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The Historicity of the InternationalRegion: Revisiting the “Europe and theRest” DivideKaroline Postel-Vinay aa National Foundation for Political Sciences (CERI-Sciences Po) ,Paris, FrancePublished online: 01 Oct 2007.

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Geopolitics, 12:555–569, 2007Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650040701546046

FGEO1465-00451557-3028Geopolitics, Vol. 12, No. 4, Jul 2007: pp. 0–0Geopolitics

The Historicity of the International Region: Revisiting the “Europe and the Rest” Divide

Revisiting the “Europe and the Rest” DivideKaroline Postel-Vinay

KAROLINE POSTEL-VINAYNational Foundation for Political Sciences (CERI-Sciences Po), Paris, France

Although most of the literature on international regionalism refersimplicitly to a polity defined by the “idea of the region” it seldomlooks at the genesis of this idea in the context of world politics. Thisarticle argues that looking at the historical formation of theregional idea is important not only to have a better understandingof international regionalism as such, but to address the issue ofEurope’s specificity within this trend. There has been an on-goingdebate about the heuristic status of the European Union (EU)within regional studies, underscoring a widening divide betweena somewhat self-introspecting field of EU studies and an interna-tional regionalism studies one which provides little insight, otherthan tautological, on the European experience’s singularity. Thehistorical trajectory of the international regional idea shows afundamental difference between Europe and the rest of world thatcould explain some otherwise unintelligible structural disparitiesbetween the EU and other regional groupings.

The question of the relevance of the European experience to the analysis ofinternational regionalism and regionalisation has emerged as a complex,both unavoidable and vexing, issue, almost simultaneously to the rapid andparallel renaissance of EU studies and of comparative regionalism in the1990s. Whereas the former has tended to isolate its object from the rest ofthe regionalist experiences around the world, the latter has been tempted tominimise, if not ignore altogether, the European legacy in order to createnew conceptual tools to tackle post–Cold War regionalism.1 This dividingtrend has left wide open the question of if and how Europe’s strikinglyunique history of regional cooperation, and the important theoretical litera-ture it has generated, is meaningful for understanding why other regional

Address correspondence to Karoline Postel-Vinay, CERI-Sciences Po, 56 rue Jacob, Paris,France. E-mail: karoline.postelvinay@sciences-po.fr

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communities have appeared on the global scene and whether this consti-tutes a specific mode of international relations. One explanation for thistrend could be methodological as the focus of the regional integration liter-ature has been essentially on regulation rather than on polity-building.Those two processes are not necessarily contradictory – the production of aform of regulation can lead to the building or reinforcement of a polity, andvice versa – but neither are they always compatible, as the power politicsinvolved in the construction of a polity can sometimes conflict with the logic ofefficiency on which regulation-making is based. If one looks at regionalisationas a historically situated polity (region)-building process, the tensions betweenthe two logics – efficacy versus status – become quite manifest.

The purpose of this article is to look at the formation of the “idea ofregion”, or “regional idea”, i.e., the ideology that provides the discursivestructure of the regional polity-building process. The argument that isunderlying this questioning is twofold. There is a historical divide, datingback to the end of the nineteenth century, between Europe’s and others’respective relation to the idea of region, which translates into different ideo-logical legacies that still inform the various experiments in regionalisationaround the world. Those differences – assessed through the contextualisa-tion of international regionalism, or “critical regionalism analysis” – highlighta geopolitical stake, or more precisely a political stake defined by spatialterms, that tends to be overlooked in the study of regional strategies on theglobal scene.

THE “REGIONAL IDEA” AND EUROPE’S SINGULARITY

The Spatial Paradox of Post–Cold War International Relations

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, most International Relations (IR) analystssensed an important spatial transformation of the international scene. Yetalthough the “global”, the “local” and the “regional” emerged as new sites ofinternational activities, and were examined as such, they have been somewhatdisconnected from the geographical notion of scale. This was paradoxical inthe context of the new globalisation as the rise of new international actorsand dynamics – transnationalism, regionalism or subregionalism – did createa topical convergence around the notion of political space. The criticalquestion of the status of the state’s territory, as a sovereignty-bounded spatialunit, did however trigger a fruitful cross-examination of both IR and politicalgeography.2 But for all the spatial upheaval going on in the internationalarena – borders being redefined, bypassed or ignored, sites of action andlevels of governance being multiplied and restructured – it has to be notedthat it was more often political geographers than political scientists or econ-omists that came up with new research proposals to address the challenge.3

In the obvious case of globalisation, by focusing on the change of actors

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and rules while disconnecting it from the change of scene, the latter havetended to leave open the very question of the globality of globalisation – orwhat is actually global about globalisation – a question that has been morestraightforwardly dealt with by the former. As Neil Smith has demonstrated,globalisation is also a geo-political construction, and therefore a historicallysituated one.4

