Keynote Speech, 3rd GARNET Annual Conference, Bordeaux, 17-20 September 2008. GARNET stands for Network of Excellence on Global Governance, Regionalisation and Regulation: The Role of the EU, a research program funded by the European Union.
Amitav Acharya
Allow me to begin by thanking GARNET, its Chief Scientist Richard Higgott, and the visibly and I should say justifiably, proud leader of the local organising committee Professor Daniel Bach for inviting me to deliver this keynote at GARNET’s 3rd Annual Conference in the lovely city of Bordeaux. During its brief existence, GARNET has scored many successes, but none more impressive than in ability transform itself into a truly global network of scholars interested in regionalism, regional integration, regional orders and I should add, regional worlds. If in doubt, just look at the conference program, where the European Union and its affairs are only a tiny percentage of the panels, and where Africa rules the waves.
Let me at the outset clarify what I mean by the term ‘regional worlds’. This is a term coined by the now defunct Regional World project at the University of Chicago. In that project, regional world was a somewhat post-modern formulation that directed attention to regions that not only self-organize their economic, political and cultural interactions and identity, but also produce their own mental image of other regions and the global space in general. In other words, it was an inside-out, as opposed to an outside-in view of the role of regions in world politics.
While accepting this view of regions, I also use the term regional world to cast a broader net than either regional order, which is largely security-oriented, or regionalization, which has a heavy economic undertone, or regionalism, which carries a serious political and institutionalist bias. Regional world subsumes regional order and regional institutions, as well as economic regionalization. Moreover, regional worlds are not just material constructs. They offer sites for ideational and normative contestations, resistance and compromises, involving both states and civil societies which transcend regional boundaries and overlap into other regional and global spaces. Regional worlds are not autonomous entities, nor purely subsets of global dynamics. They create, absorb and repatriate ideational and material forces that make world politics and order.
This is an opportune time to rethink regional worlds. American hegemony is in decline. The extent of this decline may be debated, and what comes in its place is at yet not clear, as I will comment on later. But what is less contestable is that the end of the so-called ‘unipolar moment’ is happening and is a likely catalyst of major shifts in the purpose and role of international institutions and order.
The question I am most concerned in this talk is how does it affect regional worlds?
A good deal of recent work on regionalism and regional orders was written against the backdrop of America’s post-Cold War ascendancy or assumed a return to multipolarity whose structural consequences could involve heightened regional disorder. But I argue that a fresh look at the changing forms of regionalism and regional order is warranted. One important question is whether the end of US hegemony might open the door to the rise of regional hegemonies such as East Asia under Chinese, South Asia under Indian, the Caucasus and Baltics under Russian, and southern Africa under South African, west Africa under Nigerian and south America under Brazilian, dominance. Would the end of American hegemony be replaced by such distinct or over-lappng regional hegemonies, thereby fulfilling a vision once articulated by the likes of Winston Churchill or Walter Lippmann who thought world order is best attained through regional spheres of influence? Or would the post-American regional orders be essentially non-hegemonic shaped by varying equations between the material and ideational influences among local powers, and the new normative aspirations and institutional arrangements of multilateral actors like the EU and East Asian regional groups? How would such post-hegemonic regional institutions and orders look like and what will be their impact on global order in the coming decades?
In addressing the above issues and questions, I will cover three areas. First, I will offer a brief analysis of the relationship between hegemony and regional orders. Next, I will look at the main consequences of the emerging post-unipolar era for regional worlds. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the shape of post-hegemonic regional worlds in Asia and Europe.
Regional worlds have historically a special relationship with the concept and practice of hegemony. Here, I define hegemony as preponderant power, including the ability to shape the economic linkages and foreign and security policy approaches of other nations, with both material (economic and military) and ideational influence. The special relationship between hegemony and regional worlds can be summed up in four dimensions.
First, hegemons define the boundaries of regions and even name them. There is plenty of evidence of this. Consider the term Southeast Asia, a region I am most familiar with. The term Southeast Asia before Lord Louis Mountbatten of Britain, the regional hegemon of East of Suez, was appointed to head a newly formed military cluster called the Southeast Asia Command established by the Allied Powers to fight and defeat the Japanese in the Second World War. John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer called East Asia the Chinese culture area. European colonialism not only delineated national boundaries, but also, and just as artificially, regional ones.
Second, all the three major dimensions of regional worlds, namely regional institutions, regionalization, and regional order, have been shaped by hegemonic powers, especially American hegemony. In terns of institutions, this was especially true of what some of us have called hegemonic regionalism, comprising Cold War alliances such as NATO, Warsaw Pact, Southeast Asian Treaty Organization and Central Treaty Organization. Admittedly such hegemonic regionalism has been a fragile entity, only NATO survives today, but a heavy political cost to the prospects for stable peace in Europe. More on NATO later. Even more general purpose regional institutions and informal or weakly institutionalised regionalisms have been shaped by hegemonic power, a claim made most recently in Peter Katzenstein’s recent book: A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. In this book, Katznestein argues that The Organization of American States, the Commonwealth of Independent (or should I say not so independent) States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are other obvious examples of regionally hegemonic influence, and realist interpretations claim that without the US security umbrella, the European Union would not have achieved the level of integration that it has managed so far.
US hegemony also shaped regionalization, the other element of regional worlds, including regional production structures. Katzenstein’s world of regions is made by the twin and complementary processes of internationalization and regionalization. In his framework, Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia figure as ‘core states’ of the American imperium in advancing regionalization. And Japanese aid and investment as been a major spur for East Asia’s economic growth. Similarly, regional order in both East Asia and Europe, is attributed to the availability of regional collective goods provide by American hegemony, such as protection against communist threat during the Cold War and against strategic uncertainty since its end, and development opportunities tied to access to the US market.
It is only in the ideational domain that US hegemony is said to have been less important in shaping regional worlds. Norms and identities that shape regional worlds have been largely local in origin, even though they have been inflected with American popular culture. In many cases, regional identities and regionally conceived norms and values have clashed with American hegemony, resulting in contestations and resistance and offering alternative pathways to regional institution- and order-building. But even there, neoliberal economic ideational clusters such as those associated with the Washington consensus, have characterized regionalization around the world, and it will be especially interesting if they survive the end of the unipolar moment.
With this brief background on the close nexus between American hegemony and regional worlds, let me now turn to the potential consequences of the end of unipolarity. While the relative decline of the US can no longer be in doubt, what is more debatable is what sort of order is replacing the unipolar moment. Most people had earlier assumed that it would be multipolarity and debated whether multipolarity would prove more or less destabilising.
More recently, think-tankers and public intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic have come some fashionable terms: ‘apolar’ (Niall Ferguson), ‘non-polar’ (Richard Haas), ‘post-American’ (Fareed Zakaria). The Economist magazine proposes ‘neo-polar’. I will give you two days to think about it and you may all come up with your own terms of how to describe the emerging or future world order. May be GARNET could organise a competition among its members to come with a term, which I suppose would be far more interesting than the recent formulations public intellectuals have come up with.
This is because the formulations apolar, nonpolar or neopolar all miss a crucial point: the regional context of world politics and security. Despite its recent move in Georgia, Russia is, and likely to remain, essentially a regional hegemon, with its true coercive power confined to the Caucasus, Baltics and perhaps central Asia. The same can be said of China and India, as well as Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria. None of them, nor the EU, will become a true global power in the sense the US and the USSR were during the Cold War, or the European powers such as Spain, Britain and France were (to varying degrees) when they controlled vast colonial empires. The EU is also essentially a regional actor, its influence beyond Europe is marginal except perhaps in a normative/civilian sense. The fact is that no great power in the coming world will have the ability to have its say over distant regions because of the countervailing local influence of the regionally-dominant powers. The United States may be an exception, but even here, it’s hard to see the US decisively shaping the strategic and economic future of Asia without cooperation from China, Japan or India, or over the strong objection of any of them.
Hence, if one must stick to the language of polarity, the coming world is better described as one of ‘regiopolarity’, rather than multipolarity or non-polarity or neo-polarity. As for me, I have come up with the following: We and our descendants are likely to live (and die) in a polycentric, multiversal, regiopolar world order.
What sort of regional worlds would define the post-unipolar era? Will we see a perceptible decline in the ability of the US to shape regional orders, institutions and production structures around the world? In East Asia, regional production and division-of-labour is increasingly centred around China, which challenges a crucial assumption of Katzenstein’s Japanocentric core state formulation. In Europe, the growing demand for an autonomous or semi-autonomous defence identity may be another, albeit limited, example, as I shall explain latter. In East Asia, the US ability to shape regional discourses and institutions, never all that strong, has suffered further blows with the advent of the East Asia community idea that excludes the US. The fault-line that emerged between Germany under Shroeder and France under Chirac on the one had and the Bush White House on the other over Iraq is another example of this above trend, although regime change in these two key European countries has reversed the transatlantic feud to a considerable extent.
But perhaps the most significant questions about regional worlds in the post-unipolar era is this: will open space for the rise of regional hegemonies. In his Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearshimer argues that great powers, including rising or aspiring great powers seek to achieve regional hegemony, a goal more necessary and attainable than global hegemony. To Mearsheimer, China is the obvious candidate for such regional hegemony in the post-Cold War period. But Mearsheimer, who once warned that post-Cold War multipolar Europe would go ‘back to the future’, would have been delighted by the obliging aggression committed by Putin’s Russia against Georgia. Can we take the Russian attack on Georgia is taken by some as providing a foretaste of the approaching era of regional hegemonies?
I should pause here and clarify that I do not imply that the presence of a dominant power in a region is a negative factor in regional world management. Such powers can play constructive roles. South African mediation in Zimbabwe, although belated and under international pressure, would hopefully contribute to positive change in that country and the region. China is increasingly recognised as a responsible and constructive regional player in Asia. The positives of the role of Japan, India and China in the economic and security affairs of the Asian regional world outweighs the negatives.
But certain types of regional hegemony are bad for regional world management and recent events involving NATO expansion and Russia seem to fit. Certainly, NATO’s revival in response to Georgia raises the prospects for competing regional worlds emerging in Europe. It certainly casts shadow over the idea of a non-hegemonic regional world in Europe that some had hoped for. It does so in two ways, by stimulating bandwagoning with Russia by some of its weaker neighbours and thereby cementing a Russian sphere of influence, and more importantly, by reviving US interest and hence power over Europe. The EU is not without influence and I am not writing it off as a shaper of regional order. Sarkozy’s energetic if belated diplomacy in getting Russian troops out of Georgia is something East Asian leaders should certainly try to emulate. Present Asian institutions and their leaders are apt to forsake not only preventive diplomacy, but also crisis and conflict management in the manner of the EU presidency.
To be sure, the extent of the Russian challenge to Europe’s regional world can be overstated. Russia is ghost of the Soviet Union. It faces a declining population, with some estimates projecting a fall from 141 million today to below 100 million by 2050. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20268426/). Its combined GDP is a fraction of that of the West. It has no expansionist ideology, but a narrow nationalism. Some may even argue that if the European Union can have its own ‘neighbourhood policy’, why not Russia?
Can the EU’s growing integration and conscious pursuit of a common foreign and defence policy, counter the return of European security to NATO’s hegemonic umbrella? Lately, it has become fashionable to speak of the EU as a normative power, or a normative superpower challenging American hegemony. But this view faces a major contradiction. This has to do with the fact that the vast majority of EU members are also part of NATO, which is nobody’s idea of a civilian power. NATO may not be a “European” regional institution in the strict sense of the term, but it’s an integral part of Europe’s regional security and institutional architecture and hence part of the European regional world. 19 of NATO’s 26 members belong to the EU. Only six of EU’s 27 member countries are not members of NATO. Speaking the language of normative power while sticking dearly to an expanding NATO allows EU members to have best of both the worlds: speak moralpolitik on certain type of world order issues such as human security and peace-building, while practicing realpolitik on matters of critical national and regional security. The fact that the current EU foreign and defence policy Chief, Javier Solana, is also a former secretary-general of NATO, only compounds this perception, at least in the minds of non-Europeans such as myself. This contradiction and perceptions of double standards, is likely to grow as the EU rethinks its approach to Russia in the wake of Georgia in concert with NATO. Unless there is meaningful separation between the foreign policy and security strategies between EU and NATO, the talk of EU as a moral superpower will lack conviction, at least to outsiders.
