Introduction

This book explores ideas and imaginations of large supranational regions referring themselves to cultural affinities and motivated by a variety of political interests and aspirations. Supranational regional integration is a prominent feature in world politics today. For those who discuss regionalization, the EU is often an exemplary case, but other regional orders have also arisen in different parts of the world and play increasingly important roles in global governance. These developments are reflected in a growing body of literature about world regions and different aspects of regionalization. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, studies of existing institutionalized (meso-)regions, elaborating specific theories of regionalization, have contributed to the creation of a dynamic discipline firmly established within the theory of international relations, including the recent interest in transregional entanglements and comparative studies ( Börzel & Risse, 2016 ). 1 Transnational regions are studied by historians and area specialists as well, and there is a recent trend to foster mutually beneficial dialogue between the theory-driven research of social sciences and evidence-based humanities research with its particular focus on specific regions in a diachronic perspective ( Press-Barnathan, Fine, & Kacowicz, 2019 ). Despite being driven by different disciplinary paradigms, studies of regions and regionalization mostly share an interest in a similar set of questions related to the economy, politics, and culture of how the existing regions have become more or less institutionalized.