Beyond regional integration?: social constructivism, regional cohesiveness and the regionalism puzzle

In this paper I deconstruct the foundations of regional integration and propose a social constructivist reconstruction of the ontological field of regionalism. More specifically, I first show that regions are notions not only of space but also of time and culture. Then, I reconstruct its related conceptual field (regionalism, regionalization, regional identity etc.), arguing that regional integration is an incomplete category of regionalism. Within this framework and as an alternative to regional integration, I build the concept of regional cohesiveness defined as the degree to which a group of actors inhabiting a contiguous space act and represent themselves as a group. This analytical model builds a multidimensional space for comprehensively mapping and exploring all forms of contemporary regionalism, from both institutional and normative/representational perspectives.Social Constructivist PremisesSocial constructivism is a relatively recent paradigm in international relations (IR) theory. It emerged in the discipline in the late 1980s mostly through the hybridization of the IR research field with various debates and topics from other disciplines, particularly under the influence of critical theories. Although there is no widely shared canon with respect to its intellectual lineage, much of the constructivist research is heavily influenced by modernist and postmodernist thinking, among which frequent references are to the work of Michel Foucault on the relations between power and knowledge and that of Jacques Derrida on text1.Unlike the field of IR theory, the rest of the political science spectrum still largely ignores this new theoretical perspective. However, especially in the last decade, constructivism has become one of the major approaches for the study of political phenomena that take place within the sphere of international relations. This is easily visible if one briefly reviews the editorial space and importance that constructivist research has been granted since its emergence in mainstream IR journals such as International Organization, International Security and the European Journal of International Relations, in prestigious IR collections of publications, such as the Cambridge Studies in International Relations, or in best-selling IR textbooks. Even if sometimes critical to it, most of the recent surveys of the discipline also do not fail to treat this new perspective on international relations1.As most of those writing on the topic noticed, despite heavy influences and borrowings from critical social theory, constructivism addresses most of the classic themes of international relations thinking, such as anarchy, power and interest formation2. From these traditional research directions, the puzzle of change is particularly significant to distance itself from the mainstream perspectives in the discipline, though it provides alternative accounts for many of the other topics on the IR agenda as well3. On some issues, the differences between constructivism and the more mainstream theories are not so evident as they agree on several points. In this sense, (neo)liberal research, such as the work of Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane on transnational relations4, may be regarded as a forerunner of constructivism5. In fact, as Ted Hopf already noticed6, the debate on how constructivism agrees with (neo)realism and (neo)liberalism has become probably one of the most heated topics in the field of IR meta-theory. However, in this article the purpose of reviewing the features of constructivism is not to discuss its epistemological foundations but to present the premises on which I further reconstruct the vocabulary of regionalism.The main tenet of social constructivism is that international actors, like humans, develop in a socially constructed world, hence the label. The notion of social constructivism was neither the invention of international relations theory nor it developed exclusively within this framework. …