ISS hosted a talk with Thomas Renard, Senior Fellow from Royal Institute for International Relations, Brussels, on August 30, 2013. The talk was chaired by the Chairman of the institute Ambassador (Retd.) Gul Hanif. Dr. Ahmad Rashid Malik, Senior Research Fellow conducted the talk. The proceedings started with a brief introduction of the speaker followed by his views on Pakistan’s experience of regional integration as a member of SAARC.
Thomas Renard, in his hour long meeting with the researchers talked about rebalancing the regional integration through bilateral routes since multilateralism is in a dead lock and regionalism is slowing down, whereas bilateralism is on the rise. It was interesting to hear him talk about the new fancy concept of ‘lateralism’ and ‘trilateralism’, which he basically referred to three layers of EU’s strategy to promote “regional integration”, i-e (i) regionalism (ii) bilateralism (iii) multilateralism.
The talk ended with an interaction session whereby seeking from Pakistani scholars for how could EU help in promoting multilateral cooperation between Pakistan and EU.
