CHAPTER 3: WORLD OF REGIONS

OVERVIEW: End of the Cold War: global resurgence of regional initiatives.

1. In Europe, European Union (EU) was enlarged to include ten new, mostly
former socialist, member states in 2004.
2. In Asia, the member states of the Association of South-East Asian Nations
(ASEAN) began to advance widening the membership beyond regime
differences.
3. Intergovernmental forums such as ASEAN+3 (China, Japan, and Korea), and
more recently the East Asia Summit, have been successively launched.
4. The inclusion of India, Australia, and New Zealand has even blurred the
geographical identity of Asia.
5. Other examples include APEC (Asia–Pacific Economic Co-operation),
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and MERCOSUR
(Mercado Común del Sur), created in 1989 and 1990

Lesson 1 Global Divides: The North and South

Pre- discussion

 Globalization reduces poverty while at the same time increasing inequality

and the socio-economic gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots.
 Third-World poverty has become one of the most pressing moral, political,
and economic issuesin the political agenda of the globalization era is a
legitimate one.
 Speaking at the plenary session of the 2000 Annual Meetings of the IMF and
the World Bank held on September 26-28 in Prague, the governors
representing the IMF's 182 members acknowledged that "although
globalization has brought opportunities for growth and development to
both rich and poor countries, not everyone has been able to take
advantage of the new opportunities.
 Former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn (2000:308),
characterized "globalization as an opportunity, and poverty as our
challenge," though recognizing that globalization can relate to risks as well as
to opportunities.
 The Global South
 The phrase “Global South” refers broadly to the regions of Latin America,
Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
 Regions- Europe and North America, mostly (though not all) low-income and
often politically or culturally marginalized.
 The idea of a powerful Global North and a resistant Global South was
promoted by the Zapatista revolt the global south by nour dados and
raewyn Connell.
 The use of the phrase “Global South” marks a shift from a focus on
development or cultural difference toward an emphasis on geopolitical
power relations.
 African Renaissance,” and the World Social Forum launched in Brazil.
 Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the “coloniality of power”
emphasizes the legacy of colonialism in contemporary culture and politics
 The decolonization process of the 1960s brought the newly independent
countries of Africa into the halls of the United Nations, swelled the
membership of the General Assembly, and called attention to the social,
economic, and political problems of the countries that would be grouped
together as the Third World.

Afred Sauvy in 1952 who saw the Third World (Tiers Monde) as a modern parallel
to the Third Estate (Tiers Etat) of the French Revolution, the class of commoners
after the aristocracy and the clergy.

1. With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe,
with the practical disappearance, in other words, of the Second World, the poor,
underdeveloped countries of the Third World are more often referred to today as
"South" or "developing countries," surely an improvement over the former
designation, "backward countries." "Third World" continues to be a useful and
powerful analytic concept, however, because its problems are not only and
primarily economic, much less geographic.
2. Dramatic changes, foremost of which is the rise to economic power of China,
India, and the dragons of Asia. Still the majority of poor people continue to
reside in the Third World \ Two Thirds World.

 West has been an important part of modern Third World/Global South history,
not only during but colonialism even after independence.
 Third World/Global South has gone though and the policies they have been
subjected to in their post-colonial struggle for political independence and
economic development: the development project, the globalization project,
and the imperial project.
 THE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

