Regionalism and world order after the cold war (original) (raw)

1995, Australian Journal of International Affairs

This article assesses the actual and potential contributions of regionalism to the achievement of such world order goals as peace, social justice, human rights, democracl This assessment proceeds by way of discussing in an introductory section, several main features of the global setting that have become prominent in the early aftermath of the cold war. Against this background, four possible roles for regional actors are depicted: containing negative globalism (basically associated with the adverse impacts of global market forces); mitigating pathological anarchism (the breakdown of minimum order and decency in state/society relations arising from either extremes of excessive control and abuse by the state or of pervasive and dangerous chaos arising from the weakness or breakdown of governance capacity at the level of the state); promoting positive globalism (reinforcing the global capacity to achieve desirable world order goals); and promoting positive regionalism (achieving these goals at a regional/eve/ through the strengthening and orientation of regional structures of governance). The intention here is to propose one type of research agenda with respect to the regional dimensions of world order. Necessarily, this effort is preliminary, focusing on issues of conceptualization and offering a broad normative perspective that differentiates what is negative (to be avoided or overcome) from what is positive (to be achieved or enhanced), but hopefully in a manner that usefully prefigures further and more detailed inquiry. I would like to thank Bjorn Hettne, and other members of the WIDER working group on regionalism, for their oomments on an earlier draft in the oourse of a meeting in Berlin, August 20-23, 1994. I was also helped by the discussion that followed a presentation of the paper at a panel of the International Political Scienoe Association meetings held on August 22, 1994 in Berlin, and especially by written oomments from Olivier A.J. Brenninkmeyer. A different version of this article is scheduled to be a chapter in a book on "the new regionalism" and world order being prepared under the auspices of WtDER/UNU in Helsinki, Finland, a venture coordinated by Bjorn Hettne, Osvaldo Sunkel, and Andras lnotai.