Why asian regionalism matters

When: Oct 8 All day. Where: Washington D. What: Featuring: Dr. Email: [email protected]. Yet, skepticism about fledgling Asian regionalism should not obscure its contributions to regional order. One major contribution has been the socialization of China.

In the early s, China was wary of regional multilateral cooperation. Yet, China significantly revised its view of Asian regionalism and has now become a key player driving it. Without engagement in this nascent regionalism, China would have had little option but to deal with its neighbors on a strictly bilateral basis, which would have given it far more leverage and coercive ability over its individual neighbors at a time of rapidly expanding national wealth and power.

In that event, China's re-emergence as a great power might have been much rougher and more contentious. Many Chinese analysts agree that involvement in Asian regional institutions was a major learning experience for China with regards to wider international cooperation.

Moreover, Chinese participation in multilateralism encouraged at least some of its Southeast Asian neighbors to argue against a policy of containment, as initially envisaged by the U. Such an American policy, had it been undertaken as an alternative to either "engagement" or "hedging," would have stoked Chinese nationalism and evoked a more hard-line stance toward its neighbors.

Chinese cooperation on a host of transnational issues facing the region -- such as the Asian financial crisis, the SARS pandemic, and its approach to the South China Sea territorial dispute -- might have been more uncertain and less cooperative.

Skeptics may argue that the Chinese "charm offensive" that flowed in conjunction with its participation in regional multilateral institutions is little more than a "time-buying" tactic, until such time as China has built up its economic and military muscle to show its true aggressive colors.

They might also argue that China has not stopped dealing with its neighbors on a bilateral basis, and that instead of acting as a follower to ASEAN's leadership in regionalism, China now wants, or may soon want, to lead and mould such regionalism to its own advantage. Chinese desire to develop an East Asian community to the exclusion of the U. There is thus but a thin line separating the Chinese charm offensive from a de facto Chinese sphere of influence.

But such skepticism can be challenged. Which country would totally eschew bilateralism in its foreign affairs? And which country, great power or not, would forsake aspirations to some sort of a leadership role in the international arena, at least over some key issue areas? And while China may have initially made some strategic calculations about its interest in regional participation, it is not immune to the logic of socialization and learning fostered through the habits of dialogue and continuous interaction.

Chinese policymakers are aware of the costs of switching from a policy of engagement to a posture of confrontation, thereby violating the normative commitments that they have assumed by signing onto ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, or the Declaration on a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea.

To be sure, such instruments are not enforceable, but their violation would carry reputational and diplomatic costs that no major power, whether rising or sitting, can afford to ignore. Asian regional groups are not problem-solving or law-enforcing mechanisms, but norm-making and socializing agents. In this respect, they do conform to the general model of international organizations, which generally lack coercive enforcement power, but act as instruments of socialization and legitimation.

Asian regionalism is often compared, mostly unfavorably, with the European variety. Yet, even the much-vaunted European Union is not without significant shortcomings. Both China and Russia are large "problem" countries confronting a group of small or medium-sized countries in their neighborhood, all of whom are worried about their potential for regional dominance. Frankel J Is a yen bloc forming in Pacific Asia? Accessed 25 June Accessed 2 Mar Am Econ Rev — Google Scholar. Haggard S Regionalism in Asia and the Americas.

Hsueh RY Who rules the international economy? Routledge, London, pp — Google Scholar. Kahler M International institutions and the political economy of integration.

Discussion paper no. Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo, p 2. Accessed 30 Apr Working paper series on regional economic integration no. Lee S Singapore trade bilateralism: a two track strategy.

Lincoln EJ East Asian economic regionalism. Such Pacific regionalism, however, was regarded with suspicion in influential quarters in South-East Asia as being intended to benefit rich countries, and to serve the interests of the West during the Cold War.

The decline in economic nationalism in Asia during the s, with a growing commitment to liberalization—as many economies struggled to cope with declining prices for their commodity exports—and a desire to promote both trade and international investment, made a range of Asian countries become more amenable to co-operative Asia-Pacific arrangements, at least in the economic sphere.

A consideration here was that in the s the USA was becoming an increasingly important market for many Asian countries. Such a functionalist approach to regionalism was strongly evident in the founding of APEC. In all these cases the emphasis was being laid on economic objectives. Although the USA was not initially among the member economies, US participation had been anticipated from the beginning, and was welcomed by every country with the exception of Malaysia.

Membership of APEC has been unwieldy, providing little or no foundation for identity regionalism. In terms of geographic positioning, economic scale, governmental system, ruling ideology and cultural traditions, the different countries or economies in this organization convey no impression of forming a cohesive or natural community.

In the development of APEC, little emphasis was placed on institutions. Even the creation of a secretariat had to wait until , and it was then given little autonomy or authority. In terms of identity regionalism, membership of an Asian community is far more problematic for Australia. The USA wanted to bring about trade liberalization through the reduction of tariffs and of a range of other impediments; many Asians saw the USA as unwilling to reform its own trade arrangements, and were also wary of acting too quickly and without consensus.

