ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a framework for understanding the growth and changing character of regional governance. This lays the basis for considering in Chapter 2 how social policy might be affected by the world-wide rise of regional governance. The first section explores how governance has evolved from an essentially state-led preoccupation into a complex phenomenon that involves many other actors and that is characterized by interlinkages between different (geographical) levels of policy-making. It will be argued that we are witnessing the transition from a single world of states towards a multiple world of states and regions. Important actors in this new world order are the world regional organizations and regional arrangements between states that have resulted from regional integration processes. The second section discusses three main varieties of regional integration that currently exist. First, there is regional integration by removing economic obstacles, a process that has resulted in a multitude of regional trade arrangements all over the world. Second, there is regional integration by building institutions and regulations that often go beyond economic and trade policies and that can be described as a ‘pooling’ of sovereignty at a transnational level. Third, there is regional integration by building a geopolitical identity and actorness. Here the ‘world region’1 behaves as an actor on the global scene, both through its own ‘foreign’ policy and through its presence in global institutions. The third and final section will then begin the exploration of the consequences of these varieties of regionalism for social policy. It will be argued that regionalism aimed only at creating free trade areas can put severe pressures on the existing national social policies of the countries involved. On the other hand, the development of a broader and deeper form of regionalism (often referred to as ‘new regionalism’) can act as a driver towards regional social policies. Moreover, in those – rare – cases where regionalism involves global actorness the regional external policy can contribute to the development of global social policies as well. By way of conclusion, it will be argued that in theory regional integration can act both as a building block and as a stumbling block on the way towards a global social policy that makes globalization ‘fairer’.