Among these outsiders are Asian analysts and policymakers. There is an interesting, and for some people like Kishore Mahbubani, even delicious, irony in recent alarms in the West about Russia in the European regional world. At the dawn of the post-Cold War, Russia seemed much less of a concern to the international community than China was to East Asia and the world. Yet, a decade and half later, China seems to be much better integrated into Asian regional world than Russia is to European regional world. The Russian attack on Georgia will give boundless pleasure to NATO protagonists. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO had searched for a mission to justify its continued existence: from peace-building to counter-terrorism, but none is likely to revitalise it than a resurgent and imagined Russian threat to democratic Europe.
Let me elaborate. The Russian invasion of Georgia, following conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, shows that peace in Europe can be overstated, while stability in Asia can be under-stated. In Europe, the expansion of NATO’s turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, triggering a Soviet threat that liberals and constructivists had banished from their collective mental horizon, but which neo-realists had fervently hoped for. The Georgian crisis also says something about EU and OSCE, which despite the elaborate toolkit of confidence-building, preventive diplomacy, early warning mechanisms, high representatives, etc., failed to prevent what may turn out to be the most serious breach of international order since the US invasion of Iraq, or even the entire post-Cold War period. By contrast, Asia’s supposedly weak and ineffectual talk shops, by discouraging an American-led containment of China, by making multilateralism palatable to Beijing and using the resulting Sino-US restraint to soften the region’s balance of power geopolitics, have prevented a Georgia in the region.
This suggests, if further evidence was really necessary, the need to rethink our Eurocentric assumptions about what makes for effective regionalism and in what ways do regional institutions contribute to security and wellbeing. Despite being consistently disparaged by Western scholars for their failure to emulate European and Atlantic institutions, Asia’s regional institutions have arguably done a better job of dealing with a rising China than Europe’s in dealing with Russia. IR scholars and European and American Policy makers who lauded NATO expansion for its role in diffusing liberal-democratic norms and identity to East European states, and legitimised the US’s determined effort to deny the alliance the decent burial it certainly deserved in post-Cold War Europe, forgot George Kennan’s warning that its expansion would be “a policy error of historic importance”. Asia, which had long eschewed the NATO option by rejecting all forms of multilateral collective defense, avoided any similar provocation to China. NATO expansion directly contradicted OSCE’s doctrine of common security, or security with, rather than against, the adversary. Asians regionalists, whose doctrine of cooperative was borrowed from OSCE, actually imbibed it and followed it in spirit, if not in its legalistic form (CBMs, high representatives for minorities, etc) by offering a genuine hand of engagement to China. The provocation of NATO expansion aside, the OSCE’s military and political intrusiveness might have aggravated Russian regime insecurity to an extent that ARF or other ASEAN-based regional institutions could not do to Chinese regime insecurity.
What about regional hegemony in Asia itself? Some may argue that East Asia may turn out to be more of a hegemonic regional world than Europe. This is in keeping with the conventional historical view of East Asia as a region where hegemony is more ‘normal’ than Europe, which invented Westphalian decentralisation and where balance of power politics is a more natural tendency. Recent writings suggest that the end of the Cold War in Europe would mean the continent going ‘back to a future’ of multipolar rivalry and competitive balancing, while the rise of China would mean East Asia going back to its own future in the form of a return to Sinocentrism. A closer examination of the two scenarios is worthwhile.
Two scenarios of a regional hegemony in Asia have emerged. The first comes from Mearsheimer, a structural realist. Mearsheimer believes that China, as great powers more generally, is likely to pursue a regional hegemony, and seek to establish a sphere of influence over its immediate neighbours, which might conceivably include Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Some Western analysts already see evidence of China seeking such hegemony, arguing that only a thin lines separates China’s recent charm offensive and a Chinese Monroe Doctrine.
In contrast to the neorealist scenario of a coercive Asian hegemony under China, the other scenario of hegemonic Asia is a benign one.
This perspective assumes that East Asia is a region where Confucian hierarchy in the domestic sphere and regional hierarchy in the manner of the Chinese tributary system go hand in hand. David Kang has argued that historically, when China was powerful and wealthy, Asia was stable and prosperous. Now that China is rising again, Asia as a region will also attain greater peace and prosperity by bandwagoning with China. This will create a hierarchical regional order, a milder and more benign form of hegemony, that once prevailed in East Asia under the tributary system.
It is hard to find evidence to support either view. There is little evidence that Chinese is pursuing regional hegemony, a sphere of influence of coercive or benign kind. There is no evidence of a Chinese Monroe Doctrine in Asia that seeks to exclude the United States. On the contrary, China accepts US military presence in the region as a fact of life. Chinese power projection beyond its immediate South China Sea zone is limited. Unlike the United States in the heydays of the Monroe Doctrine, China not only accept non-intervention, but may well be its single biggest exponent in the contemporary international system. This also negates the benign hierarchy scenario proposed by Kang. The classical hierarchy with China as the Middle Kingdom occurred in an era when Westphalian sovereignty with its emphasis on non-interference and sovereign equality of states had not been invented. Many Asian states, whether larger players like Japan and India or middle powers such as Vietnam and South Korea, are not bandwagoning with China, as David Kang contends. Moreover, in the classical tributary system, there was no United States of America.
To sum up, Asia will not take the path of Europe in either having an expanding hegemonic alliance like NATO, nor would it necessarily fulfil Mearsheimer’s projections about Chinese expansionism and its pursuit of an Asian Monroe Doctrine. This adds further complexity to the growing debate and literature on comparing Europe and Asia as two regional worlds. It not only challenges those who use Europe’s past instability as a guide for Asia’s future, but also those who see Europe’s institutions as a model of Asia and other parts of the world. Hordes of European scholars and millions, if not billions of EU funding notwithstanding, it is increasingly clear that this is never going to the true. The EU is too distinctive in its own history and arguably too successful in its project of supranational integration to be a model for anyone but for its own future generations who stand to lose the historical memory of past national rivalries. In other parts of the world, including where where neo-Westphalianism trumps post-Westphalianism, the EU record of war avoidance can at best serve as an inspiration, rather than a model. Recognizing and critically analysing such variations in geopolitical destinies and institutional trajectories and practices in regional worlds may be the best message that GARNET’s annual conferences and other events can pass to the international community and scholars and policymakers as we make the uncertain transition to a post-unipolar world. And I wish GARNET all success in this effort. Thank you very for your time.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
The Future of Asian Security Order: Confucius and Kautilya Meet Kant
Keynote Speech Delivered at Conference on “Still the Asian Century”, University of Birmingham, 10-12 September 2008
Amitav Acharya
1. Will 21st century Asia be peaceful and prosperous or divided and dangerous. In the academic literature, thinking about Asia’s future security order has been shaped to a large extent by contrasting the conditions and prospects of peace in Europe with those in Asia. As we all know, Asia always comes out second best in such exercises. In reality, however, post-Cold War Europe has been less stable than post-Cold War Asia, especially if judged in terms of initial expectations and forecasts. As we have learnt from the Russian invasion of Chechnya, following conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, peace in Europe can be overstated, while stability in Asia can be under-stated. In Europe, the expansion of NATO’s turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, triggering a Soviet threat that liberals and constructivists had banished from their memory but neorealists had fervently hoped for. Europe’s much celebrated institutions with their elaborate toolkit of confidence-building, preventive diplomacy and early warning mechanisms failed to prevent what may turn out to be the most serious breach of international order since the US invasion of Iraq, or even the entire post-Cold War period. By contrast, Asia’s supposedly weak and ineffectual talk shops, by discouraging an American-led containment of China, making multilateralism palatable to Beijing and using the resulting Sino-US restraint to soften the region’s balance of power geopolitics, have prevented a Georgia in the region. Against this backdrop, there is a need to rethink our Eurocentric assumptions about what shapes the future of Asia’s security order and what would it look like. What follows is a preliminary attempt, in rather broad and conceptual terms, to do just that.
Will Europe’s Past be Asia’s Future?
2. The most influential articulation of the pessimistic or ‘divided and dangerous’ view of the future of Asian security order was offered by Aaron Friedberg in his 1993/94 article in International Security. His article, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in Multipolar Asia”, is probably the most well-known and influential article on the future of Asian security order. It views multipolarity as prone to conflict, but holds that peace in post-Cold War Europe would still be maintained by certain mitigating factors, including economic interdependence, multilateral institutions and shared liberal democratic domestic political systems. But the absence or near absence of these factors would render Asia ripe for rivalry. This argument was flawed for at least three reasons, which I briefly enumerate.
3. First, history suggests no necessary causal relationship between multipolarity and conflict, as Friedberg Instead, Karl Deutsch and David Singer argue, multipolar systems do contain their own stabilising mechanisms, including prospects for developing multiple channels of interaction.
4. Second, the ripe for rivalry thesis vastly understated the extent of economic interdependence and institutional mechanisms in the region, even in the early 1990s. More important, the absence of European-style institutions in Asia did not imply the absence of shared normative frameworks. And as I have argued elsewhere, Friedberg missed the extent to which Asia’s “thin gruel” of institutions, which he contrasted with Europe’s “thick alphabet soup”, was a dietary preference, rather than a product of inescapable geopolitical fate.
5. A third problem with the ripe for rivalry thesis was that it is yet to materialise.
6. This leads to Friedberg’s second contribution to the Asian security order debate, an article in Survival in 2000 suggestively entitled: “Will Europe’s Past Be Asia’s Future?” The question mark notwithstanding, here Friedberg left no doubt his prognosis about Asia’s future and which European past was he talking about. Its was Europe’s late 19th century and early 20th century past, driven by the unification and rise and expansion of Germany, triggering the catastrophic multipolar struggle for Europe’s destiny despite substantial regional economic interdependence. In posing this question Friedberg was certainly not alone. Its rhymed well with the tune of power transition theory, and synched with John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism which became powerful new basis for realist assessments about the future of Asia’s security order.
7. Like Friedberg, Mearsheimer was not an Asian specialist. A structural realist like Waltz, he assumed, as did Friedberg, that multipolar systems are more conflict prone than bipolar ones (hence Europe after the Cold War would be a case of “back to the future”). But he differed from Waltz’s defensive realism – the view that states in anarchy, states seek to ensure their security through a balance of power, rather than to expand. Mearsheimer argued that anarchy induced states, especially rising powers to seek hegemony, especially regional hegemony, in order to ensure their survival. If China continued its meteoric rise, a confrontation with the United States was inevitable, rendering Asia deeply unstable, the growth of regional economic interdependence and institutions notwithstanding. Note a key difference between Friedberg and Mearsheimer: the former did not think Asia had enough interdependence and institutions (along with democracy) to mitigate anarchy, while the latter simply dismissed them as in consequential to prospects for peace and stability.
8. Among the many criticisms that might be levelled at Mearsheimer’s thesis, three stands out. First, physical expansion is not the only or most profitable pathway to great power status, in fact it can be self-defeating. Second, the notion of survival as the motive for expansion is a simplistic caricature of the complex instincts driving the security strategies of rising powers. A third is his ignoring of alternative attributes and styles regional dominance, including the legitimacy that rising powers can attain from weaker states through shared norms and identity as well as historical cultural practice. Considering some of these alternative pathways to legitimation provide the basis for alternative scenarios of the future of Asian security order.
Challenging Structural Realism: Will Asia’s Past be Its Future?
9. Let me now turn to the main challenge to realism in thinking about the future of Asian security order. Although others have disagreed with Friedberg’s ripe for rivalry thesis, it was David Kang’s article in International Security in 2003 that offered one of the most powerful challenges to it. Criticising IR scholars on Asia for not “getting Asia wrong” because of their Euro-centric perspectives, a label that can be applied both to Friedberg and Mearshimer, Kang put forth an elaborate argument centered on the notion of hierarchy in Asia. China’s rise, he argued, would return Asia “back to the future” by recreating a Sino-centric regional order that prevailed during the tributary system. Moreover, he argued that such an order will be a stable one, because when China was rich and powerful, Asian was prosperous and stable. He dismissed realist pessimism about Asia’s future resembling Europe’s (late 19th century and early 20th century) past. Instead of being “ripe for rivalry”, to use Aaron Friedberg’s phrase, Asia will be “primed for peace”, to quote Stephen Van Evera’s metaphor for Europe after the Cold War.
