FIRST FINAL HO IN CW

2ND TRIMESTER SY 2019-2020

A WORLD OF REGIONS

As a way of coping with the challenges of globalization, governments, associations, societies and
groups form regional organizations and /or networks.

GLOBALIZATION:
 It has made people aware of the world in general
 It has also made Filipinos more cognizant of specific areas such as Southeast Asia

REGIONALISM
 Often seen as a political and economic phenomenon
 It can also be examined in relation to identities, ethics, religion, ecological sustainability, and
health.
 It is also a process
 It must be treated as an emergent, socially constituted phenomenon.
So it means that regions are not natural or given, rather they are constructed and defined by
policymakers , economic actors, and even social movements.

COUNTRIES, REGIONS, and GLOBALIZATION

REGIONS:
 Group of countries located in the same geographically specified area
 An amalgamation of two regions
 Combination of more than two regions organized to regulate and oversee flows and policy
choices.

REGIONALIZATION and REGIONALISM

Regionalization
 Regional concentration of economic flows

Countries respond economically and politically to globalization in various ways. Some are large
enough and have a lot of resources to dictate how they participate in processes of global integration.
The best example of this is China. Other countries make up for their small size by taking advantage of
their strategic location. Examples are Singapore and Switzerland. For their lack of resources, they turn
themselves into financial and banking hubs.

SINGAPORE
 Developed its harbor facilities and made them a first class transit port for ships carrying different
commodities from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and mainland Southeast Asia to countries in
the Asia- Pacific.

Reasons for Regional Associations

 For military defense.
NATO ----- the most widely known defense grouping (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
Warsaw Pact --------- regional alliance of Soviet Union consisting of the Eastern European
countries under Soviet domination. On December 1991, The Soviet Union imploded but Nato
remains in place.
 To pool their resources
 Get better returns for their exports
 Expand their leverage against trading partners
 To protect their independence from the pressure of superpower politics.
 Economic crisis
OPEC ------ The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
 It was established in 1960 by Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
 This integration became a source of immense power that it convinced nine other oil producing
countries to join it.

NAM ------- Non- Aligned Movement

 Was created in 1961
 Created to pursue world peace and international cooperation, human rights, national sovereignty,
racial and national equality, non- intervention, and peaceful conflict resolution.
 It was created by the presidents of Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia.
 It has 120 member countries at its peak
 It was never formalized

The reason why it was called aligned because the association refused to side with either the First
World capitalist democracies in Western Europe and North America or the communist states in Eastern
Europe.

In 1996, the Thai economy collapsed after foreign currency speculators and troubled international
banks demanded that the Thai government pay back its loans. As a result, a rapid withdrawal of foreign
investments bankrupted the economy and the crisis spreads to other Asian countries as their currencies
were also devalued and foreign investment left in a hurry. The International Monetary Fund tried to
reverse the crisis but it was only after the ASEAN countries along with China, Japan, and South Korea
agreed to establish an emergency fund to anticipate a crisis that the Asian economies stabilized.

Results from the crisis

 Made ASEAN more unified and coordinated
 ASEAN continued to act as military alliance to isolate Vietnam after it invaded Cambodia after the
Vietnam war.

NON- STATE REGIONALISM

REGIONALISM ------- political process characterized by economic policy cooperation and coordination
among countries.

It is not only states that agree to work together in the name of a single cause. Communities also
engage in regional organizing. This “new regionalism” varies in forms. They can be :
 Tiny associations that include no more than a few actors and focus on a single issue, or huge
continental unions that address a multitude of common problems from territorial defense to food
security.
 Rely on the power of individuals, NGO”s and associations to link up with one another in pursuit of
a particular goal
 Identified with reformists who share the same values, norms, institutions, and system that exist
outside of the traditional, established mainstream institutions and systems.

New regionalism differs significantly from traditional state to state regionalism when it comes to
identifying problems. For example, states treat poverty or environmental degradation as technical or
economic issues that can be resolved by refining existing programs of state agencies, making minor
changes in economic policies, and creating new offices that address these issues.
For new regionalism, they see these issues as reflections of flawed economic development and
environmental models. Flawed means: economic development plans that are:
 Market- based
 Profit-driven
 Hardly concerned with social welfare, especially among the poor.