Globalization Projects of Regional Organizations

This handbook covers the globalisation projects of 24 regional organisations during the period from 1945, when the United Nations was founded, to the present day, with a particular focus on the post-Cold War era. During this period, changing global conditions, or at least the perception of change, created an environment to which regional organizations and their specific globalisation projects responded. To allow for a broad periodisation, the contributions in this book identify six structuring conditions: (1) the need for many countries of the Global South to jointly cope with postcolonialism, (2) and the establishment of Western liberalism. Furthermore, (3) some regional organisations are the direct result of proactive globalisation projects from the Global South, (4) while others are an expression of the need to survive between the confrontational blocs of the Cold War. And (5) after the end of the Cold War, regionalisms were revived or newly created, particularly in the Global South (the so-called wave of “new regionalisms”). Finally (6), during the last 20 years, an increasing number of regional organisations have been founded in order to (rather passively) integrate into the emerging new world order, to react to new global challenges or to actively shape globalisation.