2. Typology of Regional Organizations

‘Intergovernmental’ refers to the fact that national governments are the founders and members of these organizations. It does not refer to the mode of decision-making (intergovernmental versus supranational).

Penttilä 2009.

Börzel and Risse 2016b.

Haftel 2013.

Hooghe and Marks 2015.

Haftel and Thomspon 2006.

For example, Venables 2003.

For example, Venables 1999.

Knetter and Slaughter 2001.

Chen and Knez 1995. The integration of non-market economies is an exception. However, at present this has only historical relevance, e.g., COMECON and the integration of the planned economies of the Socialist countries, see Stone 1996.

The literature occasionally distinguishes between ‘integration’ and ‘cooperation’. Cooperation refers to more ‘shallow’ interaction between governments, e.g., the intention to implement common projects, while ‘integration’ refers to the creation of a common regulatory framework for removing barriers between markets. See also a related discussion in Devlin and Estevadeordal 2003.

Alesina et al. 2005.

Schimmelpfennig 2015.

Risse 2016.

Gray 2014a.

For simplicity, we will assume that ROs do have ‘actual’ goals that exist hidden behind economic rhetoric, but we acknowledge that in many cases the situation is more complex. ROs redefine their goals as they develop; conflicting ideas about what an RO should do are pursued by different groups within individual countries. Even within the mind of a single decision-maker the purpose of the RO may be unclear. Nevertheless, our approach is necessary to construct a coherent theoretical framework, which we will of course refine and develop when looking at individual ROs.

Examples include the change in attitude of South Africa to the design of SACU before and after the democratization or differences between Russia and China as key countries of the SCO with very different foreign policy attitudes, see, e.g., Balzer 2008.

Hettne and Söderbaum 1998.

Balassa 1961.

Hufbauer and Schott 1994; Feng and Genna 2003, 2004; Dorucci et al. 2004; Gray and Slapin 2012.

Stone Sweet and Sanholrtz 1997.

Kuwayama 1999.

Riggirozzi 2012. Note that literature exists on various approaches to integrating markets in a region, e.g., using an RO (‘formal’ approach, regionalism) and through the spontaneous interaction of economic players (‘informal’ approach, regionalization). See Lorenz 1992. Various papers explore different notions of region-ness that are partly associated with different types of ROs (Hurrel 1995; Hettne and Söderbaum 2000). However, in this work we are only interested in investigating the types of organizations themselves.

Cooley and Spruyt 2009.

Van Langenhove 2011.

See Söderbaum 2004.

Acharya 2016.

Hillman 2010; Lin 2002.

Even in this case actual market integration may be a subordinated goal of regionalism, see Fernandez and Portes 1998.

Bergsten 1997.

The focus on physical connectivity is observed especially often in Asian ROs (Bhattacharyay 2010). It is also the main element of the Chinese Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) initiative, though this is not a regional organization.

Lake 2008; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2012.

This certainly leads us to ask why member states would use an RO as a communication platform rather than establish an organization that openly positions itself as such. We will discuss this issue later in the text. Note that the presence of high-level summits itself does not make communication function the key for the functioning of the RO. High-level summits may be important for expressive ROs as well, as they increase their symbolic power, as well as serve as a source of rent-seeking. These rents can be extracted by both national and supranational bureaucrats and national politicians. For us, the ROs where communication indeed turns out the pivotal function they provide to their member states are especially important.

Hartmann and Striebinger 2015.

Mulugeta 2009.

RO goals may vary over time, even if they generally remain within the domain of economic or non-economic issues. As an example of changing economic goals, consider the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which we acknowledge is, strictly speaking, not an RO but a global international organization. BIS moved from facilitating Germany’s reparation payments after World War I to promoting cooperation among member central banks. An example of changing non-economic goals, we point to NATO after the end of the Cold War and then again after the start of the new confrontation with Russia in 2014. We again do not consider NATO in our book, since it is clearly a non-economic RO.

Montecinos 1996.

Söderbaum 2004.

