ABSTRACT
For more than a decade, regionalism has now ‘been brought back in’ to international studies, after some time of almost complete neglect.1 The ‘new regionalism’ began to emerge in the mid-1980s in the context of the comprehensive structural transformation of the global system. Similar to the ‘old regionalism’ which began in the 1950s and stagnated in the 1970s, the new wave must be understood in its historical context. That is, it needs to be related to the structural transformation of the world, inter alia, including (1) the move from bipolarity towards a multipolar or perhaps tripolar structure, with a new division of power and new division of labour; (2) the relative decline of American hegemony in combination with a more permissive attitude on the part of the USA towards regionalism; (3) the erosion of the Westphalian nation-state system and the growth of interdependence and ‘globalisation’, and (4) the changed attitudes towards (neo-liberal) economic development and political systems in the developing countries, as well as in the post-communist countries (see de Melo and Panagariya, 1993; Fawcett and Hurrell, 1995; Gamble and Payne, 1996; Hettne and Soderbaum, 1998a; Hettne et al., 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Böa/s et al., 1999b; and Kearns, 1999).
