Comparative Regionalism: Economics and Security.

Quiliconi, Cintia

Comparative Regionalism: Economics and Security. By Etel Solingen. London: Routledge, 2015.

Etel Solingen has made significant contributions to general international relations, international political economy, security studies, and regional studies. One of the defining features of Solingen's work is that it integrates different levels of analysis and glides seamlessly from one to the other and from issue to issue. She has brought area and comparative regional studies to the mainstream of international relations. This book revisits some of her insightful arguments in Regional Orders at Century's Dawn (1998) now in the form of a collection of essays that build on the explanatory value of the nature of domestic coalitions forming in response to globalization. The volume goes beyond her previous arguments in addressing regionalism as a broader phenomenon that is not captured by regional institutions alone. She argues that studies of "emerging regions," such as East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the European-Mediterranean area, need to avoid the bias of comparison with the European Union model.

The volume focuses on the relationship between globalization and regionalism in analyzing how globalization forces generate competition between internationalizing and statist-nationalistic coalitions. Solingen argues that coalitions composed by state and private actors are the driving agents of regional outcomes. The book's main contribution is to explain different economic and security regional outcomes. Strong internationalizing coalitions pursue economic reform and access to foreign markets; as a cooperative regional neighborhood serves their interests, those coalitions create more cooperative and peaceful regional orders. Though inward-looking, coalitions seek to preserve allocations to statist and military-industrial complexes, resisting external pressures for liberalization. Regional insecurity and competition is functional to sustain these coalitions in power leading, in many cases, to national and religious conflicts (p. 36).

International structures and institutions play an intermediate role in each coalition and have influence on the domestic coalitional interplay. The outcome of a ruling coalition's policies affects its own relations vis-a-vis its domestic rivals, neighboring states, and global political economy (p. 37). The book is divided into four parts: the first unfolds the coalitional arguments; Solingen then applies this framework to regime type, regional institutions, and regional security trajectories. Every argument is well supported by distinctive contributions based on examples from East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The book systematizes the author's excellent contributions on comparative regionalism and will be of keen interest to scholars of regionalism and globalization from both economic and security fields.

Reviewed by Cintia Quiliconi