 1960 no fewer than seventeen former colonies in Africa rushed to

freedom, achieved political independence, and became members of the
United Nations.
 On December 19, 1961: proposal by the President of the United States,
the U.N. General Assembly, in Resolution No. 1710, designated the decade
as the United Nations Development Decade, during which it urged its
membernations to intensify efforts, to mobilize and sustain support for
measures that would accelerate progress towards self-sustaining growth of
underdeveloped countries.
 In Resolution 1711, the General Assembly expressed hope that the flow of
capital and technical assistance be substantially increased so that it might
reach as soon as possible approximately one percent of the combined national
incomes of the economically advanced countries.
 In Resolution 1715, the General Assembly called upon member-states to
review their contributions to the support of the work of the Expanded Program
of Technical Assistance and the Special Fund, later to be transformed into the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP), so that the combined
budgets of these two organs in the year 1962 might reach the target of $150
million
SUMMARY
 The idea of the South as a region of distinctive intellectual production is
articulated in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Conocer desde el Sur and Raewyn
Connell’s Southern Theory, offering new agendas for sociology.
 North-South terminology, then, like core-periphery, arose from an allegorical
application of categories to name patterns of wealth, privilege, and
development across broad regions.
 The term Global South functions as more than a metaphor for
underdevelopment. It references an entire history of colonialism, neo-
imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which
large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources
are maintained.
 Nour Dados and Raewyn Connell are in the faculty of education and social
work at the Universityof Sydney, Australia. Dados studies space and power in
post-colonial Beirut, and Connell is the author of Confronting Equality.
DIFFERENTATIATE

Lesson 2 ASIAN REGIONALISM

 Pre-discussion
 One of the most striking features of the broadly conceived ‘Asia ‐Pacific
region’ is that the institutions that have emerged there have been much less
powerful and effective than their counterparts in Western Europe.
 Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia‐Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC )
forum, the ASEAN Plus Three grouping and the East Asia Summit (EAS)
suggests that institutional effectiveness is especially difficult to realize in the
Asian neighbourhood at the best of times.
 It is likely to prove even more difficult during the administration of newly
elected President Donald Trump who has expressed little enthusiasm for or
even knowledge about institutionalized regional forums.
 The one exception to this pattern has been Trump's consistent promise—or
threat as far as Australia is concerned to abandon American participation in the
Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP).
 Significantly, China has been quick to position itself as a force for regional
stability and continuity in such circumstances (Lyons et al. 2016).

LESSON OUTLINE
 Trump era promises to present unwelcome challenges to the conventional
policy‐making and scholarly wisdom about the role of American power in
Australia's region—no matter how it is defined.

Regionalization is described as the practice or trend of separating regions into little portions
and dividing huge areas into regions or districts. Regionalism is defined as the political goal of
creating a legally binding agreement between states on a geographically limited scale.

Regionalization
 It has become commonplace to make a distinction between forms of
regionalism to refer to the collaborative political efforts of states and
regionalization to refer to the actions of economic actors such as multinational
corporations (Dent 2013).
 This essay is primarily concerned with regionalism and the self‐conscious
attempt to create politically defined and organized regions.
 It is, however, important to recognize two further possible characteristics of
regional processes. First, they are not simply driven by the ‘functional’ needs
of business—or politics, for that matter—as many of the early theorists of
European integration believed (Rosamond 2005).

 The contrast between the EU's experience and that of Southeast Asia,
which in the ASEAN has one of the most enduring intergovernmental
 organizations in the so‐called ‘developing world’, is instructive and
revealing.
 Both the EU and ASEAN were powerfully shaped by external geopolitical
forces during their formative years, but internal differences and ideas about the
purpose of regional integration led to very different outcomes.

GLOBALIZATION

 Globalization means the speed up of movements and exchanges (of

human beings, goods, and services, capital, technologies or cultural
practices) all over the planet. One of the effects of globalization is that it
promotes and increases interactions between different regions and
populations around the globe.
 According to World Health Organization (WHO)- globalization can be
defined as ” the increased interconnectedness and interdependence of
peoples and countries. two inter-related elements: the opening of
international borders to increasingly fast flows of goods, services, finance,
people and ideas; and the changes in institutions and policies at national and
international levels that facilitate or promote such flows.
 “According to the Committee for Development Policy (a subsidiary body of
the United Nations), from an economic point of view, globalization can be
defined as the increasing interdependence of world economies as a
result of the growing scale of cross-border trade of commodities and
services, the flow of international capital and the wide and rapid spread
of technologies. It reflects the continuing expansion and mutual
integration of market frontiers and the rapid growing significance of
information in all types of productive activities and marketization are the two
major driving forces for economic globalization.”

 In geography, globalization is defined as the set of processes (economic,

social, cultural, technological, institutional) that contribute to the
relationship between societies and individuals around the world. It is a
progressive process by which exchanges and flows between different parts of
the world are intensified.

