Research Papers

Regional organizations have become an increasingly significant feature of the international system, and they are also increasingly developing external relations with other regional organizations. Thus far, state-centric IR theories have been used to try to explain these interregional relationships, but with poor results. The problem with the application of state-centric theories is that it makes the implicit assumption that regional organizations are unitary actors, like states, when we know that in reality this is not the case. The European Union has been conceptualized as an international actor, but frequently with the understanding that it is sui generis, and thus we cannot think of the other regional organizations that interact with the EU in a similar way. This paper attempts to address the ‘actor problem’, and the attendant Eurocentricism implicit in the study of interregionalism. It avoids the overly simplistic distinction between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism in favour of a conceptual model of actorness based on the material, ideational, and institutional aspects of regional organizations. The model is then applied to two case studies: the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Preliminary findings suggest that, although both regional organizations have relatively low actor capabilities in comparison to the EU, ECOWAS is the stronger actor of the two.