Among the various spatially defined polities that have been reshaped bythe post–Cold War order, the international region provides arguably the mostcomplex discussion to engage with. The focus of the regionalist IR literaturehas tended to be around the region – “regionalism” and “regionalisation”5 –than about it. A number of authors have however agreed, as AndrewHurrell first argued, that “all regions are socially constructed and politicallycontested.”6 The constructivist literature on regions as security entities hasalso showed, in a specific area, that the regional does constitute a distinctlevel of analysis of international relations situated between the local and theglobal.7 Still, the extensive conceptual discussion provided by politicalgeography on the definition of the “region” in the sub-national sense of theword, does not have an equivalent in international terms. If one looks atinternational regionalism as a polity-building process and not only as a reg-ulation one, then the relevance of its particular scale needs to be furtherexamined.

Europe’s Ambivalent Regionalism

The European experience has been, as a matter of fact, an almost continu-ous source of themes and issues on which to build a conceptual under-standing of the “idea of region” at an international level. Central notionssuch as “enlargement”, “neighbourhood”, “normative power”, and the inclu-sion/exclusion dynamics that they unavoidably engender,8 have highlightedthe specificities of a polity-building process that is de facto regional. Yet,using the European construction process as a template for characterisingother regionalist processes around the world has often proved to be a hin-drance to a full understanding of those phenomena without reducing themto the status of “under-developed (i.e., not as developed as the EU)” pro-cesses of integration. One could expand this latent paradox by arguing thatEurope, because of its singular experience in regional integration, hasserved as the historical departure point for the analysis of internationalregionalism in general, while not necessarily regarding itself as a “region”on the global scene. As noted before, a strong trend in the EU studies litera-ture has been to look at Europe as a “political system”, as Simon Hixdefined it,9 or an object of a sui generis quality which needs to be examinedwith appropriate and specific conceptual tools, partly or even entirely differentfrom the ones used by regionalism analysis. It should be added that outside theacademic arena as well, the European Union, when looking for recognition as

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an international actor, usually pictures itself in a category of its own, in whichother regional institutions, such as Mercosur or ECOWAS, would not fit – forobvious reasons but with potential long-term epistemic consequences. Inother words, whereas one would hardly contest that the non-Europeangroupings’ international identity can be characterised as being “regional”,one might find the term somewhat inadequate to define Europe’s interna-tional identity.

The ground-breaking literature on international regionalism of the earlyCold War era was mainly informed by Western Europe’s historical develop-ments. In that sense there is a European epistemic pre-eminence in theinternational regionalism analysis tradition. But the actual establishment of ageneral theory of regional integration, making sense for the understandingof international relations at a global level, was in fact justified by the simul-taneous emergence of regional groupings in other parts of the world, be itthe League of Arab States in 1945 or the Association of Southeast AsianNations in 1967. There has been, from the start, a sort of division of labourbetween, on the one hand, Europe and European scholars10 who providedthe foundation – both in a causal and theoretical sense – of regional integra-tion studies, and, on the other hand, non-European regional institutionswho brought the justification for granting those studies a general, largerthan Europe, significance within the field of international relations theory. Ifthere is indeed a widening divide between EU studies and “new regionalism”analysis, as Ben Rosamond or Alex Warleigh have argued,11 the origin ofthis divide has to be looked for at the early stage of the regional integrationtheory formation, if not earlier. While Europe was inviting other parts of theworld to “think regionally”, it was actually not ready, at least not in the late1940s, to do likewise for itself.

One has to remember that David Mitrany’s foremost concern when layingthe foundations of his influential functionalist theory was to create a viablesecurity arrangement, a “working peace system” at a global level: his pur-pose could hardly be defined strictly in terms of region-building and indeedits ambition went beyond the geographical scope of a regional entity. Thecentral functionalist argument in Robert Schuman’s famous declaration –making Europe with “concrete achievements” (réalisations concrètes) – wasput forward for the sake of a grand vision which was not Europe per se butworld peace. As announced in the first words of his speech: “World peacecannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionateto the dangers which threaten it.”12 Schuman’s understanding of world poli-tics, which he shared with many of his contemporaries, was that the unity ofEurope was an indispensable step, but nevertheless a step, toward the big-ger goal of achieving a viable peace for the rest of the planet. More pre-cisely world order was confused with European order, a conflation that wasnot new at the time but was in fact several decades old. As the historian ofthe European construction Charles Zorgbibe explained: “For a long time,

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the idea of the union of Europe has been confused with that of the organi-zation of the world: Europe was equated with, if not the known world, atleast the “useful” world.”13 This perception today would not only be beyondthe bounds of political correctness but remarkably out of step with theinternational reality. Although the “Iron Curtain” ran in the middle ofEurope and thus defined a world order called “Cold War”, it was during thatperiod that the European governmental elite had to come to terms with thefact that their continent was no longer the defining centre of a global order,but might actually have become one world region among others. Thisbecame unavoidably evident after 1989. But what one could describe as thea-regional legacy of the European construction process can still be felt inmany ways.

