The Politics of Normative Arguing in Regional Organizations

Abstract

This chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological framework of the book. Existing empirical analyses in Comparative Regionalism have not systematically acknowledged that regional organizations have developed over time in a dynamic context of understandings about the rightful conduct of regional politics. In view of this shortcoming, I suggest that the conceptual apparatus of the English School of International Relations provides a more historically and sociologically informed picture of regional institutional configurations. In this perspective, regionally specific primary institutions shape the possibilities for change in the secondary institutions of regional organizations by constituting spaces for normative arguing. At the same time, the discursive practices carried out in such spaces reproduce and potentially transform the primary institutions. Innovative institutionalization practices that capitalize on tensions between primary institutions or external shocks can change the institutional pathways of regional organizations at critical junctures. However, how exactly primary institutional ideas translate to secondary institutions for regional organizations, and whether tensions and shocks drive or subvert regional institution building, is contingent on how actors use them in their normative arguments.