ABSTRACT
In 1948, one of the first books on regionalism1 in the English language to be
published in the non-Western world appeared under the editorship of
K.M. Panikkar, an Indian scholar-diplomat, who was once India’s ambassador
to China. In the introduction, Panikkar traced the origins of the idea of regional
organisation (which he equated with the term regionalism) to the Armed Neutrality
of Northern Powers in the Napoleonic War, the US Monroe Doctrine, the
concept of Mitteleuropa advocated by Frederich Neuman for the Danubian
regions, and the exclusive economic and political blocs developed by Nazi
Germany in Europe and imperial Japan in East Asia. What is interesting about
this genealogy is that all these, with the exception of the Japanese Greater East Asia
Co-prosperity Sphere, were Western, and that all, with the exception of the first
one, assumed the ‘‘establishment of the paramountcy of a Great Power in a defined
geographical region’’. Hence, ‘‘so far, regional organisation has meant nothing
more than a polite phraseology for Lebensraum’’.2 Against this hegemonic concept, Pannikar advanced what might be seen as an alternative conception of regionalism:
Panikkar’s statement contains three important messages for the students of region-
alism today. First, it shows that scholars and policymakers (he was both) in regions
other than Europe or America were thinking of regionalism as a way of addressing
the most pressing challenges that these societies faced.
