Let’s move now to another challenge to our westphalian world. As we observed in the last lecture territory is no more limited to the nation state territory. After 1945 the world met a new challenge to regionalize the world order. That’s to say the national unit is not the only territorial unit of our new world. We are now in a multi-scale world in which the regional territory is added to the national territory. We have to take it into account through a very important and crucial concept, which is the concept of integration, regional integration. Integration is probably the opposite to sovereignty. Integration means abandoning a part of sovereignty in a more global, in a wider unit, which is the regional territory. But integration means also new identification. The national, the citizen identification is no more the prior allegiance, and now the main challenge is how to classify, how to order the multiple identities of an individual who is both a citizen of its nation state but also a member of a regional unit, a regional territory. The third challenge is probably the development of a new political community, and this challenge is presently one of the most important challenges in Europe. Is Europe a political community or not? Is it only an addition of national political communities? Or are we observing the rise of a new regional political community? But it’s also a transformation of the international order. Is now the world order made of inter-regionalism? That’s to say competition among the regions, for instance Europe, America, Far East and so on. And the last question is amazing are we now facing a new regionalism which is no more based on geography but on a kind of political convergences of nation states, which are no more neighbors but which are sharing the same values and the same political objectives? This is for instance the main feature of what we call transregionalism. IBAS India, Brazil, South Africa which is called in English IBSA, IBSA is an example of this new convergence among nation states which is not based on proximity but on political solidarity. But if we take into account regionalism, we have to take into account three dimensions. First, the traditional regionalism which is now failing. Second, new regionalism, which emerged around the 70s, the 80s last century. And now maybe we are meeting a third step, which is made of a crisis and a kind of revisiting this traditional and neoregionalism. First of all, let’s start by this traditional regionalism. Traditional regionalism was born in Europe just after the Second World War in 1945. It was, and that is very interesting, a mix of idealism and pragmatism. Idealism the purpose was to put an end to these European civil wars, this competition among European states, and as I observed in my last lecture this competition was probably at the origin of the way of European political development. This was considered as very dangerous, and more that dangerous with the Second World War, this kind of competition resulted in 60 millions of people killed. And so the idea was to overcome that. This was the ideal vision of what regionalism, a European region, did mean. But it was also a question of pragmatism. It was the time of reconstructing Europe and at this time for reconstructing Europe, European countries needed coal and British coal was not sufficient for covering all the needs of the new Europe, and the new Europe needed also the German coal. So the unification of Europe, that’s to say reconciliation among enemies was necessary even at an economic level. So this traditional regionalism was strongly influenced by a very important author David Mitrany in his very famous book, which was “A Working Peace System”. This book was published in 1943. The main point of Mitrany was to say that we have not to be committed to the needs of the state but we have to be committed to the needs of human beings. The needs of human beings can be satisfied by the state, by the nation state, but generally it has to be satisfied at other level, subregional level but also a global regional level. That’s to say Europe, united Europe is able to satisfy the needs of European individuals, European peoples more than the nation state, and the nation state can, on the contrary, disturb the satisfaction of the human needs. That’s to say, with this new vision of politics, for the first time in the European history, state is no more at the center of the analysis, at the center of this vision. But we are immediately facing a very strange paradox. The main purpose of this traditional regionalism was to overcome the state, but the states, the different European states were the only possible actors for promoting this new political order. That’s to say overcoming state was promoting by European states, that’s why the way was rather difficult to find. And there was from the fifties up to the seventies a kind of permanent contradiction between states defending their own sovereignty and the European construction, which more and more implied to overcome national sovereignty. That’s why this traditional regionalism was a living contradiction, and the main problem we were then facing was to combine two opposite elements of the political development. This inter-governmental vision of Europe has failed, and political actors were aware of this failure. It failed probably for three reasons. The first one, as I mentioned, is this permanent contradiction between sovereignty and interplaying, interaction and even this starting interdependence. The second contradiction is related to the social economic transformation of the world, that’s to say the rising new actors who were the transnational actors. How to locate transnational actors in this intergovernmental vision of regionalization? And when these transnational actors were playing a very active role in the transformation of the European economy, when this European economy was developing, there was a kind of conflict between these new actors and the traditional actors. And the third level, the third factor of failure was the problem of identity. European peoples used to identify themselves to their nation states, I would say, to their passport. When Europe started getting a real figure, a real presence, in this new international arena, How can they identify themselves? Are they still French, German, Italian? Or are they more and more European? This contradiction fueled a very strong debate about political identities, but in the meantime, created a kind of pressure from below, from societies for reshaping this regional order. That’s why we moved progressively, we moved to a new kind of regionalization that we would call neoregionalism. Neoregionalism after traditional regionalism, traditional regionalism was affecting specially Europe, when neo regionalism was extending to all the world.
