Could Regional Trade Integration be a Building Block for Global Governance of Trade?

Abstract

International relations -as the branch of political science that is concerned with the foreign affairs of and relations among countries -considers the states' sovereignty as a basis for improvement of worldwide peaceful partnership among states. Based on state sovereignty, governments "protect" the policy space which they consider to be a necessary presumption for further national economic and social development. The possibility of global governance, in whichever field of activities, is related to the governments´ability to give a part of the domestic policy space (it means a part of their sovereignty) in favour of the common good and common long-term interests and perspectives. This is the main dialectical question of global governance, including the governance of international trade. The dilemma or mutual supportiveness of regionalism and multilateralism should be analyzed in relation to it.Global governance theory develops approaches, which attempt to find a workable structure(s) in which the global tendencies are reflected. In the most recent period, the ideas of prosperity of regional integration -as a basis for global governance -are widely supported. According to one stream within these theories, regional governance could be extended to a global one, after the benefits have been proved within a small scale. The other stream argues that only negotiations among regional groups lead towards global governance. The ground for this idea is to restrict the number of actors of international relations and, as a result, to simplify the complexity of negotiations and to facilitate their positive outcomes. In this article, I try to show which weaknesses have these ideas in the framework of international trade, which is an important part of international relations.