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Large-scale international regions comprising groups of states sharing a common political or economic philosophy. The best-known attempt at devising such a system of world regions is by S.B. Cohen who, in the context of the Cold War, proposed a fundamental twofold division of the globe.
The Trade-Dependent Maritime World comprised Western Europe, the Americas and most of Africa and Australasia, and was held together by a complex network of maritime trading links. The Eurasian Continental World was a land-based grouping with ideology rather than trade as the prime cohesive force. Cohen\'s model was an attempt to provide a more sophisticated and detailed successor to the heartland theory that was so popular in the early twentieth century, before it too was overtaken by events. The collapse and fragmentation of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s has rendered Cohen\'s crude twofold global division virtually meaningless. The emerging new order reflects a more complex pattern of regional trading blocs, such as the enlarged European Union and the ASEAN countries in Southeast Asia. (MB)
Suggested Reading Cohen, S.B. 1982: A new map of global geopolitical equilibrium. Political Geography Quarterly 1: 223-41. Cohen, S.B. 1992: Policy prescriptions for the post-Cold War world. Professional Geographer 44: 13-15. Michalak, W. and Gibb, R. 1997: Trading blocs and multilateralism in the world economy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87: 264-79. |
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