‘Integration snobbery’: EU-centric regional integration scholarship

The study of regionalism in comparative perspective emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the keyword was ‘regional integration’‚ which reflected the dominance of European integration theory and practice. In this perspective, the EU was seen as the most ‘advanced’ instance of regional integration, and the analytical challenge for scholarship was to identify the conditions that made it such while using those conditions to understand (and predict) the trajectory of regionalism in other parts of the world. Dominated by International Relations scholars and Europeanists, this strand of literature has broadly generalised across diverse contexts on the basis of EU-centric concepts and theories as well as hub-and-spoke comparisons.

Even if early regional integration scholars were acutely aware of the complex character of the European Communities (EC) and of the problem of comparability, they promoted EU-centric comparisons with other regions. Neofunctionalists like Ernst Haas and Philippe Schmitter searched first and foremost for those ‘background conditions’, ‘functional equivalents’, and ‘spill-over’ effects that were derived from the study of European integration.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the EC was considered the ‘gold standard’, and these scholars believed in imitating or learning from the European integration experience. Haas’s own words are worth repeating:

Haas explained that the lack of regional integration outside of Europe resulted from the fact that ‘countries dominated by a non-pluralistic social structure are poor candidates for participation in the integration process’.Footnote ¹⁹ The same observation spurred Nye to develop a revised neofunctionalist model to accommodate the higher degree of politicisation in less-developed societies such as those in Africa.Footnote ²⁰ Yet the neofunctionalist approach had difficulties in identifying comparable cases, and its proponents were regularly confronted with what was often referred to as ‘failed’ regional integration attempts elsewhere.

The emergence of ‘European integration studies’ from the 1970s considerably deepened the divide between the study of Europe and that of other regions because large parts of the scholarly community came to consider the EC as a nascent polity in its own right, with no appropriate comparators among regional integration projects. As Caporaso notes, ‘as the European Community (EC) developed, thickened its institutional base, expanded the scope of its policy competences, and in general became more complex, it also came to be studied more narrowly, in isolation from other regional integration processes’.Footnote ²¹ Growing agreement on the EC’s distinctiveness, even uniqueness, obviated the usefulness of cross-regional comparison – the N=1 problem.Footnote ²² Following another major boost of the newly-created EU’s authority with the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, scholars tried to escape the parochialism related to the N=1 problem by seeking comparisons with federal systems in advanced industrial states, such as the United States. As a result, established tools of political science and comparative politics could be used in studying the EU, while this move implied that International Relations was not equipped to deal with the complexities of the modern EU.Footnote ²³ This enabled EU scholars to circumvent the N=1 problem but reinforced the gap between EU Studies and regionalism in the rest of the world.

After the end of the Cold War, regionalism proliferated and spurred a new literature on ‘comparative regional integration’, especially in the fields of International Relations, political science, and economics. Ironically, even though many EU scholars had come to perceive the EU as a state-in-the-making rather than a traditional international intergovernmental organisation, scholars in other fields often continued to compare other regional integration projects – implicitly or explicitly – against the backdrop of the EU’s path.Footnote ²⁴ From this perspective, European integration was usually considered multidimensional, highly institutionalised, and generally successful – both descriptive and prescriptive contentions – whereas regionalism in the rest of the world was often seen as informal, weakly institutionalised, or failed;Footnote ²⁵ it did not constitute the ‘real thing’.Footnote ²⁶ Such assessments often derived from hub-and-spoke comparisons centred on the EU and/or the application of EU-centric integration theories, by the standards of which other regional projects appeared to be deficient. Murray refers to these practices as ‘integration snobbery’, positioning the EU on an ‘unsteady pedestal’ and reinforcing the polarisation between the EU and regionalism in the rest of the world.Footnote ²⁷

