Suchergebnisse

Katada reviews INTERREGIONALISM AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS edited by Heiner Hanggi, Ralf Roloff, and Jurgen Ruland.

Interregionalism and International Relations, Heiner
Hänggi, Ralf Roloff and Jürgen Rüland, eds., Routledge
Advances in International Relations and Global Politics; London:
Routledge, 2006, pp. 364.How do we explain a widespread international phenomenon that only
occasionally contributes to the geo-strategic or economic interests of the
participating states? This book is about interregionalism, the
international organizations and institutions that link regional
organizations from more than one region of the world (as, for example,
ASEM, also known as Asia-Europe Meeting) or that span across more than one
region, such as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation) or FTAA (Free
Trade Area of the Americas). The fact is that few of these institutions
have accomplished much in concrete terms, yet they continue to
proliferate, as the four-and-a-half page list of acronyms at the beginning
of this volume amply demonstrates.

This paper reviews the edited volume titled The Unintended Consequences of Interregionalism: Effects on Regional Actors, Societies and Structures. The book offers an alternative perspective to studies on interregionalism. Despite not being a new phenomenon, interregional dialogues between regional groups from different parts of the world have resurged since the 1990s, together with many studies trying to define and analyze them. Yet, most of the existing works on the topic adopt a deductive approach, contain a Euro-centric focus, and highlight whether interregional dialogues achieved what they intended. The Unintended Consequences of Interregionalism breaks these norms. It not only approaches the topic inductively but also considers myriad regionalisms. Accordingly, the various regions produce distinct "regionalisms" and, therefore, a plethora of "interregionalisms" exist. The edited volume supplies a unique perspective—one that grapples with the unintended outcomes of interregional interactions.

This last decade, regional organizations progressively became
unavoidable actors of regional health governance and have been supported by some global health actors to strengthen such a role. Among these actors, the European Union (EU) is the only regional organization that implements health initiatives in cooperation with its regional counterparts. This article focuses on such "health interregionalism" toward Southeast Asia and Africa and in the field of communicable diseases, with the main objective of assessing its nature and identifying its main functions. It concludes that although appreciated and needed, the EU's health interregionalism should better reflect the EU's experience in regional health governance in order to represent a unique instrument of development aid and an added value for regional organizations

AbstractThis article explores the diplomatic implications of a central pillar in EU external relations: the development of interregional relations. In particular, the article investigates the emergence of a specific pattern of interregional relations — 'complex interregionalism' — and develops an initial framework for the analysis of this phenomenon. This framework allows for a detailed investigation of how the EU has simultaneously engaged in bilateral, multilateral and interregional relations across the globe. The EU — notably the Commission — is found to have a consistent and coherent complex interregional strategy that it employs across three world regions: Asia; Africa; and Latin America. This strategy embodies multi-level interregional relations, but aspires to the creation of 'pure interregionalism' between the EU and other customs unions. Such a strategy presents two key tensions that lie at the heart of 'complex interregionalism': the first tension is between the reality of multi-level diplomacy and the desire for 'pure interregionalism'; and the second is between the Commission's strategic vision and the realities of Council-shaped diplomacy. Analysis of the internal and external dynamics of the strategic pursuit of interregionalism, and the failure to implement it fully, can thus offer important insights for the study of both the EU's external relations and EU diplomacy.