Regional Organisation and Regional Integration (RORI) Workshop

This Workshop presents a platform for contributors to a planned Special Issue of the European Journal of International Law to present their research on regional organisation and regional integration. The Special Issue, and hence the Workshop, seeks to explore three themes through the lenses of law, economics and public policy. These themes are first, citizenship and belonging, secondly, market integration and finally, institutional arrangements and legal integration.

The discussions under the first theme examined issues such as the basis of socio-political membership in regional organisations (ASEAN, ECOWAS and MERCOSUR), specifically by exploring the sources and limits of ‘belonging’, and the challenge regional integration processes pose to the relationship between national identity, citizenship and socio-political membership. In addition, it also involved an evaluation of the current mobility and residence regime in South America and whether it lends itself favourably to a future South American citizenship.

For the second theme, participants considered the design of regional markets, the kind of relations they create between States and private actors and among private actors themselves and the normative projects underlying various regional organisations’ market integration efforts. Another matter deliberated was the relationship between intellectual property protection and free movement of goods in the EU/EEA, NAFTA and ASEAN. Finally, the participants explored ASEAN’s governing regime of foreign investment, by detailing the bilateral investment treaties entered into by ASEAN member states, exploring their progressive reshaping of the investment rules and considering the relationship between ASEAN and non-ASEAN states in the treatment of foreign investment.

The third theme discussed a wide range of issues. These included an examination of administrative organisation in South American regional organisations, the rise of regional parliaments in West Africa, their objectives, functions and powers, the benefits they bring about and the limits they face. In addition, participants considered an institutionalist conceptualisation of ASEAN regionalism, in light of the adoption of the ASEAN Charter and the growing use of law and institutions thereafter. Finally, the workshop examined the proliferation among formal regional organisations of regional courts that emulate the European Court of Justice. It proposed reasons for this proliferation and the observed geographical patterns thereof.