‘Area-centricity’: EU-critical regional cooperation scholarship

Discussions about regionalism in the developing world from the late 1950s onwards were heavily influenced by the structuralist tradition of economic development, especially in Latin America and Africa. This tradition shifted the focus away from the European concern with liberal economic integration as a means to avoid war towards regional economic cooperation as a means of economic development as well as autonomous state formation and nation building.Footnote ²⁸ The underlying conditions for regionalism, and the goals pursued through it, were assumed to be so different in the developing world when compared to Europe that a different theory was called for and comparison was considered fruitless.Footnote ²⁹ Scholars deliberately spoke of ‘regional cooperation’, in juxtaposition to the debates on ‘regional integration’ that were viewed to be EU-centric.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, many scholars and policymakers believed that there was a ‘model’ for regionalism that applied across the developing world, but it was not the EU. However, most scholars specialised in a particular region and neglected cross-regional comparisons – what ThompsonFootnote ³⁰ referred to as ‘area-centricity’. It was widely assumed that the political and historical context of regionalism was of fundamental importance, and different regions were therefore believed to be too different to compare. The tendency of scholars to eschew comparison across regions led to the proliferation of new or the idiosyncratic use of existing concepts to gauge the specifics of particular regions. Rather than seeking to make concepts travel and to generalise insights, scholars in this area studies tradition were usually content with confining their claims to single cases of regional cooperation or, at the most, to individual world regions. This served as a breeding ground for parochialism, quite similar to the N=1 problem within EU Studies.Footnote ³¹

This changed in the 1990s. The explosion of literature on the ‘new regionalism’ emphasised that regionalism was a global and multidimensional phenomenon, involving both state and non-state actors across a growing number of policy fields and in a variety of institutional forms.Footnote ³² This literature highlighted a divergence of regional tendencies in different parts of the world and in so doing offered alternative understandings of regional dynamics. While the EU-centric ‘regional integration’ approach often emphasised the failure of formal and state-led regionalism in much of the Global South, a comprehensive and quickly growing literature highlighted a range of both structural and context-specific drivers, processes, and effects that hitherto had received limited attention within the EU-centric literature, such as regionalism as a political response to neoliberal globalisation, regionalism versus regionalisation, and regime-boosting regionalism.Footnote ³³ This literature was keener than its predecessor to compare across regions of the Global South, but the unsystematic usage of concepts and theoretical approaches hampered progress. In fact, some diagnosed a fragmentation of the research field into isolated regional debates, ‘producing studies of multiple regions that are in a fundamental way not comparative’.Footnote ³⁴

While Europe or the EU were sometimes included in cross-regional comparisons, scholars often did not see comparison with Europe as beneficial because they feared the intellectual hegemony of EU scholarship and sometimes even the EU as a case. Indeed, there seemed to be an underlying assumption in parts of this scholarship that it was not possible to compare other regions to the EU without falling back on EU-centrism, rationalism, and/or positivism.Footnote ³⁵ Although a rich variety of constructivist, critical, and new regionalism approaches offered valuable insights and venues for comparison across different regions (sometimes including Europe), the split between the EU and the rest continued to shape the research field.Footnote ³⁶ Several attempts in the 2000s that tried to promote a dialogue between EU studies and the New Regionalism tended to retain hub-and-spoke comparisons with the EU, implying that the EU maintained a dominant position.Footnote ³⁷

Since the mid-2010s, however, a fundamental transformation of CR has been underway, which we describe in the next three sections. This transformation, we argue, combines the EU-centric regional integration perspective’s focus on general comparison with the EU-critical regional cooperation perspective’s plea for eschewing EU-centrism.

