ABSTRACT
Regional cooperation with neighbouring countries historically results from the interplay between two tendencies: on the one hand, economic and technological globalization and, on the other, the need of States to expand their influence beyond their borders. Since the planetary revolution represented by geographic discoveries of the fifteenth century and waves of globalization over the nineteenth and, notably, the twentieth centuries, the more evident the discrepancy between global interdependence and the state-centred system has become and the more multidimensional regionalism emerged as a third level of increasingly multilayered global governance. As a consequence of the crisis of the State and of the Westphalian order, regionalism expresses the tendency to resist the globalist unity by a plurality of regional entities. This book argues that several factors, including institutional sets and an ideational multilateralist legacy, make it possible for regional entities not to become mere spheres of influences or empires dominated by a single power.