10. There is an interesting parallel between Kang and Mearsheimer that is often ignored. Both implied the scenario of a Sino-centric Asian security order: Kang more explicitly than Mearsheimer. But while Mearshimer’s hegemony was unstable and malign, Kang’ Sinocentric order was stable and benign. Yet, despite my obvious sympathy for Kang, Kang was possibly as wrong as Mearsheimer.
11. First, Kang’s argument that Asian’s are not balancing China may well be right, but his claim that they are bandwagoning with China is certainly wrong.
12. Second, Kang overstated Chinese imperial benevolence that underpinned a supposedly stable classical East Asian order. The tributary system did not preclude major conflicts involving the Chinese use of force, and the voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the first half of 15th century was itself a symbol of imperial (though not colonial) militarism.
13. A third criticism concerns Kang’s historicism. Though soft and vigorously denied, it’s palpable. The conditions that sustained the benign Chinese world order during the Ming and Qing dynasties are not replicated in the 21st century.
14. Fourth and most important, Kang’s thesis ignored the powerful and growing forces of stability in Asia, economic interdependence and regional institutions, including normative structures.
The Shifting Asian Security Paradigm
15. If neither realism nor communitarianism can offer an adequate and acceptable basis for thinking about Asia’s future security order, what can? From a long-term historical perspective, the foundations of Asian security order are undergoing fundamental shifts.
16. In the immediate post-War period, Asian regional order rested on three pillars: economic nationalism, security bilateralism, and political authoritarianism.
17. Economic nationalism, evident at the historic Asian-African conference at Bandung, led to an emphasis on import-substitution strategies geared to self-reliance and socialist economic approaches in India involving natioanalisation.
18. Security bilateralism was evident in the pervasive role of America’s bilateral military alliances in the region. These alliances, termed as “hub and spoke” or the San Francisco system, has been widely credited with providing not only the security of the alliance partners, but maintaining regional stability in Asia as a kind of collective good, even after the US defeat in the Vietnam war.
19. Another element of security bilateralism was bilateral modes of conflict management. Even in multilateral institutions like ASEAN, bilateral conflicts were not raised and resolved. China and India both strongly opposed internationalisation of their conflicts like Taiwan and Spratlys in the case of China and Kashmir in the case of India, by taking them to any global or regional multilateral fora.
20. Authoritarianism was the pervasive and a shared political basis of Asian security order. Not only the majority of East Asian countries were ruled by authoritarian regimes, including communist regimes and military dictatorships, it is even possible to speak of an “aristocratic peace”, exemplified by ASEAN, whose founding regimes had either reversed or significantly retreated from post-colonial experiments with liberal democracy.
21. Proponents of Asian Values, a rather explicitly Confucian-derived notion, like Lee Kuan Yew (but also many others less explicitly) equated democracy with absence of discipline and stressed the necessity of good governance over democracy. Performance legitimacy trumped liberal politics, and there was an implicit assumption than economic growth and hence performance legitimacy could not be achieved without authoritarian domestic political structures.
22. Is this paradigm holding? I argue that it is being replaced gradually and unmistakably by something more complex picture. Not a liberal paradigm of regional order resembling Europe, but a mixture of realism, communitarianism and Kantianism that could decisively shape the future of Asian security order. In other words, the traditional foundations of Asia’s security order, Asian economic nationalism, security bilateralism and political authoritarianism is giving way to a complex mix of economic interdependence, security multilateralism, and political pluralism. Let me elaborate.
23. Of these, the economic interdependence trend is perhaps the most advanced and noticeable. This is not such simply trade-based interdependence, but to a much greater extent that pre-World War I European economic interdependence, one underpinned by transnational production, more costly to break.
24. Less advanced is Asia’s security multilateralism. But here too progress is pronounced and consequential. Asia. This is not just about a growth in numbers of multilateral institutions and dialogues,.but also expansion of their scope to cover both inter-state, transnational, and increasingly, domestic security issues. Moreover, Asian institutions have slowly shedding their aversion to institutionalisation and legalisation, although there is still a far way to go, and not everyone in the region is convinced of the necessity or wisdom of European style formalism.
25. Despite being consistently disparaged by Western scholars for their failure to emulate European and Atlantic institutions, Asia’s regional institutions have arguably done a better job of dealing with a rising China than Europe’s in dealing with Russia. European regionalists and IR scholars who lauded NATO expansion for its role in diffusing liberal-democratic norms and identity to East European states, and legitimised the US’s determined effort to deny the alliance the decent burial it certainly deserved in post-Cold War Europe, forgot George Kennan’s warning that its expansion would be “a policy error of historic importance”. Asia, which had long eschewed the NATO option by rejecting all forms of multilateral collective defense, avoided any similar provocation to China. NATO expansion directly contradicted OSCE’s doctrine of common security, or security with, rather than against, the adversary. Asians regionalists, whose doctrine of cooperative was borrowed from OSCE, actually imbibed it and followed it in spirit, if not in its legalistic form (CBMs, high representatives for minorities, etc) by offering a genuine hand of engagement to China. The provocation of NATO expansion aside, the OSCE’s military and political intrusiveness might have aggravated Russian regime insecurity to an extent that ARF or other ASEAN-based regional institutions could not do to Chinese regime insecurity.
26. Least advanced in Asia’s the Kantian ladder is the trend towards political pluralism. But it cannot be ignored. Friedberg and other realists did not even address this issue of domestic politics as a basis of Asian regional order. But it is important.
27. The traditional democratic peace theory does not and would not apply to Asia. Asia has too few democracies historically, and Asian democracies are distinctively illiberal. But Asia certainly offers a number of examples to refute the view that democratisation increases the danger of war, or the democratic war thesis. No two democratising states in Asia have fought a war against each other. While democratisation has been accompanied by violence, as in Indonesia following the downfall of Suharto, such violence is not necessarily peculiar to transitions to democracy. Descent into authoritarian rule has been equally or even more violent, as happened during the onset of the Suharto regime. Authoritarian regimes have engaged in more political violence against their own people resulting in more deaths (i.e. deaths resulting from suppression of political opposition, I am not including ethnic or religious violence here although the two cannot be separated) than democratic regimes in Asia.
Kautilya and Confucius
28. I do not imply Asia is not marching inexorably towards a Kantian paradise. But Kantian elements are changing Kautilyan realism and both Kautlilya and Confucius are meeting Kant.
29. I am using Kautilya and Confucius as metaphors, to refer to broad realist and communitarian elements of Asian security order, rather than as analytic constructs.
30. Kautilyan realism has two principal elements, that in some ways combine aspects of what modern IR scholars would call offensive and defensive realism. As Mearsheimer would appreciate, in 4th century BC, Kautilya advised Prince Chandragupta Maurya, to seek hegemony, to become a Chakravartin (universal monarch) and helped the latter become India’s First Emperor. But Kautilya also outlined a manual for kings to pursue a checks- and-balances type power politics, a defensive strategy par excellence, known as the Mandala theory.
31. In Asia’s future security order, balance of power politics will not disappear from Asia. Instead, it may be used to prevent the scope for regional hegemonism by China. The closer security relations between Japan and India and India and Afghanistan exemplify this.
32. Moreover, the continued working of balance of power politics does not mean it will occupy the role of a prior or decisive force shaping Asian security order, but rather as fall back position, or last resort principle. Contemporary Asian hedging against China exemplifies this approach. Many though not all Asians are not balancing against China, neither are they bandwagoning. Even the United States itself has officially adopted a hedging strategy. At the same time, as I have argued before, they have not eschewed a balancing option. But countries in the region are willing to give cooperative security a decent chance, not just because they see as guarantee of peace, but the alternative approach of containing and balancing China to be fraught with uncertainties and dangers, including, for the weaker states, a dependence on the US.
33. The ideal type of a Confucian international order may also be said to have two key elements: hierarchy and communitarianism in social relations. Of these two, I believe hierarchy will be less important than communitarianism in shaping Asia’s future security order.
34. The proponents of Asian values have been more concerned in applying the society above the self to domestic politics than to international relations. But this Confucian dictum holds greater normative appeal as the basis for a regional international society in Asia underpinned by multilateral approaches and institutions. While Asian regional bodies like ASEAN and ARF will not supplant Kautilyan realpolitik, they will increasingly temper temptations towards regional hegemony and moderate balance of power politics. While Asian countries will desire balance of power as a condition in the sense of equilibrium of power, they will not necessarily pursue balance of power as an approach through unbridled competition and arms racing.
35. To sum up, the defensive elements of Kaulilyan realism and the communitarian aspects of Confucian social philosophy will remain important factors shaping Asia’s future security order. But as Kantian elements intrude into this selective Confucian and Kaulilyan landscape, what would the future of Asian security order look like. At the risk of some oversimplification, I would call it a consociational regional security order.
Towards a Consociational Security Order?
36. Derived from the notion of consociationalism in multi-ethnic societies, a consociational regional order may be defined as the political order of a culturally diverse region that rests on political and economic inter-connectedness, institutional arrangements and the cooperative attitudes of leaders (partly resulting from the perceived dangers of non-cooperation) reconciling their parochial national thinking with the regional common purpose.
37. The key feature of a consociational order is cultural diversity. Unlike IR theories, the notion of a consociational order is sensitive to culture: an important advantage of borrowing from domestic politics. This cultural diversity ensures that there will be no single Asian community: Asia is not and will not be One.
38. In a consociational order, the most powerful states respect the wishes of the weaker states. There will be an uneven and multipolar configuration of power among states rather than absolute dominance of a single power. These powers may balance each other, thereby ensuring stability. In other words, balance of power behaviour is an integral part of consociational orders, but there is no also considerable scope for cooperation.
39. Unlike in a concert, the powerful states in a consociation respect decisions of the weaker actors, who are not left to be governed by the whims of the great powers alone. Unlike a community, a consociation has no natural sense of collective identity or “we feeling”, but a sense of togetherness is constructed out of regular interactions. And while a regional consociation is not free from serious divisions and conflicts, these are managed through diplomatic processes and institutions so that they never reach breaking point.
40. Another key feature is “balanced disparity” (Emmerson): the distribution of power is uneven, hence hierarchy exists as an objective fact. But outcomes are decided by majority vote among ethnic groups which is respected by the majority ethnic group. In a regional consociation, the most powerful states respects the wishes of the minority.
41. Institutions are vital to managing the working of a consociation. Regional cooperation under a consociational framework is induced negatively. In other words, states cooperate not because they love and respect each other (although some may do so to some others), but because the price of non-cooperation will be too high under existing conditions of high security and economic interdependence. Conflict (economic or political) will be avoided not because the members of ASEAN, ARF, APEC or EAS are bound by shared values and common identity, but their members view conflict avoidance as a necessary precondition for economic growth and development. Institutions will be vital to engaging all actors and inducing restraint as arenas of conflict resolution.
42. Conceptually, a consociational regional order combines elements of realism (balance of power), liberalism (especially economic interdependence and functional institutions), and constructivism (socially constructed, as opposed to naturally given, regional identity and norms). Figure 1 represents the model. Like Kang, the CRO perspective does incorporate a notion of hierarchy, but unlike him, the CRO perspective acknowledges Asia’s cultural diversity, rather than cultural conformity. There is no return to Asia’s past, if hierarchy remains or emerges, it will not be historically or culturally pre-ordained, but based on normative and rational calculations derived from present. It adopts neo-liberal emphasis on dangers of non-cooperation. In this writes view, a consociations regional order is the most likely outcome of Asia’s IR. Conflict will not disappear. But managed. ASEAN will be a Security Community, although it might also become a CRO. At least it will provide the basis for a CRO.
