ABSTRACT
For many decades, financial, technological, and market globalization has interplayed in various ways with the territorial and political dimensions of trade and cooperation. What is new is that globalization controversies are increasingly shaped according to geopolitical logics and security imperatives. Competing regionalism and interregionalism can be seen as attempts of States or regions to reach two types of objectives: first, to react to global and internal uncertainties, by upgrading trade and multidimensional relations with relevant partners by mean of alliances among friends – like the United States with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and China with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Second, other States impose power and hierarchical logics against economic ties, with relevant negative externalities – like Russia in Ukraine, militarily asserting its Eurasian project against the EU-centred continental architecture. Interregionalism is a varied and ambivalent trend in world politics, at the crossroad between interdependence and shifts of global power, and no longer a projection of the EU view of the world.
