Countries are redefining geography and willingly forgetting history to get into any regional trade bloc they can. As long as such games were played by marginal trading powers all this was okay. The WTO faces a real and credible threat of irrelevance if the made scramble for regionalism does not abate. If the WTO s Qatar Ministerial Meeting fails, like the Seattle meeting, it may well sound the death knell of multilateralism in trade. The problem is not yet here, it is still there, but it is there.
Countries have for a long time redefined geography to suit geo-political and economic requirements.
Indeed, when countries of western Europe called themselves a European Union , that is what they did. Before the US became a superpower and started worrying about Japan and China, the world was divided in to seven continents and every student of geography knew where they began and ended. There was a continent called Asia which began somewhere near Istanbul and ended on the east coast of Japan. There was Australia and then Australasia, to take care of the island of the South Pacific. Then there was a North America and a South America.