Over the last decade, regional trade blocs have emerged thanks to trade pacts like Mercosur, which have expanded prosperity by reducing tariffs and other trade barriers. In the late '80s, the European Community's plans to create a Common Market, where members could trade tariff-free, was widely interpreted in the United States as exclusionary. The Common Market experience demonstrated the economic benefits to be gained by economic union. Soon other economic competitors huddled for the purpose of cloning what the Europeans had accomplished. Suddenly it began to look, to paraphrase old pol Tip O'Neill, that all economics was local.
Regionalism extends back to earliest recorded history.
Silk traffickers helped negotiate restrictive deals between Chinese warlords and heads of European feudal states, linking growers, processors, designers and merchants in centuries of multinational commerce. Traffickers in spices, spirits and other valuables created similar alliances. The European colonial powers were motivated largely by the desire to create competitor-free markets for their goods. Similarly, independence movements, like the one that led to the formation of the United States, were motivated as much by the desire for free trade as for any political principle. For all the heated rhetoric associated with revolutionary struggle, often economic ties with the colonial power remain.