EUROPE, AMERICA, AND “THE REST”: WHOSE REGIONS?

Mapping “the Rest”

The international region or “world region”, as it is known in the political sci-ence literature, is a notion that was produced in the United States but that isactually embedded in a longer European geopolitical tradition. In theirimportant work on “meta-geography” (i.e., “the set of spatial structuresthrough which people order their knowledge of the world”),14 Martin Lewisand Karen Wigen have shown how the world regional framework hasindeed “deep roots in European cartography”15 and how the notion of“world region” is genealogically related to those of “continent” and “civilisa-tion”. During the Second World War, the Ethnogeographic Board was cre-ated by the US government in order to produce a usable knowledge, for acountry at war on a global scale, of the world’s geography. This Boarddesigned the basic contours of a world regional framework, laying the foun-dations of the edifice of “area studies” which would be raised and developedlater on, during the Cold War.16 It should be noted that North America, asthe new centre from which the world should be examined, was not enteredin the list of “areas” to be studied, making its status as “world region” conse-quently ambiguous. The conflation of the notion of “world region” – aclearly historically situated geopolitical construct – and the epistemic cate-gory of “area” is arguably another example of the geographical assumptionsthat can be found in the realm of international relations analysis. Here, thedepth of the assumption has to be measured not only by the importance ofthe link between the conceptual production of “world regions” and Americanmilitary thinking at a certain time, but also by the continuities betweenEurope’s and the United States’ geopolitical traditions. The formal delimita-tion of world regions during the mid-1940s was not produced out of a tabularasa befitting the novelty of the American influence on the architecture of theworld order, but was informed by a long-established repertoire of European

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worldviews, including the continental division of the planet and the geo-historical set of civilisations.

The focus of Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen’s critical analysis of globalgeographical notions is, so to speak, on the sender’s end of those notions’trajectories – an approach which is explicitly acknowledged by the authors.But one needs to look at the recipient’s end as well, in order to understandhow the regional idea took shape outside of Europe and eventually sus-tained the formation of regionalist movements. The continental notions of“Asia”, “Africa” or “America”, and indeed the very notion of “continent”,were forged by European geographers and used to designate groups ofpeoples who were not immediately aware of the new spatial category towhich they were supposed to belong. “America” was conceived of as awhole and named accordingly with a neologism created in honour ofAmerigo Vespucci, one of the main players in the “discovery” of that land –a euphemism to designate the opening stage of a history of massacre of thepopulations and plunder of the resources of the continent in question. Theidea of “Asia”, derived from the Ancient Greek notion of “Oriental land”,was not known to the Chinese or the Japanese until the early nineteenthcentury. The European geographical concepts were introduced and offi-cially accepted by the former as a matter of acknowledging an unfavourablebalance of power. According to the classical Chinese geography, the MiddleKingdom and its satellites constituted the only world that needed to beknown. When the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci tried to contact the Minggovernment in the late sixteenth century he was told that the country he wasclaiming to come from did not exist as it did not appear in the Chinese officialgeography.17 With the rise of European domination in the Far East some twocenturies later, understanding the Barbarians’ worldview became an inescap-able necessity, and works by Western geographers were progressively trans-lated and introduced in China by scholars such as Wei Yuan and Xi Jiyu.

If geography is indeed an active process of “writing the earth”, andeffectively an important component of governing, as critical geographershave argued,18 this should apply to every level of politics, national as wellas international. At the end of the nineteenth century, the few Europeanpowers that were colonising or dominating in one way or another most ofthe rest of the world, were imposing through their military and economicmight an influence that could loosely be defined as cultural but that wasalso specifically geographical, in the active sense of the term. The Europe-ans’ own “writing of the earth”, and the continental and “civilisational” geo-politics that came with it, became a cognitive reality that provedunavoidable not only for the nations under direct Western domination butfor others as well, such as the Ottomans, the Persians or the Chinese.Adopting the European international grammar was, for the latter, a matter ofsurvival as was the whole process of Western modernisation.19 The “re-writingof the earth” by the American government and governmental elite half a

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century later was also imposed as the new geopolitical repertoire on mostof the world’s countries, but obviously in a very different context. The char-acterisation of the “Cold War” as the new global order and, within thatmeta-narrative, the delimitation of “areas” as new sites of international activ-ities, became pre-eminent through a process of power politics that wasmarked, precisely, by a vast movement of decolonisation.

