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Abstract

With global governance taking a regional turn and multilateral institutions struggling, knowledge of political integration drivers is important in understanding institutional diversity. Regionalist organisations foster peace, security and economic resilience and represent a powerful modern collective governance tool. Classical theories of regional integration, such as neo-functionalism, predict that economic interdependence produces political spillovers, yet this pattern is not replicated globally. Contemporary theories were developed in response to the inadequacies of classical conceptualisations for regional integration. They seek to address why certain regional organisations (ROs) achieve deeper political integration despite weaker economic ties, while their counterparts do not achieve the same result. This study seeks to advance discourse by challenging contemporary approaches. Specifically, it asks the question of whether contemporary approaches to regionalist theory explain the observed weak and inconsistent relationship between economic interdependence and political integration. This study argues contemporary regional theory is ill-equipped to explain modern ROs and requires further discourse. To determine this, the study empirically tests Börzel and Risse’s (2019) unified regional integration framework which posits that political integration is driven by functional demands. This framework was chosen due to its multi-faceted representation of the state of contemporary theory. Methodology employs fixed-effects regression analysis on an originally created dataset of twelve ROs to empirically test theory hypotheses. Empirical results offer no support for the unified framework. A novel Regional Identity Index is created to provide methodological guidance for future operationalisations of regional identity. Process tracing is utilised on SICA and the GCC to locate where theory breaks down. Process tracing reveals theory breaks down in accounting for how regional cooperation initiated by functional pressures, converts to sovereignty pooling. These findings suggest that while contemporary theories add valuable nuance to the puzzle of regionalist outcomes, current theory is not sufficient in accounting for political integration variation.