Regionalism: in Crisis?

The new regionalism has been one of the mega-trends in the global economy since the 1990s. The Eurocentrism of classic integration theories is a problem for analysing new regional organizations, which develop in fundamentally different background conditions. With the turn of the millennium, many regional organizations of the Global South faced increasing obstacles to further integration. The rise of regional powers in the Global South did not lead to a renewed rise of regionalism. Only East Asia was able to resist the trend in declining regionalism, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) became the nucleus of further integration efforts. Today, regionalism is also challenged in the Global North, where the European Union (EU) is stalled in crisis, and where the Trump administration renegotiates North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).