Amitav Acharya
1. Will 21st century Asia be peaceful and prosperous or divided and dangerous. In the academic literature, thinking about Asia’s future security order has been shaped to a large extent by contrasting the conditions and prospects of peace in Europe with those in Asia. As we all know, Asia always comes out second best in such exercises. In reality, however, post-Cold War Europe has been less stable than post-Cold War Asia, especially if judged in terms of initial expectations and forecasts. As we have learnt from the Russian invasion of Chechnya, following conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, peace in Europe can be overstated, while stability in Asia can be under-stated. In Europe, the expansion of NATO’s turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, triggering a Soviet threat that liberals and constructivists had banished from their memory but neorealists had fervently hoped for. Europe’s much celebrated institutions with their elaborate toolkit of confidence-building, preventive diplomacy and early warning mechanisms failed to prevent what may turn out to be the most serious breach of international order since the US invasion of Iraq, or even the entire post-Cold War period. By contrast, Asia’s supposedly weak and ineffectual talk shops, by discouraging an American-led containment of China, making multilateralism palatable to Beijing and using the resulting Sino-US restraint to soften the region’s balance of power geopolitics, have prevented a Georgia in the region. Against this backdrop, there is a need to rethink our Eurocentric assumptions about what shapes the future of Asia’s security order and what would it look like. What follows is a preliminary attempt, in rather broad and conceptual terms, to do just that.
Will Europe’s Past be Asia’s Future?
2. The most influential articulation of the pessimistic or ‘divided and dangerous’ view of the future of Asian security order was offered by Aaron Friedberg in his 1993/94 article in International Security. His article, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in Multipolar Asia”, is probably the most well-known and influential article on the future of Asian security order. It views multipolarity as prone to conflict, but holds that peace in post-Cold War Europe would still be maintained by certain mitigating factors, including economic interdependence, multilateral institutions and shared liberal democratic domestic political systems. But the absence or near absence of these factors would render Asia ripe for rivalry. This argument was flawed for at least three reasons, which I briefly enumerate.
3. First, history suggests no necessary causal relationship between multipolarity and conflict, as Friedberg Instead, Karl Deutsch and David Singer argue, multipolar systems do contain their own stabilising mechanisms, including prospects for developing multiple channels of interaction.
4. Second, the ripe for rivalry thesis vastly understated the extent of economic interdependence and institutional mechanisms in the region, even in the early 1990s. More important, the absence of European-style institutions in Asia did not imply the absence of shared normative frameworks. And as I have argued elsewhere, Friedberg missed the extent to which Asia’s “thin gruel” of institutions, which he contrasted with Europe’s “thick alphabet soup”, was a dietary preference, rather than a product of inescapable geopolitical fate.
5. A third problem with the ripe for rivalry thesis was that it is yet to materialise.
6. This leads to Friedberg’s second contribution to the Asian security order debate, an article in Survival in 2000 suggestively entitled: “Will Europe’s Past Be Asia’s Future?” The question mark notwithstanding, here Friedberg left no doubt his prognosis about Asia’s future and which European past was he talking about. Its was Europe’s late 19th century and early 20th century past, driven by the unification and rise and expansion of Germany, triggering the catastrophic multipolar struggle for Europe’s destiny despite substantial regional economic interdependence. In posing this question Friedberg was certainly not alone. Its rhymed well with the tune of power transition theory, and synched with John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism which became powerful new basis for realist assessments about the future of Asia’s security order.
7. Like Friedberg, Mearsheimer was not an Asian specialist. A structural realist like Waltz, he assumed, as did Friedberg, that multipolar systems are more conflict prone than bipolar ones (hence Europe after the Cold War would be a case of “back to the future”). But he differed from Waltz’s defensive realism – the view that states in anarchy, states seek to ensure their security through a balance of power, rather than to expand. Mearsheimer argued that anarchy induced states, especially rising powers to seek hegemony, especially regional hegemony, in order to ensure their survival. If China continued its meteoric rise, a confrontation with the United States was inevitable, rendering Asia deeply unstable, the growth of regional economic interdependence and institutions notwithstanding. Note a key difference between Friedberg and Mearsheimer: the former did not think Asia had enough interdependence and institutions (along with democracy) to mitigate anarchy, while the latter simply dismissed them as in consequential to prospects for peace and stability.
8. Among the many criticisms that might be levelled at Mearsheimer’s thesis, three stands out. First, physical expansion is not the only or most profitable pathway to great power status, in fact it can be self-defeating. Second, the notion of survival as the motive for expansion is a simplistic caricature of the complex instincts driving the security strategies of rising powers. A third is his ignoring of alternative attributes and styles regional dominance, including the legitimacy that rising powers can attain from weaker states through shared norms and identity as well as historical cultural practice. Considering some of these alternative pathways to legitimation provide the basis for alternative scenarios of the future of Asian security order.
Challenging Structural Realism: Will Asia’s Past be Its Future?
9. Let me now turn to the main challenge to realism in thinking about the future of Asian security order. Although others have disagreed with Friedberg’s ripe for rivalry thesis, it was David Kang’s article in International Security in 2003 that offered one of the most powerful challenges to it. Criticising IR scholars on Asia for not “getting Asia wrong” because of their Euro-centric perspectives, a label that can be applied both to Friedberg and Mearshimer, Kang put forth an elaborate argument centered on the notion of hierarchy in Asia. China’s rise, he argued, would return Asia “back to the future” by recreating a Sino-centric regional order that prevailed during the tributary system. Moreover, he argued that such an order will be a stable one, because when China was rich and powerful, Asian was prosperous and stable. He dismissed realist pessimism about Asia’s future resembling Europe’s (late 19th century and early 20th century) past. Instead of being “ripe for rivalry”, to use Aaron Friedberg’s phrase, Asia will be “primed for peace”, to quote Stephen Van Evera’s metaphor for Europe after the Cold War.
10. There is an interesting parallel between Kang and Mearsheimer that is often ignored. Both implied the scenario of a Sino-centric Asian security order: Kang more explicitly than Mearsheimer. But while Mearshimer’s hegemony was unstable and malign, Kang’ Sinocentric order was stable and benign. Yet, despite my obvious sympathy for Kang, Kang was possibly as wrong as Mearsheimer.
11. First, Kang’s argument that Asian’s are not balancing China may well be right, but his claim that they are bandwagoning with China is certainly wrong.
12. Second, Kang overstated Chinese imperial benevolence that underpinned a supposedly stable classical East Asian order. The tributary system did not preclude major conflicts involving the Chinese use of force, and the voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the first half of 15th century was itself a symbol of imperial (though not colonial) militarism.
13. A third criticism concerns Kang’s historicism. Though soft and vigorously denied, it’s palpable. The conditions that sustained the benign Chinese world order during the Ming and Qing dynasties are not replicated in the 21st century.
14. Fourth and most important, Kang’s thesis ignored the powerful and growing forces of stability in Asia, economic interdependence and regional institutions, including normative structures.
The Shifting Asian Security Paradigm
15. If neither realism nor communitarianism can offer an adequate and acceptable basis for thinking about Asia’s future security order, what can? From a long-term historical perspective, the foundations of Asian security order are undergoing fundamental shifts.
16. In the immediate post-War period, Asian regional order rested on three pillars: economic nationalism, security bilateralism, and political authoritarianism.
17. Economic nationalism, evident at the historic Asian-African conference at Bandung, led to an emphasis on import-substitution strategies geared to self-reliance and socialist economic approaches in India involving natioanalisation.
18. Security bilateralism was evident in the pervasive role of America’s bilateral military alliances in the region. These alliances, termed as “hub and spoke” or the San Francisco system, has been widely credited with providing not only the security of the alliance partners, but maintaining regional stability in Asia as a kind of collective good, even after the US defeat in the Vietnam war.
19. Another element of security bilateralism was bilateral modes of conflict management. Even in multilateral institutions like ASEAN, bilateral conflicts were not raised and resolved. China and India both strongly opposed internationalisation of their conflicts like Taiwan and Spratlys in the case of China and Kashmir in the case of India, by taking them to any global or regional multilateral fora.
20. Authoritarianism was the pervasive and a shared political basis of Asian security order. Not only the majority of East Asian countries were ruled by authoritarian regimes, including communist regimes and military dictatorships, it is even possible to speak of an “aristocratic peace”, exemplified by ASEAN, whose founding regimes had either reversed or significantly retreated from post-colonial experiments with liberal democracy.
21. Proponents of Asian Values, a rather explicitly Confucian-derived notion, like Lee Kuan Yew (but also many others less explicitly) equated democracy with absence of discipline and stressed the necessity of good governance over democracy. Performance legitimacy trumped liberal politics, and there was an implicit assumption than economic growth and hence performance legitimacy could not be achieved without authoritarian domestic political structures.
22. Is this paradigm holding? I argue that it is being replaced gradually and unmistakably by something more complex picture. Not a liberal paradigm of regional order resembling Europe, but a mixture of realism, communitarianism and Kantianism that could decisively shape the future of Asian security order. In other words, the traditional foundations of Asia’s security order, Asian economic nationalism, security bilateralism and political authoritarianism is giving way to a complex mix of economic interdependence, security multilateralism, and political pluralism. Let me elaborate.
23. Of these, the economic interdependence trend is perhaps the most advanced and noticeable. This is not such simply trade-based interdependence, but to a much greater extent that pre-World War I European economic interdependence, one underpinned by transnational production, more costly to break.
24. Less advanced is Asia’s security multilateralism. But here too progress is pronounced and consequential. Asia. This is not just about a growth in numbers of multilateral institutions and dialogues,.but also expansion of their scope to cover both inter-state, transnational, and increasingly, domestic security issues. Moreover, Asian institutions have slowly shedding their aversion to institutionalisation and legalisation, although there is still a far way to go, and not everyone in the region is convinced of the necessity or wisdom of European style formalism.
25. Despite being consistently disparaged by Western scholars for their failure to emulate European and Atlantic institutions, Asia’s regional institutions have arguably done a better job of dealing with a rising China than Europe’s in dealing with Russia. European regionalists and IR scholars who lauded NATO expansion for its role in diffusing liberal-democratic norms and identity to East European states, and legitimised the US’s determined effort to deny the alliance the decent burial it certainly deserved in post-Cold War Europe, forgot George Kennan’s warning that its expansion would be “a policy error of historic importance”. Asia, which had long eschewed the NATO option by rejecting all forms of multilateral collective defense, avoided any similar provocation to China. NATO expansion directly contradicted OSCE’s doctrine of common security, or security with, rather than against, the adversary. Asians regionalists, whose doctrine of cooperative was borrowed from OSCE, actually imbibed it and followed it in spirit, if not in its legalistic form (CBMs, high representatives for minorities, etc) by offering a genuine hand of engagement to China. The provocation of NATO expansion aside, the OSCE’s military and political intrusiveness might have aggravated Russian regime insecurity to an extent that ARF or other ASEAN-based regional institutions could not do to Chinese regime insecurity.
26. Least advanced in Asia’s the Kantian ladder is the trend towards political pluralism. But it cannot be ignored. Friedberg and other realists did not even address this issue of domestic politics as a basis of Asian regional order. But it is important.
27. The traditional democratic peace theory does not and would not apply to Asia. Asia has too few democracies historically, and Asian democracies are distinctively illiberal. But Asia certainly offers a number of examples to refute the view that democratisation increases the danger of war, or the democratic war thesis. No two democratising states in Asia have fought a war against each other. While democratisation has been accompanied by violence, as in Indonesia following the downfall of Suharto, such violence is not necessarily peculiar to transitions to democracy. Descent into authoritarian rule has been equally or even more violent, as happened during the onset of the Suharto regime. Authoritarian regimes have engaged in more political violence against their own people resulting in more deaths (i.e. deaths resulting from suppression of political opposition, I am not including ethnic or religious violence here although the two cannot be separated) than democratic regimes in Asia.
Kautilya and Confucius
28. I do not imply Asia is not marching inexorably towards a Kantian paradise. But Kantian elements are changing Kautilyan realism and both Kautlilya and Confucius are meeting Kant.
29. I am using Kautilya and Confucius as metaphors, to refer to broad realist and communitarian elements of Asian security order, rather than as analytic constructs.
30. Kautilyan realism has two principal elements, that in some ways combine aspects of what modern IR scholars would call offensive and defensive realism. As Mearsheimer would appreciate, in 4th century BC, Kautilya advised Prince Chandragupta Maurya, to seek hegemony, to become a Chakravartin (universal monarch) and helped the latter become India’s First Emperor. But Kautilya also outlined a manual for kings to pursue a checks- and-balances type power politics, a defensive strategy par excellence, known as the Mandala theory.
