For more than 60 years, scholars of Comparative Regionalism have struggled over how to deal with European integration and, more recently, the European Union (EU). Two polarised perspectives have dominated the debate (Acharya, 2016; Söderbaum, 2016). On one side, European integration is taken as the foundation and model, even the gold standard for conceptual development and theory-building, giving rise to numerous hub-and-spoke comparisons centred around the EU. On the other side, scholars reject the EU as the key referent due to its alleged uniqueness and the problem of EU-centrism, turning instead to exclusively non-European cases.