Unpacking the politics of regionalism: What to expect from a socio-political economy of regionalism?

From a regionalism without politics . . . To a socio-political economy of regionalism

Comparative Regionalism is an eclectic and rich academic field which has dedicated much analysis to the institutional patterns, emergence and functions of regional organisations. Indeed, regionalism and its institutional developments have most often been studied as the functional and rational response of states to a particular set of interacting exogeneous and endogenous factors, including globalisation. ⁵ However, this particular focus explains why the field of Comparative Regionalism has difficulties explaining precisely what critical IPE and IPS understand best when they are not artificially separated: the social conditions, the politics and practice, and the political economy of governance.

Studying the political economy of regionalism has been an important endeavour in Comparative Regionalism even though this work presents some shortcomings that a dialogue between IPS and IPE can contribute to overcome. IPE approaches of regionalism such as the World Order Approach that emerged in the 1990s overly focus on how economic regionalism interacts with globalisation and its hegemonic manifestations. ⁶ Despite important insights regarding the negative effects of regionalism in terms of unequal development within and among regions, such structural approaches tend to conceal the complex working of regionalism, the changing constellations of actors’ interests and strategies, the role of rules norms and identities, and the struggles of region-builders to define the meaning of the regional project. In a similar way, political economy studies on African regions depict open regionalism – associated with trade liberalisation and deregulation – as resulting from coalitions between an African elite that economically benefits from these processes through its neo-patrimonial networks and international donors that support and benefit from such neoliberal regional projects. ⁷ While shedding light on key features of regionalism, those studies tend to provide a rather deterministic account based on economic interests, neglecting its many social aspects. The interest of a new generation of critical IPE scholars ⁸ in the social conditions of economic governance has not yet clearly emerged in Comparative Regionalism. ⁹

In contrast to IPE, IPS has not much engaged with regionalism. ¹⁰ This is almost surprising as IPS provides the tools to unpack the constant process of negotiation, resistance, (re)construction of networks of knowledge, power, and governance between actors in various international phenomena; ¹¹ and regionalism can be understood as an (always contested) attempt to relocate political rule and authority from the national to the regional level. ¹² There is an important lesson to be learnt here from scholarship in the Political Sociology of European integration (PSEI). With a distinct focus on actors, their practices and social representations, PSEI scholars study the EU as a political project resulting from individual and collective practices, resulting in particular socio-professional trajectories, and entailing the mobilisation of various resources and the development of strategies likely to influence the process of integration. ¹³ At the core of such analyses are power asymmetries and struggles, as well as processes of socialisation and learning that shape the emergence of regional elites and bureaucracies. ¹⁴ Only recently, emerged an explicit call for a Political Sociology Approach of Regionalism¹⁵ that seeks to open the ‘black box’ of regional organisation and understand how regionalism concretely works. ¹⁶

Unpacking the politics of regionalism

A socio-political economy of regionalism would thus aim to bring these sociological insights into the study of regionalism, while acknowledging the importance of the economy in all aspects of regionalism. In this section, I draw on examples from my ongoing and others’ research on security regionalism in Africa to illustrate what analytical insights can be gained from engaging with regionalism through an IPS-IPE dialogue. I outline in particular three insights: the need to pay attention to the politics of regionalism; the everyday practices that perform regionalism; and the links between knowledge production and regional governance practices.

First, more attention should be given to the politics of regionalism understood as the struggles over the definition of the regional space, its identity, meaning, function, and resources. For example, a socio-political economy analysis of the external funding of regional organisations could shed light on this politics, besides showing the deadlock of separating the economy from political and security aspects. ¹⁷ In Africa in particular, dependency on the EU’s funding has important effects on the articulation between the security and development objectives of regionalism. Indeed, at the EU level, reconfigurations triggered by the Lisbon Treaty reform have led to struggles between officials situated in the European External Action Service (EEAS) and in the Commission, respectively, promoting a representation of the EU as a security actor, and as a development actor. ¹⁸ The growing leadership of the EEAS over the EU’s African policy, driven by the ambition of its officials to turn the EU into a real foreign policy actor, has led to an increased securitisation of the EU’s development aid. The EU being the main funder of African regional organisations, this change has already started to have a significant impact on the priorities of regionalism on the African continent. Many African political leaders have sought to address the EU’s and other donors’ security concerns as a way to mobilise additional financial resource, ¹⁹ sometimes at the detriment of other objectives. Studying the politics of regionalism thus entails paying attention to interactions between (internal and external) region-builders, and focusing on the ways in which both material incentives and social representations shape their region-building strategies.