Transforming conceptualisation: Disaggregating cooperation and integration

The first transformation of CR during the last decade concerns the way in which scholars conceptualise regionalism as an object of study. Much prior research sought to analyse processes of regionalism in their entirety, while core concepts were contested both analytically (how are they best defined and operationalised?) and normatively (what referents and normative ambitions do they invoke?). As shown above, the Europe-versus-the-rest divide was partially reflected in the use of concepts such as regional cooperation versus regional integration. The holistic conceptual perspective has today given way to a dominant style of analysis that disaggregates regionalism into more specific elements, such as individual policy fields, norms, governance mechanisms, or institutions. This conceptual transformation is closely related to the expansion of regionalism as an empirical phenomenon, specifically the growing scope and differentiation of regionalism in terms of policy fieldsFootnote ³⁸ and the expanded authority of many regional organisations, which has entailed a growing complexity in institutional frameworks and a more diverse set of participating actors.Footnote ³⁹ An essential result of these developments is not only that systematic comparison has become more tractable and widespread but also that the EU is generally treated as one case within a larger universe of cases, without special status.

While the EU previously dominated the study of many policy fields, this has decreased dramatically in recent years. For instance, earlier studies of regional economic integration and common markets elevated the EU to the position of ‘gold standard’, and the highly institutionalised and allegedly successful EU framework was contrasted with ‘informality’ or ‘underdeveloped’ regionalism in Southeast Asia, and ‘failed’ economic regionalism in Africa and the Middle East. This bias, derived in part from the high level of aggregation in previous work, has been overcome through the more targeted and rigorous study of variation in the design and performance of regional economic institutions.Footnote ⁴⁰ Variation tends to be more gradual than previous coarse categorisations suggest, and the EU is rarely as exceptional on a well-specified continuum as earlier research argued it was.

Similarly, even if European security frameworks (including NATO) remain core objects of study, the comparative study of regional security governance is not at all structured around the Europe-and-the-rest divide. In fact, the debate centres on general questions about the logic, performance, and effects of regional security architectures and the relationship between intersecting security governance mechanisms.Footnote ⁴¹ Even if the EU has played a prominent role in peace-building and conflict management in some regions, especially in Africa, few references are made to the design and performance of the EU’s own security institutions. Furthermore, the broadening of the security concept and the emergence of non-traditional security threats have also resulted in research being spread across a range of regions, regional mechanisms, and broader security issues, such as crisis response,Footnote ⁴² disaster management,Footnote ⁴³ and regional intervention in domestic affairs.Footnote ⁴⁴ These debates are not structured around the EU-versus-the-rest divide, and they have become increasingly comparative over time.

Beyond these established policy fields that for a long time were closely associated with EU-centrism, scholars now study a plethora of ‘new’ policies that have never been plagued by conventional EU-centric thinking. For instance, regional environmental governance has become a thriving research field during the last decade.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is generally treated as a sub-field of global environmental governance, which means that the links between global and regional governance become particularly important; in other cases, the issues are structured around regional and transboundary aspects, as seen in literature on transboundary waters, and maritime governance.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here too, the divide between the EU and the rest is insignificant for conceptualisation, theory-building, and empirical research.

Regional social policy rarely attracted much attention in regions outside the EU until the mid- or late 2000s. For a range of reasons, we are now witnessing a ‘social turn’ in most other regions, with intensified discussions in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America about issues such as income distribution, social protection, labour regulation, health, education, social and individual rights, migration, and so forth.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although the EU has a longer history and tends to have more developed rules and policies, the research debate is not structured around the EU or its institutional solutions.

Besides individual policy fields, the study of regional institutions and governance mechanisms has also taken off during the last decade. Instead of focusing on the old question of whether regional organisations follow Europe’s institutional path through sovereignty transfer, scholars increasingly turn to more abstract and general questions around core social science concepts related to authority, institutional design, and governance.Footnote ⁴⁸ For example, a developed literature now exists on individual regional institutions rather than broader organisational frameworks, such as international courts and dispute settlement mechanisms (including regional ones),Footnote ⁴⁹ regional legal and judicial architectures,Footnote ⁵⁰ regional parliaments,Footnote ⁵¹ regional bureaucracies,Footnote ⁵² and regional summits.Footnote ⁵³ Often, this literature conceptualises and seeks to measure the formal competences of these institutions, but work also addresses their agency, autonomy, or internal workings. Beyond institutions, there are also quickly growing bodies of literature on particular norms and associated governance mechanisms, such as on governance transfer and governance standards,Footnote ⁵⁴ sovereignty and the intrusiveness of regional organisations,Footnote ⁵⁵ law and norm enforcement,Footnote ⁵⁶ democracy and democracy protection,Footnote ⁵⁷ participatory and membership norms,Footnote ⁵⁸ citizenship regimes,Footnote ⁵⁹ and the international actorness of regional organisations.Footnote ⁶⁰

