Regional integration in times of crises: power, institutional density and the people. A Conclusion

International audienceGlobal economic and financial turmoil has occurred over the last ten years and put stress on regional governability. European, Asian, Latin American – as the chapters of this collective volume have shown, but also African, North-American or Arab regional organisations have been confronted with a series of challenges. These included: finding new institutional designs to tackle questions of financial and economic difficulties, assure the internal survival of their member state economies, and addressing legitimacy problems. These crisis situations also provided opportunities in some cases. For instance, they allowed civil society organisations, as well as new institutions to emerge and, reinforce cooperation. These challenges were thus means to strengthen integration, but in some cases also weakened cooperation. Understood as phenomena that question the standard operating procedures of systems by creating a feeling of urgency, crisis situations lead stakeholders to react. And while regionalism is intimately linked to crisis situations which prominently figure amongst the main variables leading to the initial integration process (wars that make people understand the need for peaceful cooperation, external enemies threatening the peaceful development of countries, economic difficulties shared by a number of countries which require cooperation (Fioramonti 2012, Dosenrode 2012)), this collective volume has taken this question a step further. Our aim has been to systematically analyse whether financial and economic crises in particular influence regional integration