The Historicity of the International Region: Revisiting the “Europe and the Rest” Divide
Abstract
Although most of the literature on international regionalism refers
implicitly to a polity defined by the “idea of the region” it seldom
looks at the genesis of this idea in the context of world politics. This
article argues that looking at the historical formation of the
regional idea is important not only to have a better understanding
of international regionalism as such, but to address the issue of
Europe’s specificity within this trend. There has been an on-going
debate about the heuristic status of the European Union (EU)
within regional studies, underscoring a widening divide between
a somewhat self-introspecting field of EU studies and an international
regionalism studies one which provides little insight, other
than tautological, on the European experience’s singularity. The
historical trajectory of the international regional idea shows a
fundamental difference between Europe and the rest of world that
could explain some otherwise unintelligible structural disparities
between the EU and other regional groupings.