31. In Asia’s future security order, balance of power politics will not disappear from Asia. Instead, it may be used to prevent the scope for regional hegemonism by China. The closer security relations between Japan and India and India and Afghanistan exemplify this.
32. Moreover, the continued working of balance of power politics does not mean it will occupy the role of a prior or decisive force shaping Asian security order, but rather as fall back position, or last resort principle. Contemporary Asian hedging against China exemplifies this approach. Many though not all Asians are not balancing against China, neither are they bandwagoning. Even the United States itself has officially adopted a hedging strategy. At the same time, as I have argued before, they have not eschewed a balancing option. But countries in the region are willing to give cooperative security a decent chance, not just because they see as guarantee of peace, but the alternative approach of containing and balancing China to be fraught with uncertainties and dangers, including, for the weaker states, a dependence on the US.
33. The ideal type of a Confucian international order may also be said to have two key elements: hierarchy and communitarianism in social relations. Of these two, I believe hierarchy will be less important than communitarianism in shaping Asia’s future security order.
34. The proponents of Asian values have been more concerned in applying the society above the self to domestic politics than to international relations. But this Confucian dictum holds greater normative appeal as the basis for a regional international society in Asia underpinned by multilateral approaches and institutions. While Asian regional bodies like ASEAN and ARF will not supplant Kautilyan realpolitik, they will increasingly temper temptations towards regional hegemony and moderate balance of power politics. While Asian countries will desire balance of power as a condition in the sense of equilibrium of power, they will not necessarily pursue balance of power as an approach through unbridled competition and arms racing.
35. To sum up, the defensive elements of Kaulilyan realism and the communitarian aspects of Confucian social philosophy will remain important factors shaping Asia’s future security order. But as Kantian elements intrude into this selective Confucian and Kaulilyan landscape, what would the future of Asian security order look like. At the risk of some oversimplification, I would call it a consociational regional security order.
Towards a Consociational Security Order?
36. Derived from the notion of consociationalism in multi-ethnic societies, a consociational regional order may be defined as the political order of a culturally diverse region that rests on political and economic inter-connectedness, institutional arrangements and the cooperative attitudes of leaders (partly resulting from the perceived dangers of non-cooperation) reconciling their parochial national thinking with the regional common purpose.
37. The key feature of a consociational order is cultural diversity. Unlike IR theories, the notion of a consociational order is sensitive to culture: an important advantage of borrowing from domestic politics. This cultural diversity ensures that there will be no single Asian community: Asia is not and will not be One.
38. In a consociational order, the most powerful states respect the wishes of the weaker states. There will be an uneven and multipolar configuration of power among states rather than absolute dominance of a single power. These powers may balance each other, thereby ensuring stability. In other words, balance of power behaviour is an integral part of consociational orders, but there is no also considerable scope for cooperation.
39. Unlike in a concert, the powerful states in a consociation respect decisions of the weaker actors, who are not left to be governed by the whims of the great powers alone. Unlike a community, a consociation has no natural sense of collective identity or “we feeling”, but a sense of togetherness is constructed out of regular interactions. And while a regional consociation is not free from serious divisions and conflicts, these are managed through diplomatic processes and institutions so that they never reach breaking point.
40. Another key feature is “balanced disparity” (Emmerson): the distribution of power is uneven, hence hierarchy exists as an objective fact. But outcomes are decided by majority vote among ethnic groups which is respected by the majority ethnic group. In a regional consociation, the most powerful states respects the wishes of the minority.
41. Institutions are vital to managing the working of a consociation. Regional cooperation under a consociational framework is induced negatively. In other words, states cooperate not because they love and respect each other (although some may do so to some others), but because the price of non-cooperation will be too high under existing conditions of high security and economic interdependence. Conflict (economic or political) will be avoided not because the members of ASEAN, ARF, APEC or EAS are bound by shared values and common identity, but their members view conflict avoidance as a necessary precondition for economic growth and development. Institutions will be vital to engaging all actors and inducing restraint as arenas of conflict resolution.
42. Conceptually, a consociational regional order combines elements of realism (balance of power), liberalism (especially economic interdependence and functional institutions), and constructivism (socially constructed, as opposed to naturally given, regional identity and norms). Figure 1 represents the model. Like Kang, the CRO perspective does incorporate a notion of hierarchy, but unlike him, the CRO perspective acknowledges Asia’s cultural diversity, rather than cultural conformity. There is no return to Asia’s past, if hierarchy remains or emerges, it will not be historically or culturally pre-ordained, but based on normative and rational calculations derived from present. It adopts neo-liberal emphasis on dangers of non-cooperation. In this writes view, a consociations regional order is the most likely outcome of Asia’s IR. Conflict will not disappear. But managed. ASEAN will be a Security Community, although it might also become a CRO. At least it will provide the basis for a CRO.
Monday, 21 April 2008
Crafting Cooperation
Crafting CooperationRegional International Institutions in Comparative Perspective
Edited by
Amitav Acharya
University of Bristol
Alastair Iain Johnston
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Paperback
(ISBN-13: 9780521699426)
· Also available in Hardback | eBook format
· Published November 2007
£18.99
Regional institutions are an increasingly prominent feature of world politics. Their characteristics and performance vary widely: some are highly legalistic and bureaucratic, while others are informal and flexible. They also differ in terms of inclusiveness, decision-making rules and commitment to the non-interference principle. This is the first book to offer a conceptual framework for comparing the design and effectiveness of regional international institutions, including the EU, NATO, ASEAN, OAS, AU and the Arab League. The case studies, by a group of leading scholars of regional institutions, offer a rigorous, historically informed analysis of the differences and similarities in institutions across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa. The chapters provide a more theoretically and empirically diverse analysis of the design and efficacy of regional institutions than heretofore available.
Features case studies of regionalism and the international relations of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East ̢ۢ Offers criteria for comparing the purposes and effectiveness of regional institutions ̢ۢ Comprehensive bibliography on regionalism
Contents
1. Comparing regional institutions: an introduction Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston; 2. Hanging together, institutional design and cooperation in Southeast Asia: AFTA and the ARF Yuen Foong Khong and Helen E.S. Nesadurai; 3. International cooperation in Latin America: the design of regional institutions by slow accretion Jorge I. Dominguez; 4. Crafting regional cooperation in Africa Jeffrey Herbst; 5. Functional form, identity-driven cooperation: institutional designs and effects in post-Cold War NATO Frank Schimmelfennig; 6. Designed to fail or failure of design? The origins and legacy of the Arab League Michael Barnett and Etel Solingen; 7. Social mechanisms and regional cooperation: are Europe and the EU really all that different? Jeffrey T. Checkel; 8. Conclusion: institutional features, cooperation effects and the agenda for further research on comparative regionalism Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston.
Reviews
'Remarkable, theoretically challenging, and rigorously conceived and researched, this outstanding volume cuts across existing IR theory paradigms to deliver the most cutting edge contribution to date to the comparative study of the design and efficacy of regional international institutions.' Emanuel Adler, Andrea and Charles Bronfman Professor of Israeli Studies, University of Toronto
'This comprehensive collection applies institutional design theory to the analysis of comparative regionalism. It thus enhances and deepens our understanding of an increasingly regional world. Sharp in its three analytical essays and rich in its five empirical case studies, the uniformly excellent chapters make this collection much more than the sum of its parts.' Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University
'In this examination of how institutions resolve regional cooperation problems, a top-flight range of authors deploy serious area studies knowledge within a rich and carefully crafted analytical framework. The book should be of a great interest to both general IR scholars and to regional specialists. A winning combination.' Andrew Hurrell, Director, Centre for International Studies, Oxford University
Contributors
Amitav Acharya, Alastair Iain Johnston, Yuen Foong Khong, Helen E. S. Nesadurai, Jorge I. Dominguez, Jeffrey Herbst, Frank Schimmelfennig, Michael Barnett, Etel Solingen, Jeffrey T. Checkel
Details
· 6 tables
· Page extent: 330 pages
· Size: 228 x 152 mm
· Weight: 0.6 kg
© Cambridge University Press 2008.
This page is available online at www.cambridge.org/uk/9780521699426
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Four Scenarios of Asian Regional Cooperation
Outline of a Paper Presented to the Panel on: “Modelling a Scenario of Asian Integration: Political, Economic, and Cultural Approaches”, Conference on Asian Cooperation, Integration, and Human Resources, Waseda University, Japan, January 17 – 18, 2008
Amitav Acharya, Director, Centre for Governance and International Affairs, and Chair of Global Governance, Department of Politics, University of Bristol, UK
In this paper, I sketch four possible scenarios of regional cooperation in Asia. While these are not mutually exclusive, they do possess distinctive characteristics which will lead to different types of regionalism and regional order in Asia.
Concert
This type of cooperation assumes the primacy of great powers in regional order. Instead of competing with and balancing each other, great powers develop a common interest in the management of regional affairs. The weaker states are marginalized, or at best play a secondary role. The regional system remains anarchic, but the great powers develop rules, interactions and institutions not only to reduce conflicts among themselves, but also to manage other conflicts in the region.
The original model of a concert system is the European Concert that took shape after the defeat of Napoleon. The obvious candidates for membership in a contemporary Asian concert are: China, Japan, India and the United States, and possibly Russia. But an Asian concert may have distinctive features not found in the European model, especially because it has to accommodate ASEAN, whose members are weak states and small powers, but enjoy substantial collective diplomatic clout in regional affairs. Moreover, an Asian concert, unlike the European one, cannot be founded on common political values, unless and until China goes through a process of democratic transition (and Russia reverses it democratic backsliding).
Under a great power concert, existing ASEAN-led regional institutions will lose their importance. The great powers will develop their own forum of interactions, including frequent usage of bilateral and “minilateral” summit diplomacy. The Asian concert will make its own rules and mechanisms for conflict management, which will essentially cater to the interests of the great powers themselves. There could be no territorial adjustments or conflict resolution without their consent. There will be a strong bias against revolutionary political change in the region. Regional mechanisms will become instruments of great power intervention in the internal affairs of the weaker and smaller states of Asia.
Hierarchy
A great power concert assumes a multiplicity of great powers, or a multipolar regional system. While such multipolarity is quite likely to characterise the Asian power structure (one might say it has already become a reality), it does not preclude a regional hierarchy with China at the top. A hierarchy is different from hegemony or a pure balance of power system, which implies preponderance or equilibrium of power respectively. Hierarchy is conceived as a benign ordering of powers, with none, including the top player, exercising absolute power and authority.
It is sometimes said that hierarchy is consistent with time-honoured Asian values. Just as hierarchy is accepted and followed in Asian societies and domestic politics, the argument goes, it should also function as an legitimate organizing principle of Asian international order. And in the Asian context, the natural candidate for the room at the top in a regional hierarchy is China. David Kang has put forth an elaborate argument about hierarchy in Asia. China’s rise, he argues, returns Asia “back to the future” by recreating a Sino-centric regional order that prevailed during the tributary system. Moreover, he argues that such an order will be a stable one, because when China was rich and powerful, Asian was stable. He dismisses realist pessimism about Asia’s future resembling Europe’s (late 19th century and early 20th century) past. Instead of being “ripe for rivalry”, to use Aaron Friedberg’s phrase, Asia will be “primed for peace”, to quote Stephen Van Evera’s metaphor for Europe after the Cold War.
If a hierarchical regional order develops in Asia, what would regional cooperation look like? First, China will be the natural leader of regional institutions, thereby supplanting ASEAN. China’s interests will drive the agenda of Asian regionalism, which might translate into great prominence for ASEAN Plus Three or similar East Asian institutions to the detriment of the ASEAN Regional Forum and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, as well as ASEAN itself. Regional economic cooperation will be more about informal “developmental regionalism”, rather than trade liberalisation. In the security sphere, China is unlikely to favour the creation of “problem-solving” regional mechanisms that engage in dispute settlement or conflict resolution. On the other hand, as long as China remains under communist rule, Asian regional organizations will not take on the role of promoting human rights and democracy. They will be essentially wedded to Westphalian sovereignty.
Community
A third scenario of regional cooperation is the development of a regional community. A community implies a relationship of deep socialization, trust and convergence of basic values. Regional communities can be economic, social and security-oriented. They can have different degrees of institutionalization.
