ABSTRACT
For over 50 years, the MENA region has been seen as a single unit of analysis. I have viewed it in these terms myself, making assumptions about the political, socio-economic and cultural aspects of MENA as a distinct subsystem of the international system. Its body was neither invented nor imagined, to apply Higgott’s comment referring to East Asian regionalism.1 But to argue that MENA is a regional system does not necessarily mean that its ‘regionalization’ is also pre-ordained.2 As shown below, this is one of the least ‘regionalized’ regional systems of the world, when measured by economic integration criteria – market integration, freedom of mobility, unhindered trade and investment flows, an internal market for the subsystem’s members, collective measures to standardize legal and financial management regimes, a truly region-wide technical secretariat for co-operation or establishment of a convergence criteria, etc. Many of these features are conspicuous by their absence in the MENA region, despite efforts in the early 2000s to reduce intra-country barriers.
