Abstract
As public and academic references to a globalizing economy have become increasingly common over the last two decade, explicit efforts to theorize about the relationship between globalization and regionalism such as the EU, NAFTA, and APEC have been made within international relations. In such efforts, regionalism has been described as a set of state-led or states-led strategic projects designed to improve international competitiveness of domestic industries and to ensure advantageous trade conditions for them. A glowing number of scholars argue that the most striking characteristic common to all the regionalist projects is their commitment to “open regionalism” which is in conformity with a principal idea of globalization, that is, neo-liberalism, and thus point out regionalism as an essential part of a multi-layered system of global governance.
However, why have some regionalist projects been carried out, even under a condition of a globalizing economy, in accordance with political dynamism which has constrained the neo-liberal regionalism in the history of the EU? In this article, two mechanisms which have generated the dynamism are suggested: two-level games and Europeanization.
The former mechanism works through member states' domestic political process. In this mechanism, the structure of domestic preferences and the nature of domestic political institutions imposes constrains on the government's regionalist strategies and affects the government's international bargaining position.
The latter mechanism has been developed with the process of Europeanization, which is defined as the emergence and the development at the European level of distinct structures of governance. In this mechanism, some domestic socio-economic actors are stimulated to participate directly in the European political process and to strength interaction with European Organizations such as the European Commission and the European Parliament.
These two mechanisms has been restricted an unconditional pursuit of the neo-liberal regionalist projects in the EU politics.