Whereas some of these studies code many regional institutions on a few quantifiable elements, others focus on a few instances of regionalism and provide more complex conceptual measures. What all of them have in common, however, is that they systematically compare regionalism across cases (and often across time) along clearly defined and analytically productive dimensions, sometimes including and sometimes excluding the EU. Even if the EU comes out of these comparisons as being located on the ‘extreme’ ends of the distribution, true in spirit to the original idea of CR, the Union is located on a continuous dimension of interest that is not derived from the European integration experience as a master frame. Whereas the Europe-versus-the-rest divide revolved centrally around the (non-)comparability of different forms of regionalism, disaggregation renders systematic comparison more tractable empirically and less EU-centric. While core concepts used in the past marked the opposing camps in the EU-versus-the-rest debate – regional cooperation, regional integration, sovereignty transfer, etc. – the concepts used in much contemporary research are less controversial, and they travel more easily across contexts.

Transforming theorising: General social science theories and self-reflexive criticism of EU-centrism

The second transformation in CR concerns theory: how do we explain regionalism? What are the drivers of variation? The EU-versus-the-rest divide was characterised by theory that either derived directly from the European integration experience and was generalised beyond it (EU-centric perspective) or was tailored to understanding specific instances of regionalism in the Global South, with little interest in broader generalisation (EU-critical perspective). As noted, the strand of literature that drew on more general social science theories was largely confined to explaining the EU. Today, novel theoretical perspectives deliberately question EU-centrism and have their origin or ‘flagship’ case in regions other than Europe. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to account for the many theoretical perspectives that have emerged during the last decade, we highlight three representative ones: (i) governance approaches, (ii) authoritarian regionalism, and (iii) the decentring agenda. The first ‘game-changer’ illustrates how CR has developed theoretically through broad influences from comparative politics, International Relations, and organisation studies; the second derives from the Global South and the non-Western world and is geared towards generalisation across cases; and the third shows the growing critical engagement with EU-centrism from within EU Studies.

Maybe the most obvious development showing that CR has moved beyond the EU-versus-the-rest divide is the growing prominence of various governance approaches.Footnote ⁶¹ The concept of governance denotes the practice of regulating societal relationships in the absence of centralised government – a definition that is particularly suitable to international relations with the absence of a central authority and that has made inroads in the form of global governance. For all their diversity, governance approaches share that they seek to understand how actors adopt public rules to steer governance recipients in particular directions through processes other than traditional government. In parallel to the ‘governance turn’ in EU Studies,Footnote ⁶² scholars of other regions have similarly turned towards the governance concept.

This has brought several gains for CR.Footnote ⁶³ First, governance approaches to regionalism emerged as a critique of conventional state-centric notions, and with it the parochialism in EU Studies and ‘area-centricity’ more generally started to fade, which has led to an explosion of productive comparisons between a wide range of regional governance mechanisms around the world. Importantly, these comparisons are often conducted along clearly specified dimensions and only rarely derived from the EU experience.Footnote ⁶⁴ Second, the use of the governance concept has enabled scholars to transcend the old binary between regional integration and regional cooperation, which for decades reinforced the split between the EU and the rest.Footnote ⁶⁵ Third, governance approaches have also helped to move beyond unproductive binary debates about whether regionalism is driven by state or non-state actors and whether it is primarily formal or informal.Footnote ⁶⁶ By incorporating state and non-state actors without prioritising formal over informal institutions, regional governance provides a useful framework to systematically compare varieties of regionalism across time, space, and policy fields. Scholars certainly continue to disagree about the degree of formality and how to conceptualise and theorise the state, but it is no longer possible to question the multiplicities of state and non-state agencies within a variety of regional governance modes and institutional forms interacting within a multilayered global governance structure.Footnote ⁶⁷ From this perspective, the EU is as much an expression of different modes of governance as are other instances of regionalism.

