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Introduction
The debate concerning regional power shifts, the rise of regional powers and the future configuration of the global order has been going on for a while. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, investment bankers promoted the concept of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, China, India) as the future emerging economic powers to prospective investors.1 Having started as an analytical concept, in June 2009 the BRICs organised their first presidential meeting, making constructivist colleagues in International Relations (IR) theory feel reaffirmed. The research departments of the investment banks prognosticated that at the end of the third or the during the fourth decade of the twenty-first century China will have overtaken the US as the largest economy, and that India may follow suit in the second half of the century.2 Other researchers have extended the BRIC concept to the BRIC plus3 and to the BRICSAM countries with the objective of putting more emerging (economic) powers on our radar screen.4 The latter include Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, some (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand) and Mexico.
In 1999 Samuel Huntington5 made the prediction that global politics will pass through one or two uni-multipolar decades before it enters a truly multipolar twenty-first century. With the global financial crisis underway since 2008, one may ask whether the previously mentioned trends with regard to a power shift and a reconfiguration of the global order will be reinforced.6 The crisis appears to benefit the rising powers, as the proliferation of multilateral and interregional forums (G 8, G 8 + 5, G 20, BRICs, IBSA, etc.) gives them more voice in the emerging global governance structure.7 Moreover, the new global governance structures tend to reflect both the relative political-economic weight of these rising powers as well as the fact that they represent different world regions in these more or less formalised international institutions. At the same time, one can observe a strengthening and extension of regional organisations, for example, in Asia8 and Latin America.9
So on the one hand, the claim seems to be substantiated - namely, that regions will play an important role in the future world order,...