Regional integration projects promise more than they deliver because the political will required to deliver on the promise is always less than the economic logic that motivates the promise.
Why Integration Promises Exceed Delivery
Regional integration — the pooling of sovereignty over specific policy domains among neighbouring states — promises significant economic and political benefits: larger markets, more efficient resource allocation, collective bargaining power in global negotiations, and the political stabilisation that comes from structural economic interdependence. These benefits are real when integration is achieved. The gap between the promise and the achievement is the consistent feature of regional integration projects across regions, because the political will required to actually pool sovereignty is almost always less than the economic logic that makes pooling appear beneficial.
The political will gap arises from the domestic political economy of integration. The benefits of regional integration are diffuse — spread across the population of the integrating region over time — while the costs are concentrated: the industries displaced by regional competition, the workers whose wages are affected by labour mobility, the politicians whose power is reduced by the transfer of sovereign authority to regional institutions. The concentrated costs generate more immediate and more organised political resistance than the diffuse benefits generate political support, which is the structural reason that integration commitments systematically exceed integration delivery.
What Determines How Much Integration Is Achieved
The degree of integration that regional projects actually achieve depends primarily on the distribution of power within the integrating group and the alignment of interests between the region's dominant economies. Regional integration projects led by a single dominant power — which can provide the public goods and absorb the disproportionate costs that integration requires — achieve more than projects among states of roughly equal power, where the burden-sharing disputes that integration creates are not resolved by a clear hierarchy. Integration projects between states whose economic interests are genuinely complementary achieve more than projects between states whose economic structures are sufficiently similar that integration primarily generates competition rather than complementarity.
Regional integration achieves what the region's politics will sustain, not what its economics would optimise. The gap between the two is the consistent measure of how much integration has been foregone because the political costs were too high, regardless of what the economic analysis recommended.
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