An economic community in its technical sense refers to a free trade area and a customs union and a common market with free mobility of labour, capital and services across national boundaries. A socio-cultural community is characterized by a sense of collective identity, forged over interactions in social, cultural, educational and related areas. A security community is a group of states in which war has become “unthinkable”. Currently, ASEAN represents an attempt to develop a subregional community with three pillars: economic, security and socio-cultural, although it has a long way to go in realizing these objectives.
Some urge that Asia should aspire to become a multifaceted community just as ASEAN is striving to become. Proposals for an Asian economic community have been made by India). Visions have been articulated (such as by the East Asian Vision Group) for the development of an Asian (or East Asian) cultural community, with its own set of shared values and regional identity. Others have raised the possibility of an Asian security community.
Under this community scenario, existing Asian regional institutions will continue to be “led” by ASEAN which will remain at the “driver seat” of regional institutions such as ARF, APT and the East Asian Summit. The real challenge would be whether Asian regional organizations will continue to be informal, non-legalistic, and process-oriented, or go through a deepening of economic integration and security cooperation as would be necessary under the common market and “security community” models. Asian groupings will also continue to be inclusive, but this will conflict with the need for developing shared values that must underpin a community of any sort. An Asian regional community, if it is ever to materialize, would be different from its European counterpart, reflecting the great political and cultural diversity of the region.
Consociation
A fourth scenario for Asian regional cooperation may be called a consociational regional order. Derived from the notion of consociationalism in multi-ethnic societies, a consociational regional order is marked a number of features. One of them is the existence of cultural diversity. Another is an uneven and multipolar configuration of power among states rather than absolute dominance of a single power. These powers may balance each other, thereby ensuring stability. Unlike in a concert, the powerful states in a consociation respect decisions of the majority of the actors, rather than be governed by the whims of the great powers alone. Unlike a community, a consociation has no natural sense of collective identity or “we feeling”, but a sense of togetherness is constructed out of regular interactions. And while a regional consociation is not free from serious divisions and conflicts, these are managed through diplomatic processes and institutions so that they never reach breaking point.
Regional cooperation under a consociational framework is induced negatively, rather than due to a positive convergence of political values or collective identity. In other words, states cooperate not because they love and respect each other (although some may do so to some others), but because the price of non-cooperation will be too high under existing conditions of high security and economic interdependence. Conflict (economic or political) will be avoided not because the members of ASEAN, ARF, APEC or EAS are bound by shared values and common identity, but their members view conflict avoidance as a necessary precondition for economic growth and development.
Conceptually, a consociational regional order combines elements of realism (balance of power), liberalism (especially economic interdependence and functional institutions), and constructivism (socially constructed, as opposed to naturally given, regional identity and norms). Figure 1 represents this scenario theoretically.
Conclusion
Neither a great power concert nor a Sinocentric hierarchy is likely to materialise in Asia under present or foreseeable conditions. An Asian concert is precluded by the lack of convergence of political values among Asia’s great powers, and by the decades of regional deference to ASEAN, a club of smaller nations, which cannot be easily marginalized in the management of regional order.
China will never acquire the relative power to recreate the Sino-centric regional order, especially under conditions that are vastly different from the past. The simultaneous rise of Japan and India and the omnipresence of the United States in Asia militate against the possibility of a Chinese-centred hierarchy which is also incompatible with the Westphalian principles of sovereignty and equality that China itself espouses.
Asia is abuzz with the rhetoric of community-building, but a consociation is what might really be possible. The community model might apply at the subregional level in Southeast Asia through ASEAN (although some would contest it), but replicating such a community at the regional level of Asia is far more daunting. Asia’s cultural diversity and emerging multipolarity create the possibility of a regional consociation, in which the great powers as a regional minority accommodate the interests of the weaker nations who are in the majority. Conflicts, while never absent, are controlled before they lead to systemic collapse. The absence of shared values or collective identity is offset by a continuous process of socialization that reduces cultural barriers and promotes habits of cooperation. Such a regional consociation is the best Asia can really hope for and would be a singular achievement.
Amitav Acharya, Director, Centre for Governance and International Affairs, and Chair of Global Governance, Department of Politics, University of Bristol, UK
In this paper, I sketch four possible scenarios of regional cooperation in Asia. While these are not mutually exclusive, they do possess distinctive characteristics which will lead to different types of regionalism and regional order in Asia.
Concert
This type of cooperation assumes the primacy of great powers in regional order. Instead of competing with and balancing each other, great powers develop a common interest in the management of regional affairs. The weaker states are marginalized, or at best play a secondary role. The regional system remains anarchic, but the great powers develop rules, interactions and institutions not only to reduce conflicts among themselves, but also to manage other conflicts in the region.
The original model of a concert system is the European Concert that took shape after the defeat of Napoleon. The obvious candidates for membership in a contemporary Asian concert are: China, Japan, India and the United States, and possibly Russia. But an Asian concert may have distinctive features not found in the European model, especially because it has to accommodate ASEAN, whose members are weak states and small powers, but enjoy substantial collective diplomatic clout in regional affairs. Moreover, an Asian concert, unlike the European one, cannot be founded on common political values, unless and until China goes through a process of democratic transition (and Russia reverses it democratic backsliding).
Under a great power concert, existing ASEAN-led regional institutions will lose their importance. The great powers will develop their own forum of interactions, including frequent usage of bilateral and “minilateral” summit diplomacy. The Asian concert will make its own rules and mechanisms for conflict management, which will essentially cater to the interests of the great powers themselves. There could be no territorial adjustments or conflict resolution without their consent. There will be a strong bias against revolutionary political change in the region. Regional mechanisms will become instruments of great power intervention in the internal affairs of the weaker and smaller states of Asia.
Hierarchy
A great power concert assumes a multiplicity of great powers, or a multipolar regional system. While such multipolarity is quite likely to characterise the Asian power structure (one might say it has already become a reality), it does not preclude a regional hierarchy with China at the top. A hierarchy is different from hegemony or a pure balance of power system, which implies preponderance or equilibrium of power respectively. Hierarchy is conceived as a benign ordering of powers, with none, including the top player, exercising absolute power and authority.
It is sometimes said that hierarchy is consistent with time-honoured Asian values. Just as hierarchy is accepted and followed in Asian societies and domestic politics, the argument goes, it should also function as an legitimate organizing principle of Asian international order. And in the Asian context, the natural candidate for the room at the top in a regional hierarchy is China. David Kang has put forth an elaborate argument about hierarchy in Asia. China’s rise, he argues, returns Asia “back to the future” by recreating a Sino-centric regional order that prevailed during the tributary system. Moreover, he argues that such an order will be a stable one, because when China was rich and powerful, Asian was stable. He dismisses realist pessimism about Asia’s future resembling Europe’s (late 19th century and early 20th century) past. Instead of being “ripe for rivalry”, to use Aaron Friedberg’s phrase, Asia will be “primed for peace”, to quote Stephen Van Evera’s metaphor for Europe after the Cold War.
If a hierarchical regional order develops in Asia, what would regional cooperation look like? First, China will be the natural leader of regional institutions, thereby supplanting ASEAN. China’s interests will drive the agenda of Asian regionalism, which might translate into great prominence for ASEAN Plus Three or similar East Asian institutions to the detriment of the ASEAN Regional Forum and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, as well as ASEAN itself. Regional economic cooperation will be more about informal “developmental regionalism”, rather than trade liberalisation. In the security sphere, China is unlikely to favour the creation of “problem-solving” regional mechanisms that engage in dispute settlement or conflict resolution. On the other hand, as long as China remains under communist rule, Asian regional organizations will not take on the role of promoting human rights and democracy. They will be essentially wedded to Westphalian sovereignty.
Community
A third scenario of regional cooperation is the development of a regional community. A community implies a relationship of deep socialization, trust and convergence of basic values. Regional communities can be economic, social and security-oriented. They can have different degrees of institutionalization.
An economic community in its technical sense refers to a free trade area and a customs union and a common market with free mobility of labour, capital and services across national boundaries. A socio-cultural community is characterized by a sense of collective identity, forged over interactions in social, cultural, educational and related areas. A security community is a group of states in which war has become “unthinkable”. Currently, ASEAN represents an attempt to develop a subregional community with three pillars: economic, security and socio-cultural, although it has a long way to go in realizing these objectives.
Some urge that Asia should aspire to become a multifaceted community just as ASEAN is striving to become. Proposals for an Asian economic community have been made by India). Visions have been articulated (such as by the East Asian Vision Group) for the development of an Asian (or East Asian) cultural community, with its own set of shared values and regional identity. Others have raised the possibility of an Asian security community.
Under this community scenario, existing Asian regional institutions will continue to be “led” by ASEAN which will remain at the “driver seat” of regional institutions such as ARF, APT and the East Asian Summit. The real challenge would be whether Asian regional organizations will continue to be informal, non-legalistic, and process-oriented, or go through a deepening of economic integration and security cooperation as would be necessary under the common market and “security community” models. Asian groupings will also continue to be inclusive, but this will conflict with the need for developing shared values that must underpin a community of any sort. An Asian regional community, if it is ever to materialize, would be different from its European counterpart, reflecting the great political and cultural diversity of the region.
Consociation
A fourth scenario for Asian regional cooperation may be called a consociational regional order. Derived from the notion of consociationalism in multi-ethnic societies, a consociational regional order is marked a number of features. One of them is the existence of cultural diversity. Another is an uneven and multipolar configuration of power among states rather than absolute dominance of a single power. These powers may balance each other, thereby ensuring stability. Unlike in a concert, the powerful states in a consociation respect decisions of the majority of the actors, rather than be governed by the whims of the great powers alone. Unlike a community, a consociation has no natural sense of collective identity or “we feeling”, but a sense of togetherness is constructed out of regular interactions. And while a regional consociation is not free from serious divisions and conflicts, these are managed through diplomatic processes and institutions so that they never reach breaking point.
Regional cooperation under a consociational framework is induced negatively, rather than due to a positive convergence of political values or collective identity. In other words, states cooperate not because they love and respect each other (although some may do so to some others), but because the price of non-cooperation will be too high under existing conditions of high security and economic interdependence. Conflict (economic or political) will be avoided not because the members of ASEAN, ARF, APEC or EAS are bound by shared values and common identity, but their members view conflict avoidance as a necessary precondition for economic growth and development.
Conceptually, a consociational regional order combines elements of realism (balance of power), liberalism (especially economic interdependence and functional institutions), and constructivism (socially constructed, as opposed to naturally given, regional identity and norms). Figure 1 represents this scenario theoretically.
Conclusion
Neither a great power concert nor a Sinocentric hierarchy is likely to materialise in Asia under present or foreseeable conditions. An Asian concert is precluded by the lack of convergence of political values among Asia’s great powers, and by the decades of regional deference to ASEAN, a club of smaller nations, which cannot be easily marginalized in the management of regional order.
China will never acquire the relative power to recreate the Sino-centric regional order, especially under conditions that are vastly different from the past. The simultaneous rise of Japan and India and the omnipresence of the United States in Asia militate against the possibility of a Chinese-centred hierarchy which is also incompatible with the Westphalian principles of sovereignty and equality that China itself espouses.
Asia is abuzz with the rhetoric of community-building, but a consociation is what might really be possible. The community model might apply at the subregional level in Southeast Asia through ASEAN (although some would contest it), but replicating such a community at the regional level of Asia is far more daunting. Asia’s cultural diversity and emerging multipolarity create the possibility of a regional consociation, in which the great powers as a regional minority accommodate the interests of the weaker nations who are in the majority. Conflicts, while never absent, are controlled before they lead to systemic collapse. The absence of shared values or collective identity is offset by a continuous process of socialization that reduces cultural barriers and promotes habits of cooperation. Such a regional consociation is the best Asia can really hope for and would be a singular achievement.
