Great Powers` Strategy and Regional Integration: A New Regionalism Analytical Approach

Abstract

The growth of regionalism in the past few decades has created new relationships between states and has revealed differences in the motives that drive states to take part in regionalization. However there have been few attempts in the previous literature to analyze the essential strategic differences in the ways that great powers and other states participate in the regionalization process that are due to differences in economic scale This paper adopts the new regionalism approach (NRA) to analyze the synthetic motivations behind the participation of great powers in regionalism and their domination of the regionalization process, the structural influence on the region of great powers` participation in regionalization, and how competition among great powers affects the regionalization response strategies of other states. This provides the analytical basis for exploring China`s East Asian regionalization strategies.\nThe participation of great powers in the regionalization process tends to be driven by non-traditional economic motives. The great powers expect to increase their international bargaining power for sequential negotiation by expanding their market scale in order to increase their influence on international political and economic rules. The enormous market scale of the great powers is also a critical mechanism of influence and exclusive resource endowment which allows them to dominate the regionalization process. Once a great power participates in regional integration, it changes the influence mechanism and development of integration and also causes other states to change their response strategies and their interaction with each other.