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How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the institutional preferences and bargaining strategies of national governments. The author argues that Europe's foremost regional organization systematically affects institution building abroad, but that such influence varies across different types of organization. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, it shows how the EU institutionally strengthens regional organizations through active engagement and by building its own institutions at home. Yet the contractual nature of other regional organizations bounds this causal influence: EU influence makes an identifiable difference primarily in those organizations that, like the EU itself, rest on an open-ended contract. Evidence for these claims is drawn from the statistical analysis of a dataset on the institutionalization of 35 regional organizations in the period from 1950 to 2017, as well as from detailed single and comparative case studies on institutional creation and (non-)change in the Southern African Development Community, Mercosur, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

How and with what effects do institutions diffuse between international organizations (IOs)? An emerging literature extends a key insight of the study of diffusion processes among states to the international level, establishing that the adoption of institutions in IOs is regularly conditioned by the choices of other IOs. Yet, this literature neglects a key contextual difference between the two settings: unlike in the hierarchically structured organizations that have dominated the literature on diffusion, institutional creation, and change in IOs are the result of decentralized bargaining among sovereign governments. This paper develops a heuristic model that shows how diffusion between IOs shapes decision-making within them through its impact on the institutional preferences of individual governments. The model establishes that, unlike in diffusion processes among states, convergence is an unlikely outcome of diffusion between IOs. By implication, studies that take institutional convergence as their starting point are likely to underestimate the pervasiveness of diffusion effects. I demonstrate these arguments with a case study of the establishment of a regional dispute settlement system in Mercosur, a regional organization in Latin America.

Why have many regional organizations adopted common markets and customs unions? This article proposes a cognitive diffusion mechanism – termed frame diffusion – to explain convergent institutional choices across structurally diverse settings. Using Strang and Meyer's (1993) notion of 'theorization' to combine foundational work on framing with the literature on diffusion, I argue that processes of theorization transform the experience of successful institutional innovators into abstract cognitive schemas, which link a particular understanding of a cooperation problem to specific institutional solutions. As policymakers in other contexts encounter similar cooperation problems, they adopt framed institutional solutions, which results in institutional convergence at the macro level. I further suggest that this process of frame diffusion is conditional on ideational affinities in social purpose between the innovating organization and other regional organizations. Where other organizations pursue a distinct social purpose, policymakers rely on alternative frames and thereby cement institutional variation. After developing this argument theoretically, I illustrate it in an exploratory comparison of institutional choice in three most different regional organizations: Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Common Market of the South, and the Southern African Development Community. The argument points to significant 'blind spots' and conceptual complementarity between prominent mechanisms of diffusion.

Why have many regional organizations, such as ASEAN, Mercosur and SADC, adopted EU-type common markets and customs unions? I propose the mechanism of frame diffusion - the process by which a cognitive schema that originates in one organization shapes decision making over institutional choices in other organizations - to account for the spread of a specific institutional form across structurally diverse contexts in the absence of outside imposition. The argument is developed in three steps. First, I contend that existing arguments of international economic cooperation and regional market building drawn from International Political Economy, Neofunctionalism and Realism are largely indeterminate in terms of the specific institutional form that such cooperation takes. Second, I posit that developments in Europe and North America in the 1980s and early 1990s acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a set of frames that depicted ambitious regional market building as an appropriate institutional solution to challenges in international competitiveness. These guided policymaking in other regions under conditions of negative externalities and uncertainty. Third, I illustrate this argument in an exploratory comparison of institutional change in three 'most different' regional organizations: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Mercosur and the Southern African Development Community. The presented argument has implications for research in International Political Economy and comparative regionalism.

The ideational impact captured by Manners's notion of normative power Europe (NPE) appears most distinct and potentially most consequential in the realm of regionalism. However, empirical research on the topic has been hampered by the focus on EU actorness and methodological difficulties. Drawing on diffusion theory, this article develops conceptual, theoretical and methodological foundations for conceiving NPE as ideational diffusion. It argues that Europe's ideational influence on regionalism can be fruitfully understood as the largely indirect process by which the EU experience travels to other regions through socialization and emulation. Yet, as structural conditions vary across regions, EU ideational diffusion rarely leads to similar or even comparable institutional practices and outcomes. A choice-orientated approach is proposed for examining these claims empirically, which focuses on specifying the underlying counterfactual: political decisions in regionalism would have been different in the absence of the EU. The article concludes by outlining the analytical and normative promise of the proposed recasting of Manners's original concept.