Struggles for legitimacy and political authority are also at the core of the politics of regionalism. Looking at the practice of political dialogue between the EU and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), I have argued elsewhere that while the EU has asymmetrically defined the conditions of this dialogue (democratic principles, good governance, and human rights which are tied to development aid), West African actors have deployed strategies of instrumentalisation and resistance. Senior ECOWAS officials have been using the pressure that the EU exercises through this dialogue on ECOWAS member states to assert ECOWAS as the legitimate security actor with the right to intervene in member states; thereby protecting a still fragile regional consensus around the democratic principle and asserting their political authority. In one of such episodes, following the 12 April 2012 coup d’état in Guinea-Bissau, ECOWAS Heads of States and governments also refused to align on the EU position. Instead of cutting relations altogether as demanded by the EU in the political dialogue, they decided to send an ECOWAS mission to support the interim government. Interestingly, they justified this position by invoking the EU’s discourse on the necessity to further ECOWAS’ agency and build a political community. ²⁰ This episode shows that power asymmetries and economic dependency do not deterministically lead to hegemonic impositions of regional projects by international donors as some political economy work on regionalism tends to imply. A socio-political economy of regionalism would bring these issues into focus while also highlighting the strategies of contestation, instrumentalisation, and autonomisation that produce regionalism.

Second, IPS and the new generation of critical IPE remind us of the importance of practices in performing international phenomena. Understanding regionalism as an international social fact means examining the every-day practices of regionalism, trajectories, social representations and interactions of the individual actors who embody it. Interviews with military and police officers during field research trips in West Africa from 2012 to 2018 suggest that there is an emerging regional field of security professionals. These officers meet regularly in various locations such as the West African Police Chief Committee, the Chief of Defence Staff Committee, the ECOWAS Standby Force Headquarter, in ECOWAS missions, and in the ECOWAS training centres. Interactions between these officers through their participation in regional security practices play an important role in the construction of an imaginary of West Africa as a community and in the performance of ECOWAS as a legitimate security actor. Their circulation from the national to the regional and vice versa, their strategies, material incentives and the mechanisms of their socialisation are undoubtedly major elements that are worth exploring to understand the working of regionalism. While such studies have been carried out in the case of the EU, ²¹ there is still a blind spot in African and other regions of the Global South.

Third, both IPS and critical IPE interrogate the practice of knowledge production and its interaction with governance practices. ²² This questioning is particularly relevant for regionalism as the production of knowledge on regional dynamics or space is often used to legitimise practices of governance. ²³ Recent changes in governance practices in West Africa illustrate this point well. In a context of increasing concern with terrorism, trafficking, and migration in West Africa, European states and the EU have decided to loosen their support to the multidimensional regional organisation ECOWAS and instead privilege smaller and less formal regional grouping mainly aimed at security cooperation. The argument given to justify this policy shift refers to the need to adapt to the emergence of new regional security dynamics linked to fluctuating networks of organised crime and terrorism. The EU’s strategies in the Sahel and in the Gulf of Guinea and France’s counter-terrorism operation Barkhane illustrate such recent developments which are leading to the emergence of new ‘security regions’ such as the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea. While presented as a mere adaptation to the security environment, this policy shift also obeys different logics which see coalitions of actors across Europe and West Africa drawing on various security expertise to legitimise their attempt to reconstruct the West African regional political space in a way that fit their security and other interests. ²⁴ One consequence is the re-orientation of EU financial resources to these ‘security regions’, which might lead to the marginalisation of ECOWAS and its concern with human security and development. This raises important questions on the knowledge production processes through which regional spaces are produced, who is involved in their definition, which regional practices they legitimise, and their socio-political effects. These often neglected questions which feature at the core of an IPS-IPE dialogue should be brought more systematically to the study of regionalism as they are central to understanding governance processes at every level. ²⁵

Regionalism is thus not an object of study proper to IPE or to IPS. The existence of such kind of objects that feature at the intersection of socio-political and economic processes supports the argument laid by this forum in favour of a decompartmentalisation of these two research fields. A socio-political economy of regionalism would open up a myriad of research avenues and conceptual innovations in Comparative Regionalism. It would overcome the conservative stance of the field, almost impervious to sociological insights and the tendency to restrict political economy analyses to economic regionalism. A socio-political economy of regionalism would thus enable a more comprehensive understanding of regionalism, engaging with its emergence, working, and socio-political effects.