ABSTRACT
Introduction: the region strikes back Regionalism is a relatively new (or, alternatively, a long absent) concept in the analysis of international relations in the modern world. Whereas in the postCold War period it has become a pivotal term that adorns most political, economic, and cultural agendas as the deus ex machina that might balance the forces of globalism on the one hand and nationalism on the other, before the 1990s we find little mention of the term in this sense. Regionalism was mainly used in terms of “provincial” politics, often dealing with issues of decentralization, autonomy, or separatism and, in the few cases that it was used in the sense of the creation of some sort of transnational or supranational union, the actors were either European or South-East Asian – but definitely not Japanese.