Allison 2008; Collins 2009; Cameron and Orenstein 2012; Schweickert et al. 2012; Lewis 2012; Jackson 2014; Russo 2015. Note that ROs can also boost regimes through actual cooperation, e.g., joint military interventions, in which case they are actually ‘Alive and Kicking’ ROs. This is as long as they fit into our framework by having an economic agenda. However, as Obydenkova and Libman (2015) argue, in today’s world, while direct cooperation with autocracies does play a certain role, rhetorical support of one autocrat for another is much more common.

Note that sometimes countries join ROs to send signals (Dreher and Voigt 2011), in order to convince international investors that the country’s chosen reform path is solid. However, rhetorical organizations are rarely suited to this purpose: membership in a rhetorical organization does not represent any sunk costs and thus does not create a credible signal. Countries seeking to send signals must join ‘Alive and Kicking’ organizations.

Börzel and van Hüllen (2015) provide a comprehensive survey of how various types of ROs exercise influence on the domestic governance of their members. Obydenkova and Libman (2015) discuss the complexity of direct and indirect channels, focusing on regime boosting.

Gray 2012. More specifically, she distinguishes between functioning ROs, ‘Zombies’ which in a more recent version of the paper, Gray (2014b) refers to them as ‘Coma’ cases, and dead ROs, which are essentially defunct organizations. This language only partly overlaps with ours: Gray’s dead ROs are probably most similar to our ‘Coma’ type; Zombies or Coma ROs in Gray’s language include the whole variety of other ROs besides the ‘Alive and Kicking’ and ‘Coma’ we study in this book.

Gray 2015.

In this sense, two interesting conjectures should be made. First, it is possible that the ROs, which are generally perceived as more ‘successful’, serve a larger number of motives than other ROs. The EU is certainly an ‘Alive and Kicking’ RO, but also has a strong symbolic impact, provides an excellent platform for communication and is used by its bureaucrats to extract rents. For the purposes of our typology, as we argue elsewhere, we focus on the main function of the RO, i.e., the function, which makes all other functions possible and valuable. Second, there may be a link between the multiplicity of functions of ROs and the political regimes of their members. This could happen because of the need to form a broader coalition to sustain the RO. Our book does not investigate this conjecture though, as it does not focus on the goal of finding out the difference between democratic and non-democratic ROs. Obydenkova and Libman 2016 provide a detailed account of this topic.

For example, Poast and Urpelainen 2013.

Typically, there is a certain ambiguity at the beginning regarding the development of the ROs, even if they are currently not successful, which may explain the willingness of politicians to support them. This adds another important dimension to the evolution of ROs, which is not at the center of our discussion in this section, but should be acknowledged: ROs typically develop under the veil of uncertainty, i.e., players are unsure about the current contribution of the ROs (principal-agent problems) and their ability to provide contributions they are interested in in the short or long run. This can add a number of further interesting trajectories for the ROs. For example, a RO can be created with the intent to become ‘Alive and Kicking’, but fail to produce immediate results. As long as posterior expectations of the politicians remain positive enough, they will still support these ROs, it may go on long enough for a supranational bureaucracy to form, which will take over the organization and use its power to turn it into a ‘Zombie’.

See also Gray 2014d.

An example for the post-Soviet Eurasia is discussed in Drakokhrust and Furman 1998.

For a survey see Baldwin and Venables 1995.

Schedler 2006.

Kelley 2012.

This may not apply to institutionalized autocracies, which have been shown to be more likely to behave cooperatively than other types of autocracies; see the chapter on political regimes for a more detailed discussion.

Libman 2015.

Jupille et al. 2013.

The EU is frequently compared to a ‘fiscal dwarf’ but a ‘regulatory giant’. See Economist 2003.

Zakharov (2012) discusses the role of ‘sleeping’ institutions that may be ‘reactivated’ at some point.

The concept of decision-making crises was advanced in the neofunctionalist literature on European integration. For a recent account see Lefkofridi and Schmitter 2015.

The founders of the EU like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet are good examples of these policy entrepreneurs. In some cases, the impact of the entrepreneurs goes as far as to determine whether the RO will indeed become a RO or transform itself into a more integrated political entity, like a federation: possibly, the debate on the US Constitution versus Articles of Confederation is an example of it. See Libman 2011b and Rector 2009 on the weak boundary between federations and international organizations.