ABSTRACT
Although its roots can be traced back to the early 1970s, interregionalism is still a relatively new phenomenon in the international institutional architecture (Hänggi, Roloff and Rüland, 2006). While the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were early promoters of bi-regional or group-to-group interregionalism, the 1990s saw a proliferation of interregional forums and a pluralization of formats of interregional interaction (Hänggi, 2006; Rüland 2010, 2014c). Interregionalism became a new institutional layer, connecting global and regional policy processes in an emerging and increasingly horizontally and vertically differentiated multilevel system of global governance. In the process, studies on the formats, functions and effects of interregional cooperation became an established field of research under the wider umbrella of regionalism studies.
