REGIONALISM A CATALYST TO GLOBALIZATION OR A CONSTRAINT: A SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE KASHMIR ISSUE IN INDIA

Abstract

The Global politics has been witnessing to an influx of  regional cooperation schemes in the post 1980 period marking it as  one of the most significant developments of the modern era. As a consequence, nations such as the United States, Canada, Japan and China, which had hitherto showed little interests in regionalism in the post-World War II period, have embraced regionalism with momentous enthusiasm in the Post cold war era. [1]What is the justification for this recent attraction in regionalism? At least four developments seem to have come together in the late 1980s to create a drive toward regionalism:

[1] In North America, a FTA between the United States and Canada was signed in 1989; this agreement grew into NAFTA when Mexico joined in 1994. Since 2001, china and Japan have been actively engaged in signing number of FTAs with ASEAN countries. In the post-2001 period, ASEAN+3(that is 10 members of ASEAN plus Japan, China and South Korea) has emerged as a significant regional cooperative arrangement in Asia. For various regional cooperative arrangements and initiatives in North east Asia, See Rozman, G(2004) Northeast Asia’s stunted Regionalism: Bilateral Distrust in the shadow of Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.