Transforming the Regional Idea into a Vehicle for Nationalism

Whether the Western geopolitical repertoire was disseminated through thebrutal process of nineteenth-century European domination or through themore complex mode of mid-twentieth-century American “imperial invitation”(in reference to Geir Lundestad’s famous “empire by invitation” theory), it hasoften, on the recipient’s end, been re-interpreted or instrumented fordomestic purposes. The traditional Chinese system, also defined as a “trib-ute system”,20 was as such a self-sufficient and coherent system of interna-tional relations, organised around the Chinese court, and that was inessence hierarchical. The European impact on this system was threefold.First, it transformed the status of the Chinese world order by ignoring itsclaim to universality. The Chinese worldview that sustained this order wasno longer The Civilisation (wenming), but one among others; it became asort of “local cosmology”. Second, the Europeans challenged the hierarchicalnature of the Chinese system by introducing the Westphalian principleof sovereignty and equality between nations – a flexible principle, it shouldbe noted, as the European colonial practice had demonstrated. Third, theEuropeans regionalised the countries of the Chinese world system, not onlyby giving a local significance to that system, but also by effectively bringingtogether the countries in question around the shared perception of a newand vital threat. One of the manifestations of that de facto regionalisationwas that the exogenous concept of “Asia” became a frame of referencewhich could be used to address and comprehend the Western threat and,possibly, to respond to it. Such an endeavour was probably dubious fromthe point of view of those who were already under direct European colonialrule, mainly in what is now called Southeast Asia, but not from the point ofview of those who could somehow negotiate their way out of completedomination such as China, Japan and Korea.

Pan-Asianism took shape in the late nineteenth century both as a com-mon response to the Western threat – optimistic reformists would also call it“challenge” – and as a collective reflection on practical modernisation ineach of the countries concerned. Most pan-Asianist movements were rootedin the civil society of the time and were therefore of a very different naturethan that of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” concept forged bythe Japanese militaristic government more than half a century later, as anideological frame for its war strategy in the region. The earlier version of

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pan-Asianism was also more strictly rhetorical as it did not have a tangibleimpact on the architecture of the international relations of the region. It didhowever contribute to a regional identity-building by the production ofinter-Asian epistemic communities formed by both the hundreds of studentsand scholars from China and Korea who came to Japan to be trained inWestern modernisation, and their Japanese counterparts. The intellectualKorean community in Japan constituted, ironically but not surprisingly, thebasis of the nationalist movement that would later take shape in the late1910s against Japanese colonisation of the Korean peninsula. More generally,one can safely argue that the eventual objective of the actors of pan-Asianismwas really nation-(re)building, rather than region-building. As noted byVladimir Tikhonov,21 pan-Asianism’s ideological features were indeedregionalist, defending the idea of an “East Asian alliance”, as they could alsobe culturalist, promoting “Asian civilisation” and even racialist, evoking the“struggle between the Whites and Yellows”, in a not entirely unexpectedecho of Europe’s own assumptions. But this ideological apparatus shouldnot conceal the actual domestic dimension of the pan-Asianism promoters’agenda. Their priority was clearly to reform or improve (in the case of MeijiJapan) their respective national political systems that had shown signs ofweakness decades before the acceleration of European colonialism and hadbeen further disrupted by it.

Creating commonality is arguably a fundamental component of politicalactivity at any level, and the regrouping of different national visions into thelarger idea of regional solidarity could be seen, in that regard, as a banalillustration of a classic phenomenon. In this instance, however, one shouldemphasise the historical singularity of the phenomenon, as well as the fun-damental divide between Europe and other regions this singularity implies.From the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War,the use of either the continental or the civilisational reference as a platformfor the formulation of nationalist agendas became widespread. In the non-colonised world, the first regional idea that appeared as both a defensivenotion against external domination and an instrument for individual nation-building strategies, was that of Latin America, a regional idea also known asBolivarism. This occurred, one could argue, within the Western world(former Spaniards against the Spanish kingdom), but it did show the samepattern of re-appropriation of a continental concept for the establishment,and in this case the creation, of new nations (Bolivia, Argentina, Chile . . .).In the colonised world, the formation of pan-continental or pan-civilisa-tional movements for domestic purposes did not really take place before theearly twentieth century. Pan-Arabism positioned itself against the Ottomansbefore turning against the Europeans, whereas pan-Africanism was a com-mon medium that was from the start defined in opposition to the West, ifnot to the even more abstract concept of the “Whites”, calling consequentlyfor a liberation of the “Blacks”. Both trends laid the foundations of the

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nationalist movements that would bloom after the Second World War andwhich were given a climatic expression with the 1955 Bandung Conference.

