ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) is the ‘poster child’ of regionalism. It is the most institutionalized and most powerful, as well as the best-known example of regionalism. It is often used as the benchmark against which other regions are measured. As Laura Macdonald in this volume points out, the EU is the key example of regionalism in the North. Its centrality to the study of regionalism is such that other forms of regional cooperation, in both the North and the South, are typically compared to the EU – even when such a comparison is decried by the author. Although the 27 EU members constitute a regional ‘bloc’, the 2010 financial crisis highlighted the EU’s economic divide when both Greece and Ireland had to be ‘bailed out’ by a combination of EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) monies. That diversity is a key theme of this chapter.