The East Asian including Japanese priority tended to be economic co-operation, rather than trade liberalization. Malaysia sought to limit economic liberalization within APEC, including giving support to an expansion in membership to include Russia, for instance making the organization even more unwieldy.

An APEC landmark development was the Bogor Declaration of , in which APEC leaders agreed to achieve free and open trade and investment by for developed countries, and by for developing countries. Although an ambitious objective, the different member countries interpreted the agreed aims in varying ways, and the acceptance within the APEC organization of the principle of flexibility gave these differences real force.

Some countries wished to move more slowly towards liberalization, while others sought exemptions such as agriculture. By the demanding agenda of the Eminent Persons Group had so annoyed many of the Asian member economies that the Group was dissolved. In retrospect, APEC experienced its worst setback in the Asian financial crisis of —98, which affected Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and many other regional economies.

APEC failed here to identify with the Asian pain, and its lack of effective action sharpened the impression of prioritizing Western, rather than Asian, interests. Another area in which a Western agenda was perceived to be too dominant was the APEC initiative in moving beyond economic issues. Following the 11 September attacks, counter-terrorism became a further non-economic theme in APEC. Other APEC initiatives were taken in events security planning, financial transactions, travel security and cyber-security.

Advances in economic co-operation have also helped security institution building in the Asia-Pacific context. Like its economic predecessors, CSCAP welcomed government officials, nominally in their private capacities, and also sought to be relevant to government, and in particular to contribute to state-to-state regional co-operation.

Finally, CSCAP borrowed from PECC in being structured on the basis of national committees and working groups—the latter bringing together specialists from a range of countries to study and make recommendations on specific regional problems.

Singapore, in particular, saw such an institution as a way of helping to maintain US strategic involvement in Asia. Whatever practical advantages it may have offered, the proposal met with opposition and sometimes hostility in Asia. The new institution was seen as unnecessary by many observers, and also as a challenge to Asian, especially ASEAN, projects.

In many interpretations its geographic reach runs from the western part of the Indian Ocean to the most eastern parts of the Pacific. For some commentators it is merely a geostrategic concept—a framing device that recognizes trade flows, and the importance of oceans—but for others it is a new experiment in regional architecture, firmly incorporating the USA.

It has also been highlighted and defined in different ways in India, Japan and Indonesia. They referred in particular to the creation of infrastructure—a project that was perceived in some quarters to have the potential to compete with ambitious infrastructure initiatives of China.

In South-East Asia there is also anxiety in some quarters about an Indo-Pacific project, seeing it as a possible threat to ASEAN-led regionalism see below , and an indication of a growing and dangerous contest between major powers. Vivekananda visited Japan; Okakura spent a year in India. Initially, there was resistance in China to ideas of Asian unity, partly because of historic Chinese disdain towards many Asian peoples, but in the s the nationalists—led by Sun Yat-Sen—began to speak of an Asian spiritual unity.

Japan encouraged this sentiment, inviting Asian students to Japanese universities and forming groups such as the Pan-Asiatic Association to foster intraregional relations. It could be argued today that while the modern nation state system of Asia was largely a product of Western colonial influence, region building in Asia owes much to Japan. In the ensuing decades—as Asia became engulfed in the Cold War, with divisions between communist, anti-communist and neutral countries—Asian regionalism made less progress.

What did emerge was a narrower, South-East Asian regionalism—although this smaller region had developed very little sense of identity, and encompassed immense cultural and political diversity. Historically, in mainland South-East Asia there had been a range of both large and small Theravada Buddhist kingdoms large 19th-century capitals included Bangkok and Mandalay and an expanding Confucian state, Viet Nam.

The Archipelago comprised the Philippines, long under Spanish domination, and a multitude of Muslim sultanates—some tiny, river-based polities with populations of only a few thousand. Most of South-East Asia had come under Indian cultural influence in the early centuries ce, but the expansion of Islamic influence, commencing in about the 14th century, was limited largely to the Archipelago.

Siam remained independent, but the building of the modern nation state of Thailand nevertheless owed much to French and British tutelage.

Western colonialism brought regional unity of one type, with the spread of the idea of nationalism and the nation state, but in other ways the differences between European political and legal systems meant further division. The territorial borders of the colonial states also contrasted with the more elastic borders of the old kingdoms, and tended to impose limits where there had once been fluidity in movements of people. During the Second World War the region was given an administrative basis for unity.

SEATO was never perceived to be locally driven, and this was one of the reasons that even the USA was soon pessimistic about its future. It was dissolved in During this period potentially more productive initiatives were emerging from within the region.

As it turned out, only Thailand and the Philippines could be convinced to join, and the organization was short-lived, lasting only from to The issue of regional identity was approached with much seriousness.

Sharpening tension between the three member countries of Maphilindo over the formation of Malaysia in —in particular over the incorporation of Sarawak and North Borneo in the new state—made this another short-lived exercise, but the initiative did demonstrate a concern for cultural substance in region building, a continuing South-East Asian theme in the decades ahead.