Building Regions: The Regionalization of the World Order

This book is about regions, how they emerge and how they are dramatically changing the appearance of the present 'world of states' and its related forms of governance from local to global levels. But what are regions? Regions can be small or huge. They can be part of a single state or be composed out of different states. They can be important recognised economic, social or cultural entities or they can be ignored or even combated by the people who live on a region's territory. They can be well-defined with clear cut boundaries as is the case in so-called 'constitutional regions' or they can be fuzzy as for instance in cross-border regions. In sum, they are not natural and defining regions is not a simple task. As such, the concept of region building will be advanced as an alternative to the construction of regions with three issues of region building being explored: Why are regions built in a world of states? How do region building processes take place? How are regions transforming the present world order? In doing so, it brings together under one conceptual framework, different processes and concepts such as regional integration, federalism, and separatism and refines the social constructionist view on regions.