ABSTRACT
As shown in the previous chapter, much debate continues to surround the phenomenon of globalization. Globalization, through its horizontal (levelling of the international economic field) and vertical (shifting production and related processes between a few global production and financial hot spots) slicing of the world, has generated significant strategic interdependencies across the planet, where fluctuations, force of events and developments in one part of the world leave an impression elsewhere. Globalization also digs deep grooves into the regional organization of states. As globalization has accelerated over the past 20 years, so it has become more and more reliant on the different geopolitical settings of the international system (regional systems and regional groupings) in order to sustain itself. In some parts of the world (the EU, North America, Pacific Asia) there has been a fairly smooth relationship between regionalist tendencies and globalization, which has often helped in ironing the path for the latter in providing appropriate policy frameworks within which to function. But in other parts of the world, most notably the GME (and much of sub-Sahara Africa), geopolitical complexities have come not only to disrupt the globalization process, but also hinder and challenge it.