A second strand of theorising, which is usually referred to as authoritarian regionalism, builds upon experiences in the non-Western world. An established theme in the study of African regionalism,Footnote ⁶⁸ recent work systematically studies when, why, and how regional organisations are used as smokescreens by governments for regime-survival, regime-boosting, and legitimacy-boosting purposes.Footnote ⁶⁹ This literature is self-conscious about developing a theoretical perspective that generalises across regions and does not derive from the European integration experience. Although this literature often makes a sharp distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes, they have started to develop general concepts that travel. Nevertheless, a divide persists between the quickly growing literature on authoritarian regionalism and the ‘authoritarian turn’ in EU Studies.Footnote ⁷⁰ This is unfortunate since both debates are concerned with the dynamic interplay of regional institutions, domestic politics, and questions related to regime type and regime legitimacy.

By contrast, the growing literature on populism and regionalism explicitly transcends the split between the EU and the rest. This literature shows that populist governments – both right-wing and left-wing; from Europe and from the rest of the world – may criticise established global and regional institutions that form part of the liberal international order while actively engaging with and endorsing regional projects as an integral part of their populist strategies.Footnote ⁷¹ Despite contextual differences, a ‘populist script’ of regional cooperation is identifiable, and this literature bridges the divide between the EU and the rest of the world.Footnote ⁷²

Finally, theory has also been advancing explicitly problematising EU-centrism. One strand of this literature – the ‘decentring agenda’ – undertakes a self-conscious attempt to decentre the study of Europe by highlighting the manifold ways in which the EU itself is influenced by and connected to regionalism in other parts of the world, not least through a critical engagement with Europe’s colonial history. Moreover, the decentring agenda questions taking the European experience as a ‘given’ and actively challenges the view of Europe as the model, reference point, or gold standard for other regions.Footnote ⁷³ This perspective changes the relationship between the EU and other regions within CR and matches calls by Global South scholars to ‘take seriously the lived experiences and agencies of the peoples that actually shape their regions’.Footnote ⁷⁴ This call manifests itself in many recent studies that put centre stage the agency of Global South actors in regionalism.Footnote ⁷⁵ While these studies generally emphasise the specific contextual conditions under which regionalist projects develop, the best work is framed under the umbrella of CR instead of isolated regional debates.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although context-specific tools may be important, scholarship is increasingly framed in terms of concepts and theories that have the potential to travel.Footnote ⁷⁷ As will be further elaborated in the next section, this transformation is linked to more rigorous comparative research designs and an increasing creativity of criss-crossing comparisons.

Transforming methodology: Novel designs and the ‘data revolution’

The third transformation concerns methodology: how do we generate valid and reliable knowledge about regionalism? For a long time, the comparative study of regionalism was characterised by a strained relationship between the EU versus the rest, overlapping in methodological terms with the broader divide between disciplinary research versus area studies. This divide is gradually decreasing, and more sophisticated studies in terms of comparative methodology and case selection are on the rise. This is closely related to the aforementioned rise of studies on more disaggregated concepts such as individual policy fields and institutions. Since the purpose of such phenomena appears to be more uniform across contexts, and established theoretical tools are available for their analysis (e.g. governance approaches), systematic comparison has become more tractable. While there is a diversity of both quantitative and qualitative approaches to comparison, it is no longer satisfactory to emphasise regional context and regional uniqueness without situating the case within a broader universe and general theoretical discussion.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even area studies specialists now regularly advocate for a more comparative approach, building on the view that intensive regional research remains indispensable to the social sciences but that this research will be marginalised unless it situates its findings vis-a-vis other regions to demonstrate its broader relevance.Footnote ⁷⁹ These methodological changes imply that the established criticism against CR that it is not genuinely comparative and predominantly privileges local, context-specific analyses no longer holds.Footnote ⁸⁰

