East Asian Regionalism Notes

East Asian Regionalism

INTRODUCTION

Nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War, scholars are still perplexed by the complex geopolitical realities that emerged in its wake. The fundamental question remains: Will the new world order be shaped primarily by state, regional or global forces and actors?

WHAT IS A ‘REGION’?

• Can refer to a geographical space; economic interaction, institutional or governmental jurisdiction, or shared socio-cultural affinities.

• Region is a ‘rubbery concept’ stretching above and below the administrative boundaries of states.

• Without a firm understanding of what constitutes a ‘region’, it becomes harder to analyse what regional integration is, as well as its desirability and achievability. It’s also harder to identify the relation between the development of East Asia as a region, and the development of the East Asia of the regions.

• ‘The underlying question is whether EA should be defined geographically (with accompanying criteria of historical experience, common values or civilizational perspectives) or functionally, based on contemporary interactions and interests’ [Evans].

Regional identity

• Benedict Anderson’s notion of nations as ‘imagined communities’ also applies to regions as there is no such thing as a ‘natural region’. All regions are socially constructed and politically contested, and must be constantly (re)negotiated through a process of regionalism to maintain its political expediency.

• The ‘ASEAN Way’ (& ’Asian Values’ discourse*) serves as an established/distinctive repository of cooperative norms – or ‘cognitive prior’ [Acharya] – that enables regional institutions to ‘socialize’ their members into distinctive patterns of interaction fosters a sense of regional Self/Other.

REGIONALISM VS. REGIONALISATION*

GLOBALIZATION VS. REGIONALISM (IN GENERAL)

Globalization – the internationalization of production*, capital flows and markets; the expansion of multilateral trading systems (e.g. WTO); and the diffusion of culture towards ‘a single borderless world’ [Scholte, 1997]

Reasons for the rise of ‘New Regionalism’ in the late 1980s:

1. End of the Cold War & confrontational alliance politics

2. Relative decline of US hegemony & the emergence of new major players (e.g. EU, Japan, China)

Several factors unique to the Asia-Pacific gave ‘new regionalism’ particular momentum there…

3. The defusing of ideological partitions in the region

• Achieved through the inclusion of socialist CLMV countries in the (hitherto capitalist) ASEAN bloc

4. The growth of regional production networks* following the 1985 Plaza Accord* and China’s ‘open-door’ economic reforms.

5. Changing domestic political settlements, with ‘liberal reformers’ gaining popularity against economic nationalists.

6. A region-wide recession in the mid-1980s, followed by the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, led governments to see regional integration as necessary for protecting Asia’s economic dynamism.

These events sparked two concurrent forceful tendencies: multilateralism and ‘new regionalism’ [Hettne, 2005]

Do regional trading agreements undermine the development of a (post-hegemonic) global economy/order characterized by multilateral trading systems?

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