Europe’s historical relation with the regional idea is substantially differ-ent. Until rather recently, the idea of Europe was somewhat confused, asargued before, with the idea of the world. At any rate, organising relationswithin the countries of Europe was understood as producing a global worldorder. What the Europeans actually managed to impose on the rest of theworld at the end of the nineteenth century – and that the Ottomans or theChinese could not do – was to establish their continent as the productioncentre of international norms and rules. By the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury, the European governmental elite started to create international organi-sations with an explicitly global scale ambition, inviting not only theEuropean powers but the few non-colonised countries of the non-Westernworld as well. As noted by Craig Murphy,22 most of those organisations hada functional purpose, responding to the issues raised by the new industrialdevelopment of which Europe was the centre. Significantly, however, theConvention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes of 1899 whichbrought together for the first time Western and non-Western governments –supposedly on an equal footing – around a political question, was a manifestexample of an exercise in world ordering based on European terms. Theturning point of 1945 was not that the idea of Europe was no longer equatedwith the idea of the world, as seen previously, but that the union of Europewas a de facto condemnation of nationalism, or at the very least a safeguardagainst the potential destructive tendencies of nationalism – demonstrated bythe devastation of the Second World War. This is a second major differencebetween Europe’s regional idea as it started to re-emerge in the post-SecondWorld War context, and others. In the context of decolonisation, and fromthe point of view of the decolonised, nation-building and the nationalismthat went with it formed the priority agenda within the regionalist discoursethat was elaborated for that very end. This is not to say that nationalismbecame absent of European dynamics after 1945 – indeed it has affected itregularly including in the very recent past – but it means that since then,nationalism has been officially defined as a negative factor for the interna-tional order, a hindrance which should be as much as possible overcome.Such a denunciation of nationalism would have been unthinkable for thepolitical leaders of the Bandung Conference era, and in some measure this isstill true today for governments in regional groupings outside of Europe.

WORLD ORDER PRODUCTION: A REGION-BASED PROCESS

Negotiating Exogenous Global Orders

The dissemination, at the end of the nineteenth century, of Europe’s visionof a world organised around continents and civilisations, happened in a

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specific international political context. The rise of European colonialismcame along with an explicit will on the part of the governments of themajor powers and their governmental elite, to think of the world globallyand systematically so. The birth of “geopolitics” at that time, a discipline thatwas probably not so new from an epistemic point of view as RobertMayhew23 has argued, but which positivist scientific ambition was, appearedto be both an expression of and the construction of a conceptual instrumentfor that will. For those who, until then, were using another repertoire, theEuropean worldview became a global geopolitical norm, imposed throughhard power politics. Adopting that norm meant, for the Chinese, to acceptthat the world was a “mappable totality”, as Xiaobing Tang put it,24 in whichthe Middle Kingdom appeared as one geographically delimited civilisationamong others. This was indeed a gigantic reorientation in space and time,and one of the consequences of the change of balance of power on theinternational scene. The challenge posed by the claim to universality of theEuropean global project was not so much, or not only, that of universalisationper se – the actual spread of global norms and practices – but the fact that itconstituted a universal order that had to be accepted at best through a moreor less balanced process of negotiation, at worst without it.

Most analyses of the global/local relation have tended to confuseglobalisation and global order, somewhat taking for granted the historicalcontext in which those analyses were situated. Likewise, the internationalregionalism analysis of the 1990s, the “new regionalism”, has made a similarconfusion: more precisely, it has been looking at the formation of regionalgroupings under the conditions of “globalisation” rather than that of a spe-cific global order. Yet, the history of the political use of the regional idea inthe non-Western world, in the late nineteenth century, in the inter-Warsyears, and again in the Cold War period, shows that regionalism can becharacterised as a response to a world order which is indeed challengingbecause of its global ambition, but which is not necessarily the order of“globalisation”. The world order that took shape with the acceleration ofEuropean colonialism in the 1880s and lasted until 1914 has been definedby some economists as a first episode of globalisation.25 The Cold War canhardly be defined as a “globalisation”-based world order, by this token. Thepan-Asianism and pan-Africanism of the Bandung Conference era werepresented, through the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity, as an alternative to theCold War order, and later developed into the North/South geopoliticalnarrative as opposed to the East/West one. As argued before, the regionalistdiscourses produced by the pre- and post-decolonisation dynamics were infine used for the establishment of nationalist regimes. The contradictionbetween, on one hand, the pursuit of individual agendas – even verypersonal ones, in the case of some post-colonial dictatorships – and, on theother, the ambition of regional solidarity, can be considered as one factor,among many others, in the failure of the non-European groupings in the

