Regional Powers and Regional Orders

Nadine Godehardt, Dirk Nabers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136718908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Regional Powers and Regional Orders presents a re-examination and re-conceptualization of the concept of 'region' and its function within power and order systems.

Utilising a comparative and case study approach, the volume examines 'new' regional powers such as Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa. These territories as regional powers are novel phenomenon in the field of international politics and even more so in the field of international relations. The book focuses on the emerging role of these new regional powers within their respective region, and asks how other members of these regions cope with and react to that role.

Regional Powers and Regional Orders will be of interest to students and scholars of international and regional politics and power, and international relations.

Part I

Theoretical concepts in the study of regional orders and regional powers

1 Creating international regions

The spatial expression of power

Karoline Postel-Vinay

The ‘region’ is arguably the core notion that is situated at the intersection of the field of International Relations (IR) and that of Area Studies. The study of international regionalism has been an important sub-field of IR that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s (Haas 1958), waned for two decades, and then re-emerged after the end of the Cold War (Hurrell 1995). Meanwhile the international region has steadily come to constitute a major level of analysis in the field of Area Studies.¹ Yet the notion of ‘region’ per se has been studied very little from an international perspective – whereas the region as a sub-national entity has been an important object of study in various disciplines, starting with geography, and more specifically political geography (Taylor 1985; Soja 1989). Although the relatively new sub-field of critical geopolitics provides important insights into the spatial aspects of international politics, it does not take into account its regional dimension (Postel-Vinay 2001).

A number of leading works on the ‘new’ (i.e. post-Cold War) international regionalism, have, however, acknowledged the existence of socially constructed and politically contested regions as an intuitive working hypothesis (Fawcett and Hurrell 1995; Schulz et al. 2001). The purpose of this chapter is to move beyond this preliminary intuition by further digging out the cognitive basis that informs the reference to the region that is made by the different fields within international studies. What is proposed here, therefore, is an exploratory reflection on the conceptual and historical dimensions of world regions, which might then provide a new framework for the discussion of the regions–power nexus in the context of international politics. How relevant to the analysis of international relations is the matter of ‘place’, which has been so thoroughly debated when attempting to articulate the local to the global (Featherstone et al. 1995)? What is the historicity of the actual notion of world region? The legacy of critical geopolitics, and the definition of ‘geography’ as the ‘writing of the Earth’ (O’Tuathail 1996), although not loquacious on the subject of international regionalism as such, could nonetheless prove to be useful in the tackling of this question. Both conceptual and historical dimensions of world regions show the specificity of the latter as spatial expressions of power on the international scene.

Place and international relations

All subjects that could be roughly defined as the encounter of the ‘regional’ with the ‘international’, such as ‘regional powers’, ‘regional order and governance’ or ‘international regionalism’, implicitly refer to a polity defined by the ‘idea of the region’. Yet this idea, the ‘region as such’, is rarely discussed in the context of world politics. It does not mean that this notion is, in that particular context, not taken into account. On the contrary, as Marie-Claude Smouts put it, the region constitutes a ‘relevant space’ for both international action and the analysis of international relations, and is indeed a spatial entity that is ‘laden with socio-political significance’, constructed within a specific historical framework (Smouts 1997: 40). But the proper deconstruction that this would imply has yet to be fully undertaken. International regions have been deconstructed as functional entities, notably as security communities (Adler 1997; Buzan and Waever 2003; Bilgin 2004), and through that process have eventually been deconstructed as ‘regions’. Little has been said, however, about the specificity of international regions as spatial entities. Again the ‘idea of a region’ in itself has not really been tackled, creating an apparent wasteland in the field of IR that offers a striking contrast to the rich literature that exists on the sub-national region in political geography.

