The crisis of the post-war order led to the emergence of a new global political structure. This new global political structure made obsolete the classical Westphalian concept of a system of sovereign states to conceptualize world politics. The concept of sovereignty became looser and the old legal definitions of the ultimate and fully autonomous power of a nation-state are no longer meaningful. Sovereignty, which gained meaning as an affirmation of cultural identity, has lost meaning as power over the economy. All regional integration projects during the Cold War were built on the Westphalian state system and were designed to serve economic growth as well as security motives in their assistance to state building goals. Regional integration and globalization are two phenomena that have challenged the pre-existing global order based upon sovereign states since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The two processes deeply affect the stability of the Westphalian state system, thus contributing to both disorder and a new global order.