Facets of Integration: The Role of Ideas in Shaping European and East Asian Unities (Identity) (Essay‪)‬

Issues relating to integration can barely be qualified as understudied. this may partly account for the current trend of misplacing the term with respect to nearly all forms of state-to-state rapprochement, including those that should be more accurately described as co-operation or a union. Most authors draw chiefly on the European experience only to refer in passing to the instances of integration activities outside of Europe. Meanwhile political and economic integration projects define international-political landscape well beyond the European Union. Today they encompass North and South America, East and South Asia, and with reservations--even the former Soviet space. these are tangible and complex political, economic, cultural and ideological processes, problems, contradictions and results. We continue to accumulate varied and diverse empirical material, and to grasp it means significantly enriching our notions of integration patterns and of possibilities of setting up integration management schemes in all corners of the globe.