC. A second fact, which is in my opinion intuitive, is the one what the differences of integration processes are and how those can
This volume features up-to-date studies of regional integration efforts, particularly those made in North America, South America, and East Asia. Comparisons are drawn between these efforts and those made in the EU, where integration has progressed much further. The book asks: what explains the variation in achievements? What kind of agreements are needed to produce regional integration? Is 'pooling and delegation' of sovereignty necessary? How important is regional leadership?
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism - the first of its kind - offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.
The institutions of the EU and NAFTA are critically analysed by leading American and European scholars. The book covers both the general problems of building new and integrated markets, and several policy areas that are related to economic integration. The institutions established in both Europe and America are seen as deficient in several respects. Without offering adequate replacements, the economic integration projects are actually undermining some of the core institutions that serve the needs of the market economies - institutions on which the integration process itself depends.
This collection of 14 papers explores the political dimensions of regional integration, discussing the key aspects of the European experience, from the Treaty of Rome to the Single European Act to the Treaty of Maastricht and beyond.
Comparative regional integration has met with increasing interest over the last twenty years with the emergence or reinforcing of new regional dynamics in the EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR and ASEAN. This volume systematically and comparatively analyses the reasons for regional integration and stalemate in European, Latin American and Asian regional integration. It examines whether regional integration systems change in crisis periods, or more precisely in periods of economic crises, and why they change in different directions. Based on a neo-institutionalist research framework and rigorously comparative research design, the individual chapters analyse why financial and economic crises lead to more or less integrated systems and which factors lead to these institutional changes. Specifically it addresses institutional change in regional integration schemes, power relations between member states and the institutions in different policy domains, and change in individual or collective citizens’ attitudes towards regional integration. Adopting an actor-centred approach, the book highlights which regional integration schemes are influenced by economic and financial crises and how to explain this. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and policy specialists in regional integration, European Politics, International Relations, and Latin American and Asian studies.
