ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with how the region of Europe has emerged and is emerging as a global actor. It is important to note that while some large political units operate as territorial states, the EU is a different kind of political animal: a regional institutionalized polity. The chapter outlines European regionalization, regionalism and regional agency as a process in which internal and external factors interrelate. It deals the issue of global actorship: the mutually supportive relationship between regionness, presence and actorness, providing the theoretical framework for the analysis. The chapter also outlines the historical development of European agency through processes of convergence and policies of cohesion. It discusses the future of European actorship against the backdrop of global economic crisis, and the general importance of regional actorship in international relations. Regionalism is the ideology and project of region-building, while the concept of regionalization is reserved for more spontaneous processes of region formation by different actors—state or non-state.