The transformation of CR with regards to quantitative research methods is to a considerable extent triggered by what may be referred to as a ‘data revolution’, which is most evident in the comparative analysis of regional organisations and regional governance institutions (see section on ‘Transforming conceptualisation’ above). The best work in this vein grounds its data-collection effort in general concepts of social science that have concrete empirical referents, are minimally sensitive to contextual differences across cases, and are operationalised in clear and transparent ways. As Hooghe et al. describe their approach to measuring the international authority of regional and global international organisations (IOs):

Prominent data generation projects in the last decade have revolved around the concepts of institutional design,Footnote ⁸² institutional similarities/differences,Footnote ⁸³ policy scope and output,Footnote ⁸⁴ and the discursive legitimation of regional organisations.Footnote ⁸⁵ A general ambition to escape EU-centrism in favour of general concepts and measures is often evident. In fact, several of the most comprehensive databases are focused on IOs, with regional arrangements either as the main categoryFootnote ⁸⁶ or as a subset.Footnote ⁸⁷

The ‘data revolution’ arises from the increased accessibility of data as well as more sophisticated methodological tools for their analysis. For instance, while many scholars still rely on traditional statistical methods, an increasing creativity is seen in developing measures beyond the degree of institutionalisation and using both quantitative and qualitative methods simultaneously.Footnote ⁸⁸ Most of these data-collection efforts concentrate either on one or several policy fields and/or various types of institutional features discussed in the previous section. With regard to policy fields, there are comprehensive data-collection efforts related to trade agreements,Footnote ⁸⁹ peace operations,Footnote ⁹⁰ the environmentFootnote ⁹¹ as well as water management.Footnote ⁹² With regard to institutional features, there are comprehensive data-collection efforts related to, for instance, diffusion of institutional design,Footnote ⁹³ legal and judicial architecture,Footnote ⁹⁴ policy scope and membershipFootnote ⁹⁵ as well as legitimacy and legitimation.Footnote ⁹⁶ These extensive data-gathering efforts tend to prioritise formal structures and policy input and output (especially of regional organisations),Footnote ⁹⁷ and quantitative data overwhelmingly derives from treaties and secondary legislation as the main sources.

Yet this methodological transformation is by no means confined to quantitative research methods and data, and there has been an equivalent shift in qualitative research. Compared to only one or two decades ago, today’s qualitative research in CR is more self-conscious about designing systematic comparisons, including explicit conceptualisation, operationalisation, and measurement of key concepts. We see an emergence of systematic qualitative comparisons of a relatively small number of cases, which are often (but not always) based on the disaggregated conceptual approach to regionalism discussed above. There is, in particular, an expanding comparative literature on specific policy fields, such as security, trade governance, finance and monetary cooperation, migration, health, education, human rights, gender, democracy protection, energy, infrastructure, environment, and water management.Footnote ⁹⁸ In contrast to earlier hub-and-spoke comparisons between the EU and other regions, today we see a much more diverse pattern of comparative studies which include a smaller number of carefully selected and clearly defined cases or rigorous, paired comparisons between regions or regional institutions in Africa and East Asia, or Latin America and Africa, and so forth. Differently expressed, we have seen a shift from unstructured and open-ended studies in the 1990s and 2000s, which often compared regional organisations in their entirety and moved freely across policy fields, towards increasingly systematic, structured, and focused comparisons and research designs, which focus on specific institutions or governance dimensions, such as regional secretariats, parliaments, courts, etc., and more clearly defined policy fields and research issues.Footnote ⁹⁹ Similar to quantitative research, considerable attention is also devoted to the interaction between regional and global governance mechanisms.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While it is widespread to analyse individual policy fields, it has become increasingly common also to compare between them, for instance, security and human rights, or trade, security, and health.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Whereas quantitative comparisons tend to focus on formal rules coded based on official documents, the evidentiary base used in qualitative research is wider. Qualitative scholars often rely on diverse sources, such as official documents and texts (e.g. treaties, legal texts, annual reports, strategies), communications (e.g. speeches, press releases, official communication), news articles, interviews, participant observation, and secondary literature. However, compared to qualitative scholarship and area studies in the past, the increased specialisation through the disaggregation approach and new methodological standards have resulted in greater emphasis on transparent measurement of key concepts. While these changes have helped to delimit the data-collection process to more specific elements, the increased focus on several regions imposes new challenges, to which qualitative scholars often respond by collaborating, not least among scholars with complementary regional specialisations.

