Description
In years after the end of the Cold War, various forms of transregional cooperations emerged in world politics to facilitate broader economic and security cooperation across the globe, taking the advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalisation. For example, the Australia and Japan initiated Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to advance free trade commitments from Asian and Pacific countries. However, more recently, competing attempts have been made by rising and great powers to establish trans-regional cooperationsto advance their visions of ‘multi-polar’ world order, such as the Belt and Road Initiatives or Eurasian Economic Cooperation. The emergence of these transregional cooperation projects raises important questions around the purposes of these projects and broader implications for contemporary international order. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the emergence, dynamics, and evolution of such transregional cooperation after the Cold War. My preliminary analysis suggests that transregionalism emerged primarily to (1) institutionally backup the national interest of great powers and rising powers; and (2) to bring economic benefits through economic partnership that would enable great powers and rising powers to widen its influence in global politics. To substantiate the argument, I establish a novel dataset comprising of regionalism and transregional cooperations from 1989-2024, combined with two case studies of contemporary transregionalism, namely the Quadrilateral Security Cooperation and the Belt and Road Initiative.
