ABSTRACT
The US and the EU are key actors shaping the international system. The unique breadth and depth of the transatlantic alliance explain why, in spite of obvious shifts in power and the rise of new actors, it still to a large extent defines the world order. However, this relationship has been fracturing since the end of the Cold War. Increasingly the two sides of the Atlantic have even come to represent different world order models: unilateralism oft decried as imperialism, on the one hand; and multilateralism intertwined with interregionalism offered as a novel international phenomenon, on the other. Either side of the relationship has also become associated with a specific economic and societal model, the underlying differences having been made ever more salient by the 2008 global crisis and the subsequent European sovereign debt-crisis. There is a place for regionalism in either of these models, but one of a very different sort: neo-Westphalian in the US case, post-Westphalian in the EU one. The first is to be understood as state-centric and rooted in hierarchical power relations; the second is rather more functional in nature as it is centred on multilateral governance efforts (Santander and Ponjaert, 2009). The US strategy emphasizes bilateralism loosely aggregated within a regional context thus creating weak regions held together mainly by a hub-and-spoke web of trade relations; whereas the EU strategy continues to rest upon multidimensional intraregional links rooted in institutionalized interregional relations as a necessary structural feature of its external action.