In sum, the transformation in methodology has moved debates in the field beyond the old EU-versus-the-rest divide. Most quantitative comparisons are not designed around the EU at all but focus on general questions and issues. Qualitative comparisons across diverse cases have also become much more common, while conventional hub-and-spoke comparisons between the EU and other regions have declined in relevance.

Conclusion: The price of ‘mainstreaming’ Comparative Regionalism and the road ahead

A struggle over the EU’s role has dominated the field of CR for the past six decades. Whereas EU-centric scholarship has treated the EU as a model and even a ‘gold standard’ for conceptualising, theorising, comparing, and designing regionalism in the rest of the world, many critics of this position have gone parochial, exaggerating the uniqueness of their favourite region, and/or anti-EU-centric, disregarding the EU entirely. This paper shows that CR has entered a new phase, moving the field beyond the EU-versus-the-rest chasm. Increasingly, the EU is integrated into a more self-consciously comparative research agenda, built around general concepts and theoretical arguments as well as more rigorous comparative designs and research methods.

The benefits of the field’s maturation are twofold: first, intellectual energy is freed to further improve existing research. Second, findings more easily link up with, and ultimately promise to shape, broader debates in political science, International Relations, and Comparative Area Studies; as a result, the field becomes less isolated and parochial. These two are, in short, the benefits of ‘mainstreaming’.

‘Mainstreaming’ the research field, however, comes at a threefold price. First, even though (the most) overt forms of EU-centrism have come to an end, as we have argued, EU-centrism may survive in less overt forms that are harder to detect. This pertains particularly to the relationship between EU-centrism and continued ‘Western’ dominance in global knowledge production. For example, does a subtle form of EU-centrism survive in various governance approaches even if these are not derived from the EU’s experience as such? Similarly, does the focus on formal institutionalisation in much contemporary research reveal a subtle form of EU-centrism, or ‘Western bias’ more broadly, in the generic assumptions that underpin research, in this case assumptions about what matters for the operation of political systems? These are potentially controversial questions to which contending answers can be legitimately given. But they ought to be discussed broadly.

Second, mainstreaming CR puts a premium on professional training in theory and methods that is to the structural disadvantage of scholars working in the Global South. Relatedly, mainstreaming may also raise the financial resources needed to produce scholarship that stands a chance of competing successfully over scarce publication space, especially in peer-reviewed journals. For example, compiling large datasets or conducting extensive fieldwork in several sites that underpins broad comparison are expensive and time-consuming. There is little doubt that knowledge production in CR remains skewed towards ‘Western’ scholars and those located in ‘Western’ academic institutions.Footnote ¹⁰² While more pluralism and diversity in terms of the sociological characteristics of the research field are clearly desirable, mainstreaming the field may make these harder to achieve since it may raise barriers to entry.

Third, mainstreaming CR may render the field less plural in its conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches. Mainstreaming often entails a stronger ‘hierarchisation’ and patrolling of boundaries that make it harder for heterodox approaches to be heard. This danger requires an active will by ‘gatekeepers’ to retain pluralism and heterogeneity, which we see as a distinct strength of CR. Similarly, pluralism requires that those identifying with non-mainstream approaches find it meaningful to engage in scientific dialogue with the mainstream.

