It’s probably fair to say that global organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have failed to turn the world into a unified, coherent block of like-minded parties. There are various reasons for that, the major one being that these organizations can hardly be suspected of ensuring the best interest of all of their members (read Joseph Stiglitz or Naomi Klein to know more about this).
Regardless of the question whether such a unified world would be a good thing or not, the conclusion is that -until it does- partnerships between countries will become increasingly important, and hence will be subject to some transformation in the future.
The current state of these regional alliances looks like this:
Except for the scattered Africa, most of the trading blocs follow the logic of the geographic continents. Judging from this map, two moves would likely occur somewhere in the next ten years.
For one, China is currently part of no group at all. It doesn’t have to, for now. It has easy access to most of the worldwide markets, and its internal market is big and booming enough to keep it safe of any need for further integration with any other region. But, for the sake of argument, say that the US and European markets would become tougher with Chinese exports. Not such an unrealistic scenario. Where would China turn to? It ‘owns’ Africa already, the US and Europe would be closed, so they’d have to turn to India, Russia or South-East Asia. In either scenario, it might be a blow for Western export markets.
A second oddity is the European Union. It’s the biggest single consumption market in the world for now. But it’s hardly a noteworthy political power at a global scale –even if the European countries would have a single foreign policy, which isn’t the case now despite of its lip service, it would still have to cope with its limited geographic reach. An extension to the East (difficult and strange, but not unfeasible) would make sense.
The video beneath gives some proof of point. Made by the World Economic Forum, it was meant as an introduction to a conference between Europe and Central Asia. But, between the lines, on sees an effort to show that both regions have many stakes in common:
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