Regionalism-Who Needs It?

A specter is haunting the world at the turn of the twenty-first century: the specter of regionalism. The experiments in confederation of the European Union—of which the most important is the adoption of the Euro as a pan-European currency—are thought by many to signal a movement from national sovereignty to regional integration, a trend which is both inevitable and desirable. Contrary to popular belief, however, the replacement of nation-states and intercontinental alliances by regional organizations in world politics is neither inevitable nor desirable.

The genuine but limited success of the European Union in forming a transnational trading bloc is often treated as proof that world politics is moving in the direction of regionalism. But where, outside of Europe, is regionalism a trend? The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cannot be compared to the EU. The North American economy is, for all practical purposes, the U.S. economy; Canada as a whole is the equivalent of one of the larger U.S. states, and Mexico’s GDP adds even less to the total.

In East Asia, regional integration hardly exists, except as an aspiration. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group (APEC) exists chiefly on paper. Asian nations tend to depend as much on exporting to North America and Europe as to their neighbors. International security cooperation is even less advanced. Neither China nor Japan, the two great powers of the region, are trusted by their neighbors, most of whom prefer to see their regional military power kept in check by a strong U.S. military presence. If Asia is defined broadly to include the Indian subcontinent, then it is the site of perhaps the most dangerous arms race in the world today—the competition between India and its rival Pakistan, which is allied with India’s historic enemy China.

Even in Europe, regionalism has been only a partial success. Most of the states of Eastern Europe are being kept out of the EU. So is Turkey, a Muslim state kept out of what in effect is a post-Christian club, and Russia, which has as plausible a claim to European identity as Spain and Portugal. The NATO alliance, headed by the U.S., remains the only effective European security alliance. Absent American leadership, the squabbling countries of Europe have been unable to devise a common foreign policy to respond to crises in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and elsewhere. Nor has the EU yet managed to create a common European cultural identity, despite its Athens-to-Brussels historical mythology. The fact that the various denominations of the Euro depict imaginary buildings that exist in no European country, so that none of the nations of Europe will be offended, proves that the common European identity is very shallow indeed.

If regionalism is not inevitable, is it nevertheless desirable? For Americans and their Canadian allies, the answer should be clear. The U.S. and Canada fought two world wars against Germany, and a Cold War against the Soviet Union, to prevent the division of the world into regional blocs. Like the British before them, Americans—whose homeland is an island off the shore of the Eurasian/African supercontinent—have feared that in a regionalized system they would be excluded from most of the resources and markets of the world. Among other consequences of this might be the domination of the world by an Old World military superpower or alliance able to draw on a power base far superior to that available to Washington in the Americas alone. For these reasons, American strategists, like their British precursors, have promoted a world order in which global economic integration permits access critical to regions which remain politically divided among a number of states.

The British and American interest in keeping Europe and Asia politically divided and open to the world economy has been shared by the small nations of those regions. In a world carved into regional spheres of influence, these countries would be doomed to be satellites of locally-dominant nations like Germany, Russia, China or Japan. A system of global economic integration permits smaller nations to diversify their trading partners, while global alliances in a "checkerboard" pattern permits them to ally themselves with distant and non-threatening great powers such as the U.S. against neighbors that are too big and too close for comfort.

The United States, then, has a clear interest in opposing economic-political regionalism in Europe and Asia and elsewhere. Instead, the U.S. should encourage globalism and nationalism. Usually globalism and nationalism are treated as opposites. In fact, political nationalism is compatible with a high degree of global free trade and investment as a result of trade treaties among sovereign states. Indeed, the greater the number of sovereign states there are in the world, the less appealing protectionism is as a policy for any one. Only huge states, empires or blocs with enormous internal resources can attempt to secede from international markets.

In light of the threat to American economic interests posed by regional protectionist bloc, and the even graver American security threats that regional superpowers like the Third Reich, the Japanese empire and the Soviet empire have posed, nationalism-within-globalism, at the expense of regionalism, is the best outcome. It is hard to understand therefore why American policymakers reflexively support regional integration and oppose the dissolution of tyrannical or unworkable multinational states. It seems obvious in retrospect that both the U.S. and the world as a whole are better off with a shrunken Russia, a free Ukraine and independent Baltic republics than they were in the days of the Soviet imperium. But many U.S. leaders, including President Bush, sought to hold the Soviet Union together indefinitely in the interests of "stability." A similar misguided worship of stability has led the Clinton administration to try to arrest the long-overdue dissolution of the ill-conceived Yugoslav federation into a handful of new and more coherent nation-states. For the U.S., which originated in a nationalist secession from a multinational empire in 1776, to tell other nations that they cannot secede from the undemocratic multinational entities in which they find themselves trapped offends American ideals at the same time that it ignores American interests.

The U.S. should not actively promote the failure of the European experiment in regionalism—even though such a failure might benefit both the U.S. and Canada, by rekindling interest in greater Euro-American integration of the kind embodied in a proposed Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA). Elsewhere in the world, however, the U.S. should refrain from encouraging projects of regional integration which, if they succeeded, would result in the diminution or elimination of American economic and military influence in that area. Nor should the U.S. use its good offices or (as in the case of the Balkans) its armed forces to prevent multinational states that never should have been cobbled together in the first place from falling apart into smaller nation-states. The American goal in the twenty-first century should remain what it was in the twentieth—an integrated world of many sovereign nation-states, not a world divided among a few regional blocs.