1 The Governance of Economies: the Dialectic of Globalization-Regionalization Bob Jessop This on-line version is pre-copyedited, preprint version. The published version can be found here: ‘The Governance of Economies: The Dialectic of Globalization- Regionalization’. In Regionalism and Subregionalism in East Asia: The Dynamics of China, edited by Glenn Drover, Graham Johnson and Julia Tao Lai Po-Wah, 17-34. Commack: Nova Science Publishers. * * * * * This chapter is not directly concerned with the emergence of sub-regionalism in East Asia or its relationship to the so-called 'Asian Crisis'. Instead it offers some conceptual and theoretical ground-clearing both to clarify what is at stake in studying sub-regionalism and to relate the latter phenomenon to the more general re-scaling of economic, political, and social processes that has recently been occurring. It suggests how sub-regionalism can be studied as the product of interaction among the wide range of processes and strategies that are often subsumed under the popular, if vague, labels of globalization and regionalization. And it proposes some ideas about how the resulting 'politics of scale' are being resolved through the restructuring of the state, politics, and policy-making. In this context my remarks are organized around three main issues. The first is how to deconstruct the 'chaotic concept' of globalization and, if possible, make it useful for studying sub-regionalism. I will argue that globalization is, in general, best interpreted as the complex resultant of many different processes rather than as a distinctive causal process in its own right. In this sense it will always be misleading to explain specific events and phenomena in terms of the process of 'globalization'. Nonetheless, in spite (and perhaps because) of this misleading quality, such narratives are often deployed to naturalize and/or legitimate certain kinds of economic, political, and social policy. Against this mystificatory tendency, however, I will argue that, if adequately re-specified, globalization trends can