Regional Organization and the Regulation of Internal Conflict

ARE regional and global approaches to world order compatible or competitive ? Policy-makers and scholars pose this question with increasing frequency. Yet too often assessments of the relative capabilities of regional and general international organizations fail to distinguish the different demands such issues as threats to the peace or modernization create for widely divergent institutions. Enthusiasm for regionalism waxes and wanes with events. As Inis Claude observes, “The advocacy of regionalism can be, and often is, as doctrinaire and as heedless of concrete realities as the passion for all-encompassing organization.”