ABSTRACT
In the face of serious, even existential crises, regionalism has proven itself a resilient and structuring global phenomenon. Regional polities and policies have successfully adapted to a range of challenges, among them the 1997 Southeast Asian financial crisis (MacIntyre, Pempel and Ravenhill, 2008; Breslin and Higgott, 2010; Beeson and Stubbs, 2013), the 1998–2002 Latin American banking crisis (Santander, 2014; Grugel, 2004), the unilateralism of George W. Bush’s first presidential administrations, as well as the global economic crisis (Pemple and Tsunekawa, 2014) followed by the Eurozone crisis (Lefkofridi and Schmitter, 2014; Rodrigues and Xiarchogiannopoulou, 2014; Fabbrini, 2015). Since 2008, regionalism has been shaped by the imperatives brought about by two successive economic/financial crises and an increasingly multipolar international environment. Whether prompted by crises or strategic competition, regional cooperation across the globe has had to respond to shifting power asymmetries and political fragmentation in an attempt to counteract possible inefficiencies and disintegration. As a result, the literature has to cope with new exogenous and endogenous factors affecting regional cooperation.
