ABSTRACT
After looking at ‘fluid types’ of early regionalism in ancient Greece, Sinop in Turkey, ancient and pre-modern India, and even China, and mentioning region-building efforts in pre-modern Europe, this chapter analyses the old regionalism of Louis Cantori and Steven Spiegel in their really detailed framework for comparing regional IR, as evinced by 5 of the 15 subordinate systems of the Middle East, West Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and West Africa, according to: (1) their nature and level of cohesion, (2) their nature of communications, (3) their level of power, and (4) their structure of relations, and then focuses on the critique offered by new regionalism of old regionalism in the writings of Frederik Söderbaum and others that went beyond the debates between the 1940s and 1950s among federalism, functionalism, neofunctionalism and transactionalism about the nature of regional integration, to posit that regionalism has to be viewed both from endogenous and exogenous perspectives. After raising the question of why and where the newness of new regionalism resides, the chapter discusses the disciplinary and contextual sources and indicators of newness of new regionalism, and the rivalries between its many strands claiming to monopolize the elements of newness, after Björn Hettne and others, and shows how comparative analysis across the rationalist–reflectivist divide offers the best clue.