The EAS: The Continuing Influence of the ‘Offshore Balancer

  When the EAS was initially promoted by a Malaysian government that had
famously had problematic relations with the United States over a number of
years, the United States was conspicuously absent from the list of potential
members.

 The United States rather belatedly turned its attention to the most
economically dynamic and strategically significant region in the world (Le
Mière 2013).

 The shorthand for this change of strategic focus was the pivot

 The preferred nomenclature became ‘rebalance’, a term slightly less

encumbered by the sort of discursive baggage that gave geopolitics such a
bad name during the twentieth century.

 But however, the United States' priorities during the administration of Barak
Obama were described; one expression of this impulse was the desire to
develop new connections with the East Asian region. Importantly, it is a
position that has been directly repudiated by close advisors to the Trump
administration (Gray and Navarro 2016).

 The United States was also keen to demonstrate its willingness to fulfil its
role as what has been described as an ‘offshore balancer’ (Layne 1997;
Mearsheimer & Walt 2016).

 Yet as the recent anti‐American declarations of the Philippines'

unpredictable President Rodrigo Duterte demonstrate, this is a complex
proposition (Moss 2016).

The Rise of the Indo‐Pacific

There are a number of important issues that emerge from the preceding discussion
that are worth re‐emphasizing before going further.

 First, as in the past (Beeson 2006), there are a number of competing visions
of ‘the region’. As a consequence, its boundaries remain uncertain,
contested, and contingent.
 Second, such differences are reflected in the memberships and goals of
the various organizations and initiatives that have recently emerged.
 There is a noteworthy difference between initiatives that are driven by
economic goals—APEC, the TPP; and the Regional Comprehensive
Economic Partnership (RCEP)—and those that have a more strategic focus,
such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the Indo‐Pacific.
 Third, even where the membership and boundaries of organizations are
more settled, there is equally long‐standing scepticism about their
effectiveness and actual influence over their members.
 Indeed, ASEAN's own ‘widening’ process has further compromised its
capacity for the sort of ‘deepening’ that famously characterized the EU in its
heyday.

Reasons for being sceptical about the Indo‐Pacific's prospects.

 First, the enormous geographical expanse that the Indo‐Pacific represents

makes it unworkable as the basis for an effective strategic order (Yoshihara
2013).
 Second, the Indo‐Pacific draws together South Asia and the Indian Ocean
with East Asia and the Western Pacific Ocean, which remain two distinct and
therefore separate strategic systems; it has been persuasively argued
(Phillips 2016, White 2016).
 Third, with most of its focus on the maritime aspect of Asia, the Indo ‐Pacific
does not pay enough attention to continental Asia especially the activities of
China in that area (Bisley 2016).
 Finally, there is no distinct institutional basis for the Indo‐Pacific thus far,
although some of the most energetic and enthusiastic supporters of the idea
in academia and some influential think tanks argue that some extant
institutions such as the EAS and the ARF reflect ‘an essentially Indo ‐Pacific
footprint’ (Medcalf 2012: 5).

 The ARF is notionally supposed to be dedicated to security issues but has

had remarkably little impact in addressing them; it has been largely
ineffective, primarily because it follows the ASEAN Way and studiously avoids
dealing with issues that might discomfort its members (Emmers & Tan 2011).
 Indo‐Pacific has some potentially influential advocates.
 Australia has played a surprisingly prominent role in attempting to
discursively create regional identities and encourage the development of
regional institutions.
 In addition to helping construct the idea of the ‘Asia‐Pacific’ region and
establishing APEC (Ravenhill 2001), the Australian governments played a
role in the creation of the ARF, which, despite the shortcomings noted
earlier, potentially remains the region's most important security institution.
 For Australian officials in particular, Australia's centrality in the Indo‐Pacific
gives a welcome prominence to its generally neglected west coast and
reinforces its status as an Indian Ocean state.

Characteristics of regionalism: economics, security and politics.

Characteristics of globalisation include free trade, liberalization, increase in
employment, increased connectivity between nations, interdependence,
cultural exchange, urbanization, improved standard of living, reduced
production cost, and outsourcing.