New Regionalism and Global Constitutionalism: Allies, Not Rivals

Abstract

The boom of regional intergovernmental institutions since the nineties – a reality usually known as “new regionalism” – raises several crucial questions about the nature of the current international system and about the role that international law plays in it. In this article, I will only deal with two of them. The first is the nature of the relations between the apparently contradictory processes of globalization and regionalism. The second interrogates the type of connections – both formal and substantial – between two allegedly opposite trends taking place in the contemporary international legal order: global constitutionalism on one side and the regional fragmentation of international law on the other.