Sunday, 18 March 2007
East Asia’s New Multilateralism: Hopes and Illusions
(Based on lectures at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, 23 February 2007 and Hong Kong University, 12 February 2007. The original title of the talk was "East Asia's Arrested Multilateralism". Portions of the text draws from an article by the author published in Korea Observer in Autumn 2006)
Amitav Acharya
The emergence of East Asian regionalism is arguably one of the most important developments in the international relations of Asia. The trend began in 1997, when the region was hit by a massive economic crisis. The crisis undermined the credibility of regional institutions that were developed within a sub-regional or Asia-Pacific basis, namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). These institutions were seen to have failed to anticipate or contain the crisis and repair the damage to the region’s economic dynamism and political relationships caused by it. Since then, East Asian institutions, comprising the ASEAN Plus Three (APT, 1997), the East Asian Summit (EAS, 2005), and the futuristic notion of an East Asian Community (EAC), have gained momentum in the growing alphabet soup of regional institutions in Asia. So much so that proponents of East Asian regionalism envision them as the basis for a “bona fide [East Asian] regional community… for peace, prosperity and progress”
In this talk, I analyze the prospects for East Asian regionalism, focusing particularly on the East Asian Summit and the proposed East Asian Community. After discussing the factors that led to its emergence, I will outline some of the comparative advantages of building regional institutions within an East Asian framework. I then turn to the limitations of East Asian regionalism. My argument is that although the East Asian framework does offer some important comparative advantages in promoting regional cooperation, it is not necessarily a more viable framework for addressing the economic and strategic problems of contemporary Asian security order. At best, it can co-exist with Asia Pacific institutions, providing a platform for useful summit-level talks and undertaking a limited range of functional tasks which other regional institutions are ill-suited or unwilling to take on. But a host of institutional, political and strategic problems would need to be overcome before East Asia could really develop a genuine sense of regional community.
Origins and Impetus
Why has multilateralism occurred in an East Asian framework? Four factors have contributed to the emergence of East Asian regionalism. For the sake of brevity but at the risk of some oversimplification, I shall call them anxiety, anger, interconnectedness, and identity.
Anxiety
The contemporary move towards an East Asian institution began in 1990 when the then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammad, proposed an East Asian Economic Grouping (later renamed as East Asian Economic Caucus). His proposal was spurred by an acute sense of anxiety about regional trade blocs emerging in Europe and North America. The EU was about to become a single market, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was emerging. If East Asia did not do anything, reasoned Mahathir, it would be marginalized. Adding to the concern was the crisis over the Uruguay Round of the GATT, which was facing a breakdown. In fact, Mahathir’s proposal for EAEG came a day after the Uruguay Round that was in a state of impasse over the issue of the EU’s agricultural subsidies.
But the EAEG proposal stalled in the face of stiff American opposition. US pressure contributed to Japan’s reluctance to assume leadership of the grouping, as Mahathir had envisaged. Moreover, the fear of regional trading blocs that inspired Malaysia’s proposal proved to be unfounded. The EU did not become “fortress Europe”. The GATT Uruguay Round was successfully completed, thereby undercutting the rationale for an East Asian grouping.
Anger
The role of anger in spurring East Asian regionalism was critically evident following the outbreak of the Asian economic crisis in 1997. The crisis spurred a certain amount of regional disappointment and resentment towards the US, even among its allies such as Thailand and Japan. The very different responses from Washington to the Baht collapse and the Peso crisis in Mexico fuelled perceptions of America apathy towards the region. Washington’s response to the Peso crisis was prompt and generous, while in the case of Thailand it simply let the IMF take the lead and provided little direct financial aid. This, coupled with abrupt and total manner in which Washington rejected Japan’s proposal for an Asian Monetary Fund as a bulwark against future crises “antagonized opinion leaders of the region”.[1]
The crisis spurred a new regional process, known as the ASEAN-Plus-Three (APT). The APT focused particularly on regional financial cooperation, which had not been undertaken within APEC. At the behest of South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung, APT leaders set up an East Asia Vision Group (EAVG), to consider pathways towards regional cooperation. Its Report and that an inter-governmental group called the East Asian Study Group (EASG), endorsed the idea of an East Asian Summit.
Interconnectedness
A major impetus for East Asian regionalism is accelerating East Asian regional economic interdependence, both before and in the wake of the financial crisis. The president of the Asian Development Bank notes that intra-regional trade in East Asia in 2003 accounted for 54% of the region’s total trade, compared to 35% in 1980. Intra-East Asian trade today is higher than that in the NAFTA region (46%),“very much comparable to intra-regional trade in the European Union before the 1992 Maastricht treaty.”[2] Although East Asian nations with the notable exception of China rely on investment from outside East Asia, the share of intra-regional foreign direct investment jumped from 24% in the latter half of the 1980s, to 40% in 1995-97.[3] On the top of economic linkages, the East Asian Community idea has been strengthened by a string of regional crises since the financial meltdown in 1997. The terrorist attacks on Bali and elsewhere in the region since October 2002, the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 have fostered a sense of shared vulnerability of the region to complex transnational disasters, which come with little warning and respect no national boundaries.
Identity
A fourth factor spurring the move towards an East Asian regionalism is the somewhat invented or imagined notion of an East Asian identity. This has been most evident in the language of the East Asian Vision Group, which unlike Mahathir’s ‘negative imagining’ of the region, presented East Asia as a positive, progressive regional identity. Hence, it stressed ‘fostering the identity of an East Asian community’ as well as ‘promotion of regional identity and consciousness’. (EAVG 2001:1-6). The EASG argued that
“Fostering a strong sense of East Asian identity and congeniality is essential for expediting genuine regional cooperation and, moreover, for helping reach the ultimate goal of East Asian integration…East Asian countries should attach great importance to the issue of regional identity and work closely to develop it. Building a strong sense of identity and an East Asian consciousness is a goal to be sought through continuous efforts by both government and civic leaders, since it is related to having people realize the common fate of the region and to changing the way of thinking. (EASG 2002:39)
The Advantages of an East Asian Framework
What are the actual and potential contributions of East Asian regionalism? At least five are noteworthy. I would discuss them under the following categories: institutional-binding, institutional-balancing, efficiency and functional logic, normative change, and the autonomy to the weak.
First, and this is a liberal institutionalist argument, East Asian regionalism provides an important additional layer of engagement between the region’s preeminent rising power, China, and its neighbours. This may create the possibility of China developing a form of what John Ikenberry, an American scholar, calls “institutional self-binding”, whereby a great power adopts a structure of restraint towards its weaker neighbours in exchange for the latter’s collective recognition of its own economic and security interests and leadership. East Asian regionalism may be a better mechanism for such Chinese self-binding than ARF or APEC, where the presence of the US makes China nervous about making concession which may be perceived as a sign of weakness and not even be reciprocated by Washington. Indeed, China has in the past seen US policies of engagement through the ARF as a form of “soft containment”.
Second, and this conforms broadly to expectations of realist theory, East Asian regionalism offers a psychological cushion to its participants against excessive US dominance. This may be seen as a form of ‘institutional balancing’, (different from institutional-binding) whereby a group of states use a regional institution to counter the dominance of a great power that remains outside the grouping. The very existence of East Asian institutions forces the US to weigh the diplomatic and political costs of action in a future regional crisis that may be construed as grossly unsympathetic or hostile by regional actors, for example the kind of behaviour mentioned earlier that sparked resentment against the US in the wake of the 1997 crisis.
Third, and this draws from neo-liberal theory, East Asian regionalism may serve as a more efficient platform for undertaking certain functional tasks that other regional groupings are less suited or inclined to perform. Financial cooperation is one of them, and has been already undertaken by the APT. East Asian regionalism has also proven useful in addressing certain types of non-traditional security threats, such as pandemics. The regional response to SARS crisis was undertaken through an East Asian framework and this may prove useful again should there be a massive outbreak of the bird flu. The focus on energy security at the 2nd EAS in Cebu is also noteworthy given the membership in the EAS of both India (not an APEC member) and China, two of the biggest consumers of energy resources.
Fourth, from a social constructivist perspective, East Asian regionalism, especially APT, may be a better platform for promoting normative change in the region, especially the much needed dilution of the non-interference doctrine. In ARF or APEC, such dilution is less likely, because of the likelihood that any such effort would be forcefully championed by their Western members such as the US or Australia, and invite suspicion and rejection by the more traditional-bound East Asian nations such as China and Vietnam. The level of comfort for negotiating what the former Thai Foreign Minister Surin Pitswuan once called “flexible engagement” may be greater within an East Asian context and forum.
Fifth and finally, (and this may conform to Mohammed Ayoob’s ‘subaltern realism’, East Asian regionalism, especially through its Summit, provides a forum for interactions between China and Asia’s two other rising powers: India and Japan. This ensures not only that the EAC will not be dominated by China, which is a concern of some of its detractors. But the simultaneous engagement of China, Japan and India through the EAS also offers the region’s weaker states a greater scope for autonomy. Weak states are known for their tendency to play great powers against one another to secure a margin of freedom for their own actions and to secure material benefits. While an extreme version of this may be destablising, some amount of competitive bidding by the Asian powers for ASEAN’s affection may be good for regional order, especially if the benefits offered include geopolitical restraint and economic assistance. Indeed, this has already happened with respect to China and Japan.
Despite offering these advantages, East Asian regionalism faces some very powerful obstacles. I identify five of them, referring them as: definition, default, duplication, distrust, dominance.
Obstacles and Challenges
Defining East Asia: Opportunistic Regions
Its first challenge is contested regional definition. Proponents argue that East Asia is economically more integrated and politically and culturally more coherent than unwieldy Asia-Pacific institutions like ARF and APEC that include the US, Canada and Australia. Yet, the inaugural Kuala Lumpur summit defined East Asia in “political rather than geographical terms”.[4] The broadening of the summit to include India, Australia and New Zealand, at the behest of Japan and Singapore,[5] and justified as a way of underscoring “open” and “inclusive” nature of the grouping, became a source of considerable controversy. Ironically, Mahathir himself disowned the summit for its inclusion of these non-East Asian countries, especially Australia. He accused Canberra of being America’s “deputy sheriff” that would “represent not the east but the views…of America.”[6] But Mahathir’s conception of East Asia is not shared by others, not the least by his former deputy and political nemesis Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar contends that the term East Asia is “of course a misnomer”, and urges the advocates of the East Asian Community idea “to think in terms of a truly Asian, original identity.” Referring to Indian participation, he argues “Ignoring India means ignoring an emerging economic giant and its contributions to the civilization of South East Asia.”[7]
Such politically-motivated differences over regional definition cloud the future institutional development of the East Asian Community. China had opposed moves to include Australia, New Zealand and India in the lead up to the summit. Whereas the move to broaden the Summit was undertaken by Japan and Singapore partly due to fears of Chinese dominance, Beijing saw this move as a Japanese ploy to weaken Chinese influence in East Asia. While Japan and India want the Summit to be the basis for the development of the East Asia Community, Beijing would prefer to develop such a community through the APT process, which does not include Australia, New Zealand and India.[8]
Default Leadership: ASEAN
The next challenge facing East Asian regionalism concerns its leadership. The inaugural KL Summit declaration made it clear that ASEAN would be the “driving force” of the summit. Institutionally, this implies that the EAS will be hosted and chaired by an ASEAN member state which assumes the ASEAN chairmanship and held back to back with the annual ASEAN summit. ASEAN’s leadership of the EAC is a function of its political standing. As Singapore’s Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong states, “ASEAN does not threaten anybody and the big countries in the region will want ASEAN to play that facilitating role.”[9]
But ASEAN’s capacity for leadership is undermined by internal weaknesses, which include the challenge of economic competition from China, intra-mural political bickering, and domestic political problems in member states. ASEAN is leading the EAC process mainly by default, because neither of the region’s two major powers, China and Japan, is in a political position to do so. “Cooperation in East Asia”, argues Japanese scholar Takashi Shiraisi, “cannot work if the prime mover is either or the two countries.”[10]
Duplication: EAC Versus Asia Pacific Institutions
What are the functions of East Asian institutions that are not undertaken by Asia Pacific regional groups, the ARF and APEC? As noted, one such area is financial cooperation undertaken by APT, including the system of bilateral currency swaps. But East Asian institutions are also supposed to tackle non-traditional security issues, such as terrorism, natural disasters, and environmental degradation, etc., that also fall within the mandate of APEC and ARF. The EAS’ mandate for undertaking “strategic dialogue and cooperation in political and security issues”, is also the key mission of the ARF. The EAS also seeks to promote “development, financial stability, energy security and economic integration”.[11] APEC suffered by ignoring development, and could do without a role in energy or finance. But the issue of economic integration is problematic, given the existence of competing blueprints for FTAs in the region: Asia Pacific wide (APEC-based), EAS-wide (pushed by Japan) and APT-wide (backed by China).