One would, of course, expect that the notion of region, a place par excellence, would not be ignored by a discipline that has been defined by a long tradition of ‘place matters’ thinking (Taylor 1985), and that was actually compelled to reassert itself in the early days of the post-Cold War era in the face of a bold, and at the time almost convincing, statement such as the ‘end of geography’ (Graham 1998). Partly because of that challenge, but mostly because of the sheer transformation of the relation of place to space – as illustrated by the ‘glocalization’ phenomenon – geography went through an ‘epistemological revolution’ (Lévy 1996) leading to its repositioning within the social sciences. The object of the discipline was transformed by a new complexity that could be translated as the criticism of the ‘geographical being’, that is to say the assumption of both the unity and the permanence of the context of human activity (Retaillé 1997). Going beyond the monolithic ‘geographical being’ allowed for the reintroduction, as well as the updating, of the notion of ‘area’, so as to also take into account the relativity and the fluidity of the global space (Gregory 1989). In other words, the existence of interactions, and not the permanence of place, would henceforth define areas in the global space. The location of areas would echo the new purpose of geography, as prescribed by Denis Retaillé: ‘Geography means looking for the place of a society and not defining society by a given place’ (Retaillé 1996: 95).

While this epistemological revolution was occurring among geographers, not all fields of the social sciences were giving consideration to the necessity of revisiting the place–society nexus. Whereas in the early post-Cold War days ‘society’ appeared to be everywhere, to the point that globalization itself could be defined as one global social fact, ‘place’ tended to be taken for granted as much as it tended to be forgotten altogether. Global society, despite its tangible spatial plurality, was increasingly being ‘delocalized’ (Agnew 1989). That was, and up to a point still is, the case especially with IR. The extremely scant discussion of the idea of region within international studies is, in that regard, not only a case in point but also a paradoxical phenomenon. One could hardly ignore the spatial transformation of the international scene, in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and indeed one would often refer to the spectacular spatial transformation of the international scene. Borders were being redefined, bypassed or ignored, while sites of action and levels of governance were being multiplied and restructured. The ‘global’, the ‘local’, the ‘glocal’, as well as the ‘regional’, emerged as new arenas of international activities, and were examined as such. Although there was an implicit spatial measurement in the discussion about those new sites of international interaction, this discussion has been somewhat disconnected from the geographical notions of place and scale.

The vast literature of the 1990s on globalization has tended to focus on the change of actors and rules while disconnecting it from the actual change of scene. By doing so it has tended to leave open the very question of the globality of globalization: what is actually global about globalization? Defining the place of globalization, or more precisely the site of production of globalization, leans towards tautology – globalization is globally produced – whereas one could, in fact, argue that globalization ‘has a home address’ (Agnew 2006). The actual scale of the global social fact has tended, likewise, to be overlooked, a neglect that can then lead to the hasty conclusion that this scale is literally Earth-wide, leaving the obvious unevenness of the globalization process unaccounted for.

A similar argument, albeit with a slightly different meaning, can be applied to the spatial analysis of international regions: what is regional about international regions? The ‘new’ regionalism literature of the 1990s rightly and usefully pointed to the major changes of agency that characterized worldwide regionalization processes. Compared to the international regional trends of the 1950s and 1960s, the new regionalization phenomena were no longer state-centred, some of them being fuelled primarily by the dynamics of non-state actors, such as was the case with the ‘soft regionalism’ of East Asia (Hettne et al. 1999). But this detailed analysis of agency change did not address the question of the relevance of the region, or more precisely it did not explain why and how the international region was a relevant space for the movement of actors who, as such, could be also observable in other sites of the international scene, such as the global or the transnational ones.

The post-Cold War IR literature, insofar as it has been addressing issues of globalization, regionalization and transnationalization, was de facto constantly referring to spatial transformation. Yet the evocation of space did not lead to any specific analysis of the political use of space, or even to a more general reflection on political space. This discrepancy can probably be explained by the fact that the immediate agenda of most of the IR literature in the 1990s was, and even now still is, up to a point, the analysis of the regulation of international politics.

