Regional Integration Without Empire By Henry C.K. Liu

Regional Integration Without Empire

By

Henry C.K. Liu

Presented at the 2015 Eurasian Workshop at IIASA, Luxemburg, Austria – Sept 15-16

Regional integration is a multi-national political process in which sovereign nation states within a region voluntarily agree to enhance cooperation in regional affairs through participation in supranational institutions governed by integrated regulatory regimes to facilitate the region’s common goals and objectives in socio-economic development, while retaining individual state sovereignty. It is important that regional integration does not degenerate into empire structure dominated by any one nation state, or one group of nation states.

As a political process, regional integration aims to achieve within a region economic, social, cultural and political integration. This goal is to be achieved through the promotion of international trade by reducing trade barriers within a region, such as reduction or removal of tariffs to create a single regional market, and to adopt unified rules on trade, standards on goods quality and service performance, legal framework and a common currency, or at least a free convertibility of currencies of member states.

The process also orchestrates multilateral governmental support from sovereign states in a region for tackling common regional problems that transcend national borders, such as protection of the environment, maintenance of public health, safeguard of cross-border water purity and supply, setting standards for food safety, policing of transnational crime, particularly illegal cross-border traffic of narcotic drugs and controlled substances, undocumented immigration, violation of financial regulations and fraudulent business practices,  and illicit money laundering.

Regional integration as it has developed nowadays focuses primarily on economic issues, particularly through market liberalization in international trade and finance and concerted efforts to create a region-wide single market, operating under the assumption that prosperity can best be achieved through trade and that prosperity is a sine qua non for achieving socio-cultural and political integration .

Yet many regional problems are not purely economic or financial, but are social-political problems with economic and financial dimensions. Such socio-