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1950s and 1960s to deliver effective cooperation among its members. It alsoexplains, a fortiori, why the North/South vision defended by those regional-ist movements as a heuristic framework for an alternative world order to theCold War one, had only a circumscribed impact on actual world politics andhardly survived the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As history showed, the regional idea was imported and re-appropriatednot only as a response to a new dominating world order, but to a worldorder that was essentially foreign. Global world orders, be it the “globalisa-tion” one or the “Cold War” one or the still potential “War on Terror” one,have a geographically situated point of origin, if not a production centre. Sofar, world orders have been global because they have been imposed on aglobal scale, not because they have been engendered globally, by a trulyglobal community. As John Agnew remarked, “globalization has a homeaddress.”26 Globalisation as a technological innovation and market driven,but also state induced (national barriers do not open up on their own) phe-nomenon, can arguably not be locally situated. But when seen as an insti-tuted world order, producing international organisations and internationaldiscourses, norms, rules and practices, then its location, or “home address”,becomes very relevant indeed. From the late nineteenth century until theend of the twentieth century regional ideas have been formulated inresponse to an imposed global world order, taking also into account theforeignness of that order. Consequently there were not only power politics,but identity politics as well, involved in the appropriation process of theregional idea. This often led to an opposition between the new imaginedregion and the monolithically perceived entity of the “West”: It was the casewith the early continent-based notion of pan-Asianism, then later with thecivilisation-based one of pan-Arabism and rather recently with the “area”-based vision of East Asia as it was defended in the 1990s by the Malaysiangovernment. One should not rush, however, to the conclusion that all non-Western regionalist movements are essentially anti-Western. Some regionshave been conceived on the very assumption of an alliance of the “West”and the “non-West”, such as the Asia-Pacific Community which is historicallyand fundamentally a Japan–US alliance. The problematic pre-eminence formore than a century of Europe, followed by the United States, in the con-ception of global world orders is nevertheless an implicit issue that stillshapes international regionalism.

Provincialising Europe from an IR Perspective

The idea of Europe was originally a civilisation-based regional idea. But itwas embedded in a repertoire engendered by the European geopoliticaltradition which put Europe not only at the centre of the world but in a high-height position as well; the European civilisation was, in hierarchical terms,both in the middle and above the world. This gave the European geopolitical

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repertoire an illusory “bird’s eye view” quality which, in actual fact, was aform of Euro-centrism. In the conclusion of their previously mentionedwork on continental geography, Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen make up alist of ten principles defining critical meta-geography among which figures“typological honesty”.27 One can deduce from their overall thesis that anygeo-centrically informed typology, be it Euro-centrism or Sino-centrism, willfit in the category of “dishonest” typologies. From the point of view of IRanalysis, the question of whether the typology that underlies a given geopo-litical repertoire is “honest” or “dishonest” is somewhat irrelevant as it doesnot really help to explain the why and how of world politics. Deconstruct-ing Euro-centrism is useful insofar as it points to the political mechanismthat produced it and from there leads to a better understanding of the globalcontext in which this production occurred. Euro-centrism, and for that matterSino-centrism, thrived in their respective ways and times, reflecting the inter-national balance of power of a certain moment and place. Sino-centrisminformed and reflected a specific international relations system that func-tioned for several centuries in one part of Asia, until it was vitally chal-lenged by the global rise of Europe and all that came with it, including thepre-eminence of the European geopolitical repertoire. Euro-centrism waslikewise at the heart of an international relations system which, from theend of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century,affected an increasingly larger part of the planet. After 1945, the Europeancivilisation/continent-based repertoire gave way to the American “worldregion”–based one, where the United States was given the “bird’s eye view”position, creating an “area studies” tradition which would necessarily notinclude the US as an object of study. Significant traces of Euro-centrism canarguably be found in the American geopolitical repertoire, for obvious reasonsof cultural and political kinship between the two so-called “old” and “new”worlds. This does not contradict the reality of the change of balance ofpower that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, and thathas been illustrated by a transformation of the globally dominant geopoliti-cal repertoire. This transformation implied a modification of the status of the“idea of Europe”, which from being a “world order” became de facto a“world region”.

After 1989, Europe or rather its governmental elite could not but facethe reality of this de facto new provincialism. Europe was no longer a self-evident entity defining the shape of the global world order (it had actuallyprogressively ceased to be so with the evolution of the Cold War order), buthad to define itself within that order. This awareness and the politicaladjustment it induced is somewhat similar, in a much milder manner, to theexperience the Chinese governmental elite had to go through at the end ofthe nineteenth century. One had to admit, at long last, that Europe was nolonger The Civilisation, a European wenming, but rather a sort of local cos-mology. Therefore, the borders of Europe, as the defining elements of this

