ABSTRACT
Theorising regionalism has never been straightforward. The well-worn dialectic between neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism in European Union (EU) studies ultimately has failed to generate workable theories, and scholars in this field – historically the prime example of regional integration1
studies – now find themselves working with a ‘mosaic’ (Diez and Wiener 2004) of various concepts, approaches and projects in a period of revision and experimentation. On the other hand, scholars of the so-called ‘new regionalism’ – in terms of quantity, primarily an extra-European phenomenon, but one which includes and was even initiated by the reliance of the EU (Fawcett 1995: 9; Schulz et al. 2001: 3) – have generally eschewed orthodox integration theory as represented by the acquis in EU studies. Instead such scholars have sought to generate their own corpus of theory on the ground that their dependent variable – ‘new regionalism’ – was too different from the ‘old regionalism’ of the pre-Single European Act EU to be meaningfully studied using the traditional conceptual lenses of EU studies scholars.2 Thus, these scholars have sought to elaborate a self-consciously separate ‘new regionalism approach’ (NRA), an excellent critical overview of which is represented by the essays in Söderbaum and Shaw (2003).