The end of the bipolar order transformed the rules of the game on the international scene, and globalism, regionalism and transnationalism appeared as some of the many expressions of this major change. From that perspective, it seems only logical that studies of that change were focusing on the new forms of governance, and the new practices, norms and rules that they established. In other words, efforts to understand the new international system that has emerged in the last two decades have been much more about looking at the processes of regulation-building rather than at those of polity-building. Hence, the core topics of the recent international regionalism literature have evolved around issues of actors and rules – such as regionalization, regional governance, institutionalization, and integration – thus leaving aside the question of region-building as such; in other words, the production of the region as a polity.

In one specific instance, however, the relationship between the change of actors and the change of scene at the international level has been thoroughly discussed. The nation-state, both as a primary international actor and as ‘relevant space’, has been the locus of important debate. The critical question of the status of the state’s territory, as a sovereignty-bounded spatial unit, has constituted an overarching theme of the many fields and sub-fields of the political science from the early 1990s until recently (Walker 1993; Spruyt 1994; Kastoryano 2006). Almost by definition, from a political science perspective, the state’s territory escapes essentialism, and therefore it can be more easily deconstructed, compared to the global or local space, or the region. In this respect, the territorial space of nation-states arguably stands more firmly at the political intersection of place and government. So the focus on regulation-building processes brought about by the collapse of the Cold War order affected differently the issues of the state in international affairs by allowing more room for a renewed reflection on polity-building. The rise of identity politics on the international scene is one obvious illustration of that trend (Kastoryano 2006).

Another important question in the post-Cold War era, and it is one that became even more salient after 9/11, is that of legitimacy in the international order. Along with the renaissance of identity politics, the problem of international legitimacy – ‘who speaks for whom in the various sites of global governance’ – has also given a new relevance to the study of polity-building processes. Halfway between the definition of the contours of a hypothetical ‘international community’ (Buzan and Gonzalez-Pelaez 2005) and the redefinition of the territorial nation-sate, the construction of Europe has proved to be the most exemplary case of the renewal of polity-building issues in the post-bipolar order. The politics of enlargement have underscored, both from a theoretical and from a policy perspective, the complex intertwining – as reflected in the politics of ‘deepening’ of the European integration – of issues of regulation-building with the redefinition of the European polity. This complexity is summed up in such deceptively simple questions as: ‘What are the borders of Europe?’ or ‘How far east and how far south should Europe extend?’ These are as much about norms and rules as they are about identity. It does provide a strong reminder that in international affairs too, ‘place matters’.

Mapping world regions

Post-Cold War geopolitics, either ‘critical’ (O’Tuathail 1996; Dalby and O’Tuathail 1998) or ‘new’ (Newman 1999), have opened up a field of enquiry around the relationship between geography and politics in the largest sense of the words – local and global, national and international. Rather than establishing a new grand theory, this enquiry offers a methodology based on the definition of the practice of geography as an active process, ‘geo-graphy’ being literally the action of ‘writing the Earth’. One could argue that this critical methodology informs not only the renewed field of geopolitics – which is, of course, particularly relevant to the analysis of international relations – but that, as well, of political geography and the larger one of human geography – which also needs to be taken into account when addressing the notion of ‘region’. It concurs with the reflexive geographical approach as proposed by Retaillé – a geography that looks for the place of society rather than defining it through a given place – that one could call, then, ‘critical geography’. E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical concepts in the study of regional orders and regional powers
• 1 Creating international regions
• 2 The power of ideas in international relations
• 3 Regional powers and regional governance
• 4 On the economics of regional powers
• Part II Regional powers and their neighbourhood
• 5 The European Union as a regional power
• 6 China and the definition of the Asian region
• 7 Roles and actions of leadership
• 8 Regional leadership?
• Part III Regional powers and the global power distribution
• 9 The omnipower
• 10 Pakistan
• 11 ‘A fine and delicate balance …'
• 12 Israel
• Conclusion
• Index