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new local scale, would become problematic. Until then the borders ofEurope were unproblematic in the sense that they would necessarily reflectthe central Cold War order: they now had to shift from a global to a localsignificance. The evolution of Turkey’s position vis-à-vis the EuropeanUnion is revealing of that change. Turkey had been regarded as a “natural”partner of Europe as long as it “naturally” fit into the Cold War order’s defi-nition of the borders of Europe. With the end of the bipolar order it is pre-cisely this “natural” dimension of the Turkey–Europe relation that has beenreappraised by members of the European governmental elite such as ValéryGiscard d’Estaing, the main editor of the EU’s constitutional project, whoargued that Turkey could not possibly be part of the Union as both its capitalcity and 95% of its population were “geographically” in Asia.28 As uncon-vincing as they are, those arguments based on an unlikely “natural” geogra-phy, or a likewise “natural” history, do highlight the political necessitybehind the debate on Europe’s identity, an issue that had hardly beenaddressed during most of the Cold War period either in the public sphere orthe academic arena.29 This political necessity stems from the change ofsignificance, and as a matter of fact the change of scale, of the Europeanidea on the international scene. As argued previously, the European con-struction was first conceived of as the recipient of a global world order, andconsequently as an “a-regional” unit (i.e., above the limited meaning ofother regional constructions). The shifting of the production centre of theglobal world order that became inescapably evident with the fall of the Ber-lin Wall, forced Europe to define itself as an entity that was similar to aworld region, or at least that could be characterised as a sub-global entity.

CONCLUSION

This article has argued that looking at the contextualised formation of the “ideaof region”, or “regional idea” could not only lead to a better understanding ofinternational regionalism as a major phenomenon occurring on the globalscene, but could also provide a way to tackle the issue of the divide betweenthe questioning of the European studies field and that of an internationalregionalism analysis which somehow gets round Europe’s manifest singularity.

The main hypotheses that have been discussed are the need to definethe (international) region in relation to a global order, and the fact thatbecause, so far, global orders have not been engendered globally but by alocalisable, region-based, production centre, they are necessarily exogenousto those who did not participate in their genesis. This second point highlightsa common confusion which is made by the recent literature on internationalregionalism between globalisation and global order, tending to conceal thefact that what we call “globalisation” is also a specific historically situatedworld order. In a longer term and historical perspective, the contextualisation

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of international regionalism provides a framework for the analysis of the for-mation of the regional idea. What appears here is the fundamental differencebetween Europe’s and other groups of countries’ historical relation to the“idea of region”. Outside of Europe, the genesis of the (international) regionalidea is linked to processes of negotiating exogenous world orders which havebeen imposed through brutal or more benign forms of power politics. Themix of reactive regionalist and nationalist legacies that was present in theconstitution of the first non-European regional groupings of the decolonisa-tion era can still be found in the post-Cold War ones. The regional idea inEurope was originally based on the notion of (superior) civilisation, and thusconfused with the idea of world order. The first formal construction of aEuropean regional grouping, in the post–Second World War context, wasfounded on an anti-nationalist principle, which was situated at the opposite ofthe political vehicle of the regionalism produced by the decolonisation dynam-ics. The notion that the European construction was providing the frame for anew world order – a world peace system – was however deeply embedded inthe idea of Europe that prevailed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Since thefall of the Berlin Wall, the idea of Europe has gone through a de facto changeof scale which, in turn, reflects a change of meaning of the European experi-ence for international relations. It is doubtful, and maybe still too early to say,whether the present idea of Europe refers to an alternative mode of interna-tional relations (different from the US-led world order), or merely to an entitythat is involved in the process of negotiating an exogenous world order.

NOTES

1. S. Breslin, R. Higgott and B. Rosamond, ‘Regions in Comparative Perspective’, in S. Breslin, C.W. Hughes, N. Phillips, B. Rosamond (eds.), New Regionalisms in the Global Political Economy (London:Routledge 2002) pp. 9–19.

2. See, in particular, J. Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of InternationalRelations Theory’, Review of International Political Economy 1/1 (1994) pp. 53–80; B. Badie, La Fin desTerritoires (Paris: Fayard 1995); M. Albert and L. Brock, ‘De-bordering the World of States: New Spaces inInternational Relations’, New Political Science 35 (Spring 1996) pp. 69–106; A. Murphy, ‘The Sovereign StateSystem as Political-Territorial Ideal: Historical and Contemporary Considerations’, in T. Biersteker and C.Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).

3. As argued previously in K. Postel-Vinay, ‘Géographie et pouvoir’, Critique Internationale 10/1(Jan. 2001) pp. 51–58.

4. N. Smith, American Empire. Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley:University of California Press 2003). For a more contemporary discussion see J. Agnew, Hegemony: TheNew Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2005).

5. For an update on definitions see M. Schulz, F. Söderbaum and J. Ojendal (eds.), Regionaliza-tion in a Globalizing World (London: Zed Books 2001).

6. A. Hurrell, ‘Regionalism in Theoretical Perspective’, in L. Fawcett and A. Hurrell (eds.), Region-alism in World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995) p. 38. See also L. Fawcett, ‘ExploringRegional Domains: A Comparative History of Regionalism’, International Affairs 80/3 (2004).

