Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This study is a rexamination of the relationship between soft power, economic success, regional hegemony, and path dependent development, focussing on the waxing and waning of EU regional hegemony and implications of the EU Brexit. The aim is to bring back consideration of the role of normative institutions in managing both state and regional cohesion in the face of the fragmenting tendencies of the uneven distributional impact of economic globalisation. The successes of EU Eastern enlargement, and the rise of regional economic powers exercising hard power, notably China and the US, have profoundly reshaped geopolitical relations, between core and periphery, states and regions, and the adequacy of theories on the effectiveness of regional hegemons in inter-state bargaining. Use of soft power acknowledges the importance of European integration, but relative weakness of the EU relative to the hard power of China and the US, has contributed to the dominance of neo-realist theory, and the relative side lining of institutionally conferred normative power and its exercise - though key features of both the bipolar international order and Eastern enlargement from a historical perspective. It is concluded from an analysis of theories of eastern enlargement and the management of the Brexit “shrinkage, that a key and neglected dynamic in theorising on regional hegemonic power is the ability of hegemonic powers to unite countries where political cohesion is adversely affected by the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of globalisation.