In further consolidation of the research field, we wish to conclude on our assessment of how to fully exploit the ongoing transformations in CR and, therefore, urge more debate about essential research design features. We discuss conceptualisation, theorisation, and comparative methodology in turn.

Regarding conceptualisation, we believe that disaggregating regionalism into more specific and tractable elements such as policy fields or institutional features has been beneficial, and suggest that the problem of ‘re-aggregation’ should attract more scholarly attention moving forward. On the institutional dimension, for example, do delegation to supranational courts, autonomous bureaucracies, and self-confident parliaments go together, or are there trade-offs between them? In the policy dimension, are governance mechanisms similar or different across different policy fields and regions and, if so, how? How do guiding normative frameworks vary across policy fields and regions? While there is incipient research that tries to characterise these elements from an overarching (quantitative) perspective,Footnote ¹⁰³ there is little work that integrates across the distinct domains of institutions, norms, governance mechanisms, and policies.

This points to the potential usefulness of typological theorisingFootnote ¹⁰⁴ around groups of regionalisms that share distinct combinations of institutions, norms, governance mechanisms, and policies. Again, incipient work in this direction exists,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ but opportunities to typologise across domains, regions, or classes of phenomena (e.g. formal versus informal regionalism) remain wide open, even if this is unlikely to lead to a single ‘master’ typology of regionalism. Typological theorising could also be useful in combining currently disjointed efforts to characterise contemporary instances of regionalism by seeking to capture their respective features through the addition of adjectives or adverbs, such as post-hegemonic regionalism in Latin America.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This would require scholars to clearly define the underlying dimensions of category-building and specify categories in mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive ways.

Regarding theorisation, in building a post-Western, global, and genuinely comparative research field, scholars should be much more forthright in (1) developing theoretical arguments from ‘flagship’ cases all over the world (instead of Europe only) and (2) generalising from them to other parts of the world – including to Europe. In line with the more disaggregated conceptualisation of regionalism, we believe that theorising usefully proceeds by generating mid-range theoretical arguments that can travel across different contexts. Foreign policy analysis, theories of international negotiation, or theories of (regional) hegemony may be useful here. While mid-range arguments may be confined to particular groups of cases – arguments about ‘authoritarian regionalism’, for example, primarily apply in authoritarian contexts – they should be formulated in ways that allow them to travel across regions. The emerging literature on regionalism and populism may serve as a guide here, both because this research agenda is theoretically advanced and because it covers basically all regions of the world, including Europe.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Regarding methodology, although there are different views and preferences regarding how best to compare, CR as a research field cannot be biased in favour of a particular comparative method. It must allow for a range of different comparative approaches and methods: quantitative, qualitative, or mixed comparisons at different levels and with varying number of cases. Individual case studies must also have their place. However, the fundamental challenge is to escape ‘area-centricity’ and encourage scholars to think in more general and comparative terms. From this perspective, there is a need for area-centred debates on regionalism to think beyond regional particularities. Hence, single case studies have much more limited value and impact when they are framed and designed without any reference to comparative or general theoretical debates. Otherwise, why would comparativists or specialists of other regions pay attention to research that is biased in favour of a particular region? The future development and consolidation of CR depends at least partly on a more self-conscious case selection and efforts to counteract parochialism.

This brings us to our final point, namely that scholars of CR need to ask research questions that travel beyond a single region. Even if region-specific research questions are still legitimate, there is still a tendency for ‘area specialists’ to use contextualised language to capture rather similar phenomena that exist in other regions instead of applying general concepts and developing research questions and hypotheses that can be transferred to cross-regional comparisons. In fact, what at first glance may be thought of as a region-specific question can often be formulated in a more general and theoretically relevant way. For example, there is currently a rich debate on the role of symbols and rituals as well as rhetorical and discursive practices of regionalism in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, but these literatures are still segmented and largely isolated from one another, which prevents the potential for comparison as well as theory-building. Formulating research questions in more general terms represents an important step towards a more genuine comparative debate about the patterns, sources, and consequences of regionalism in global politics.