7. E. Adler, ‘Cognitive Regions in International Relations’, Millennium 26/2 (1997); B. Buzan andO. Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press 2003).

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8. See for example J. Zielonka (ed.), Europe Unbound. Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundariesof the European Union (London: Routledge 2002); U. Meinhof (ed.), Living (with) Borders. Identity Dis-courses on East-West Borders in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002); M. Berezin and M. Schain (eds.),Europe without Borders. Remapping Territory, Citizenship and Identity in a Transnational Age (Balti-more: John Hopkins University Press 2003); M. Albert, T. Diez and S. Stetter, ‘The European Union andBorder Conflicts. The Transformative Power of Integration’, International Organization 60/3 (2006);T. Diez ‘Europe’s Others and the Return of Geopolitics’, Review of International Affairs 17/2 (July 2004);T. Diez, ‘Constructing the Self and Changing Others. Reconsidering ‘Normative Power Europe’’, Millen-nium. Journal of International Studies 33/3 (June 2005).

9. S. Hix, The Political System of the European Union (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1999).10. Although the “old regionalism” literature was mostly produced in the US, a number of scholars

had direct connections with Europe such as David Mitrany and Ernst Haas who were born in Europeand whose experience of the continent’s Second World War tragedy, respectively as an adult and as achild, had a direct impact on their work.

11. B. Rosamond, ‘Conceptualising the EU Model of Governance in World Politics’, European For-eign Affairs Review 10/4 (2005) pp. 463–478; A. Warleigh, ‘In Defence of Intra-Disciplinarity: “EuropeanStudies”, the “New Regionalism” and the Issue of Democratization’, Cambridge Review of InternationalAffairs 17/2 (July 2004) pp. 301–318.

12. R. Schuman, 9 May 1950, Quai d’Orsay, Salons de l’Horloge, Paris.13. C. Zorgbibe, L’Histoire de la Construction Européenne (Paris: PUF 1993) p. 1.14. M. W. Lewis and K. E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley:

University of California Press 1997) p. ix.15. Ibid., p. 158.16. See in particular M. Farish, ‘Archiving Areas: The Ethnogeographic Board and the Second

World War’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95/3 (Sept. 2005) pp. 663–679.17. See L. Gallagher, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci, 1583–1610

(New York: Random House 1953). For a longer discussion on the introduction of the European geopolit-ical tradition in the non-Western world, see K. Postel-Vinay, L’Occident et sa Bonne Parole. Nos Représen-tations du Monde de l’Europe Coloniale à l’Amérique Hégémonique (Paris: Flammarion 2005) pp. 27–72.

18. G. O’Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996) p. 2. Seealso S. Dalby and G. O’Tuathail (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge 1998); J. Black, Mapsand Politics (London: Reaktion Book 1997).

19. See Postel-Vinay, L’Occident (note 17), and on “civilisational geopolitics” see in particularP. Bilgin, ‘A Return to “Civilisational Geopolitics” in the Mediterranean? Changing Geopolitical Images ofthe European Union and Turkey in the Post-Cold War Era’, Geopolitics 9/2 (Summer 2004) pp. 269–291.

20. J. Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order. Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge:Harvard University Press 1968); D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization. Geography and Historyat Empire’s End (Durham: Duke University Press 1996); T. Hamashita, Chôkô Shisutêmu to Kindai Ajia(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten 1997).

21. V. Tikhonov, ‘Korea’s First Encounters with Pan-Asianism Ideology in the Early 1880s’, TheReview of Korean Studies 5/2 (Dec. 2002) pp. 195–232.

22. C. N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance Since1850 (Cambridge: Polity Press 1994).

23. R. Mayhew, ‘Halford Mackinder’s “New” Political Geography and the Geographical Tradition’,Political Geography 19/6 (Aug. 2000) pp. 771–791. See also M. Heffernan, ‘Fin de Siècle, Fin du Monde?On the Origins of European Geopolitics 1890–1920’, in K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds.), GeopoliticalTraditions (London: Routledge 2000) pp. 27–52.

24. X. Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity. The Historical Thinking ofLiang Qichao (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996) p. 2.

25. R. Baldwin, P. Martin, ‘Two Waves of Globalization’, in H. Siebert (ed.), Globalization and Labor(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1999) pp. 3–58; S. Berger, Notre Première Mondialisation (Paris: Seuil 2003).

26. J. Agnew, Hegemony (note 12) p. viii.27. M. Lewis and K. Wigen, The Myth of Continents (note 24) p. 195.28. V. Giscard d’Estaing, Le Monde, 8 Nov. 2002.29. See T. Diez (note 22) and also S. Garcia, European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy

(London: Pinter 1993); R. Kastoryano (ed.), Quelle Identité pour l’Europe? (Paris: Presses de SciencesPo 1998).

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