How regional trade blocs are finally breaking free from EU blueprint
A new analysis shows comparative regionalism scholarship has quietly shed its European bias, disaggregating regional integration into measurable components and applying rigorous comparative methods. For policymakers and business strategists, this means frameworks for understanding African, Asian, and Latin American trade blocs are becoming more reliable—and less distorted by outdated assumptions about how regions should organize.
Originaltitel: Comparative Regionalism beyond Europe versus the rest
What is the current state of Comparative Regionalism (CR) as a field of research? Since its inception, CR has suffered from a chasm between those who take European integration as the model for conceptualising, theorising, comparing, and designing regionalism worldwide, and the critics, who reject EU-centrism in favour of more contextualised approaches focusing on the Global South. This paper challenges this characterisation by showing how CR has fundamentally changed in the last decade or so. We detail three ‘silent’ transformations: (i) conceptually, scholars disaggregate regionalism into specific components, rendering systematic comparison more tractable and less individual case-centric; (ii) theoretically, scholars develop frameworks that build on general social science theories and actively seek to move beyond EU-centrism; and (iii) methodologically, scholars use more rigorous comparative designs and a broader range of data. These changes, we suggest, indicate a ‘mainstreaming’ of CR, with attendant benefits and costs.