Regionalism, Regionalization, and the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation

The Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) has set into motion an economic regionalization process in an area in which economic, social, cultural, geopolitical, and religious forces have created countless barriers to collective action and cooperation.' The span and promise of the initiative are suggested by its membership (Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine) and by the number of countries that have been interested in its mission and applied for observer status (Austria, Belarus, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Tunisia, and the United States). This organization deserves special attention not only for the region's importance in terms of natural resources, energy supplies, food supply chains, and security, but also because it offers a window to the complex challenges and opportunities of articulating a regional identity in an area which is notoriously heterogeneous in terms of cultures, values, and religions. Last but not least, it is an exemplary case study that both its successes and failures may offer significant lessons for other similar initiatives in other parts of the world. All of the above combine to make it deserve special attention in a volume dedicated to the study of the Black Sea area.

This chapter is an attempt to overview and to assess BSEC within the regional context and to understand its chances of success as a vehicle of economic cooperation and regionalization. The assessment will use a distinctive approach in the sense that, besides the customary overview of the empirical realities on the ground it will employ as benchmarks the conceptual frameworks and insights given by the existing literature growing from or relevant for the study of economic regionalization.

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