Although the EAS claims to provide for “open and spontaneous Leaders’-led discussions on strategic issues of peace and stability” in the region and in the world. (Chairman’s Statement, 2nd EAS, Cebu), it is not clear why APEC with its own annual summitry cannot provide such a medium. Hence, avoiding institutional competition and duplication of tasks is a major challenge for regional institution-building in general and East Asian regionalism in particular.
Distrust: The Unstable Sino-Japanese Core
The most serious challenge to East Asian Community idea is the spiral of mistrust between China and Japan. Sino-Japanese tensions reverses decades of reconciliation which might otherwise have served as the basis for a genuine East Asian Community. In many ways, China and Japan have complemented each other as benefactors to the region. In the 1980s and 90s, outward Japanese investment contributed to common prosperity in East Asia. The Chinese economy has increasingly assumed the role of regional integrator. In the 1997 crisis, aid offered by Japan was an important psychological factor behind Malaysia's ability to withstand the crisis, while China's pledge not to devalue its currency helped to stave off any further aggravation of the crisis. The SARS crisis moved China closer to the region after Beijing made up for its earlier secrecy over the outbreak by cooperating closely with neighbours in containing the pandemic. And Japan was the largest provider of humanitarian economic aid in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami.
But while their economic and functional ties with the region have been largely complimentary, the political and strategic roles of China and Japan in East Asia have become increasingly competitive. Japan was alarmed by Chinese nuclear tests and military expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. Responding, it strengthened its alliance with the US, which in turn fuelled Chinese perceptions of renewed Japanese militarism. Japan's prolonged economic stagnation at a time of China's meteoric rise fuelled Japanese insecurity. North Korea's missile tests and nuclear programme aggravated Japan’s insecurity and moved Tokyo closer to Washington's strategic agenda.
The Bush administration's war on terror offered an opportune framework for Japan to carry out political and constitutional changes which in reality have their basis in its concerns about the rise of China. These changes, which permit an expansive role for Japan's military are interpreted by neo-nationalist elements in China as a further sign of Japanese militarism. These forces have also exploited anti-Japanese sentiments over the visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by the former Prime Minister Koizumi and the publication of Japanese textbooks that glossed over Japanese war-time atrocities in East Asia. Anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, sometimes tolerated by the authorities in Beijing, produced a nationalist backlash in Japan. As a result, Sino-Japanese competition and mistrust creates a kind of unstable core at the heart of the EAC concept. It remains to be seen whether there would be any genuine improvement under the Abe government.
Dominance: The US as the Victim or Spoiler?
The United States has a history of anxiety attacks over East Asian regionalism. In his memoirs, US Secretary of State James Baker confesses to having done his best to “kill” Mahathir’s proposal for an East Asian Economic Caucus, “even though in public [he] took a moderate line.”[12] Today, the EAC is seen by some sections of the US policymaking community as a wedge between the US and East Asia, and an instrument for Chinese strategic gain at the expense of the US. Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State under the first George W. Bush administration, describes East Asian regionalism as ‘thinly-veiled way to make the point that the US is not totally welcomed in Asia.[13]
There has been some speculation that US might one day be invited to the EAS. But even friends of Washington do not see this as either necessary or desirable. Singapore’s Goh Chok Tong argues that “East Asia cannot be extending to countries in the Pacific, for then even the political definitions would get stretched beyond belief.” In Goh’s view, the region’s “engagement with the US could be through the APEC and the ARF.”[14]
In the meantime, while feigning disinterest and a lack of concern, sections of the US establishment are worried about potential Chinese dominance of East Asian regionalism. The famously conciliatory speech by the then Deputy Secretary of State, Robert Zoellick, in September 2005 warned that American concerns about China “will grow if China seeks to maneuver toward a predominance of power [in East Asia].” To prevent this, he urged ASEAN, Japan, Australia, and others to work with the US “for regional security and prosperity through the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum”, institutional competitors to EAC inn which America is a member.
If the past is any guide, overt or covert US pressure and manipulation could stifle progress towards an East Asian Community. On example of such an approach comes from neo-conservatives like Dana Dillon of the Heritage Foundation, who believes that “[w]ith artful management of the process by engaged American diplomats, the U.S. can either neutralize EAS into another Asian talk-shop, like the ASEAN Regional Forum, or use it to help harness China’s economy while muzzling its military.”[15] Already, America’s regional allies, such as Japan and Singapore, are seen to be acting in support of US interests (as well as their own), by keeping the EAS “open” and “transparent”.
Conclusion
In conclusion, East Asia’s nascent regionalism, while not being doomed from the start, or dead on arrival, has a lot of ground to cover before it can lay the foundations for a regional community. It will co-exist with, rather than subsume subregional mechanisms such as ASEAN, SCO, or supplant Asia-Pacific institutions like ARF and even the almost defunct APEC. The vision of an East Asian Community has been, and may well remain, an imagined community. As I have written elsewhere, “To describe it this way is not to dismiss it as an illusion, or to deny its potential for transforming East Asia’s future... [Rather] ‘imagined’ is meant to emphasize the bold aspirations that underlie the notion, aspirations which seek to transcend powerful physical, political and even cultural barriers confronting them. Many great transformations in history start with a vision, which is essentially an imagined outcome. Some acts of imagination carry a strong dose of wishful thinking that remains unfulfilled. The East Asian Community could turn out to be just that. But some imaginations can and do find their cherished outcome. The key to success or failure for the EAC lies not in its imaginary beginning, but in the process of translating it into reality…The challenge here is not just to resolve questions and uncertainties about its membership, leadership, functional scope, and intra-mural harmony, but also to find an institutional niche so as to accentuate the distinctive contributions it can make to regional stability and economic well-being which other institutional mechanisms have been unwilling or unable to make.
[1] Richard Stubbs, “ASEAN Plus Three: Emerging East Asian Regionalism?”, Asian Survey, vol.42, no.3 (2002), p.449.
[2] “Towards a Borderless Asia: A Perspective on Asian Economic Integration” Speech by Haruhiko Kuroda President Asian Development Bank, At The Emerging Markets Forum 10 December 2005 Oxford , UK Available at: http://www.adb.org/Documents/Speeches/2005/ms2005088.asp#_ftn3
Accessed 14 May 2006
[3] Takashi Isogai and Shunichi Shibanuma, “East Asia's Intra- and Inter-Regional Economic Relations; Data Analyses on Trade, Direct Investments and Currency Transactions” Bank of Japan Working Paper, 2000. Available at: http://www.boj.or.jp/en/type/ronbun/ron/wps/kako/iwp00e04.htm
Accessed 14 May 2006.
[4] “East Asia Summit will help to build trust”, The Straits Times, 5 November 2005.
[5] “Inaugural E Asia summit to boost Asian economic integration: Singapore”, Agence France Presse, 6 September 2005).
[6] “Australia Out of Place at Summit,”, ABC Online, 7 December 2005. www.abcnet.au/news/newsitems/200512/s1526124.htm
[7] Anwar Ibrahim, “Whither East Asia?”, AsiaViews, January 2006, p.2.
[8] “Japan, China clash over East Asia summit”, The Yomuri Shimbun, 25 November 2005.
[9] “East Asia Summit will help to build trust”, The Straits Times, 5 November 2005.
[10] Takashi Shiraishi, “Insights into the World/ East Asian Community Won’t Hurt U.S. Interests”, Daily Yomiuri, 4 September 2005.
[11] “East Asia Summit simply described as a dialogue forum”, Jiji Press, 28 November 2005.
[12] James A. Baker III, with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989-1992, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995.
[13] Bernard Gordon, “The FTA Fetish”, Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2005, p.A.16.
[14] “High stakes at the Kuala Lumpur summit”, Financial Express, 9 November 2005.
[15] Dana Robert Dillon, “Watching the East Asian Summit,” The Heritage Foundation Policy Research and Analysis, 18 August 2005, p.1.
Amitav Acharya
The emergence of East Asian regionalism is arguably one of the most important developments in the international relations of Asia. The trend began in 1997, when the region was hit by a massive economic crisis. The crisis undermined the credibility of regional institutions that were developed within a sub-regional or Asia-Pacific basis, namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). These institutions were seen to have failed to anticipate or contain the crisis and repair the damage to the region’s economic dynamism and political relationships caused by it. Since then, East Asian institutions, comprising the ASEAN Plus Three (APT, 1997), the East Asian Summit (EAS, 2005), and the futuristic notion of an East Asian Community (EAC), have gained momentum in the growing alphabet soup of regional institutions in Asia. So much so that proponents of East Asian regionalism envision them as the basis for a “bona fide [East Asian] regional community… for peace, prosperity and progress”
In this talk, I analyze the prospects for East Asian regionalism, focusing particularly on the East Asian Summit and the proposed East Asian Community. After discussing the factors that led to its emergence, I will outline some of the comparative advantages of building regional institutions within an East Asian framework. I then turn to the limitations of East Asian regionalism. My argument is that although the East Asian framework does offer some important comparative advantages in promoting regional cooperation, it is not necessarily a more viable framework for addressing the economic and strategic problems of contemporary Asian security order. At best, it can co-exist with Asia Pacific institutions, providing a platform for useful summit-level talks and undertaking a limited range of functional tasks which other regional institutions are ill-suited or unwilling to take on. But a host of institutional, political and strategic problems would need to be overcome before East Asia could really develop a genuine sense of regional community.
Origins and Impetus
Why has multilateralism occurred in an East Asian framework? Four factors have contributed to the emergence of East Asian regionalism. For the sake of brevity but at the risk of some oversimplification, I shall call them anxiety, anger, interconnectedness, and identity.
Anxiety
The contemporary move towards an East Asian institution began in 1990 when the then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammad, proposed an East Asian Economic Grouping (later renamed as East Asian Economic Caucus). His proposal was spurred by an acute sense of anxiety about regional trade blocs emerging in Europe and North America. The EU was about to become a single market, and the North American Free Trade Agreement was emerging. If East Asia did not do anything, reasoned Mahathir, it would be marginalized. Adding to the concern was the crisis over the Uruguay Round of the GATT, which was facing a breakdown. In fact, Mahathir’s proposal for EAEG came a day after the Uruguay Round that was in a state of impasse over the issue of the EU’s agricultural subsidies.
But the EAEG proposal stalled in the face of stiff American opposition. US pressure contributed to Japan’s reluctance to assume leadership of the grouping, as Mahathir had envisaged. Moreover, the fear of regional trading blocs that inspired Malaysia’s proposal proved to be unfounded. The EU did not become “fortress Europe”. The GATT Uruguay Round was successfully completed, thereby undercutting the rationale for an East Asian grouping.
Anger
The role of anger in spurring East Asian regionalism was critically evident following the outbreak of the Asian economic crisis in 1997. The crisis spurred a certain amount of regional disappointment and resentment towards the US, even among its allies such as Thailand and Japan. The very different responses from Washington to the Baht collapse and the Peso crisis in Mexico fuelled perceptions of America apathy towards the region. Washington’s response to the Peso crisis was prompt and generous, while in the case of Thailand it simply let the IMF take the lead and provided little direct financial aid. This, coupled with abrupt and total manner in which Washington rejected Japan’s proposal for an Asian Monetary Fund as a bulwark against future crises “antagonized opinion leaders of the region”.[1]
The crisis spurred a new regional process, known as the ASEAN-Plus-Three (APT). The APT focused particularly on regional financial cooperation, which had not been undertaken within APEC. At the behest of South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung, APT leaders set up an East Asia Vision Group (EAVG), to consider pathways towards regional cooperation. Its Report and that an inter-governmental group called the East Asian Study Group (EASG), endorsed the idea of an East Asian Summit.
Interconnectedness
A major impetus for East Asian regionalism is accelerating East Asian regional economic interdependence, both before and in the wake of the financial crisis. The president of the Asian Development Bank notes that intra-regional trade in East Asia in 2003 accounted for 54% of the region’s total trade, compared to 35% in 1980. Intra-East Asian trade today is higher than that in the NAFTA region (46%),“very much comparable to intra-regional trade in the European Union before the 1992 Maastricht treaty.”[2] Although East Asian nations with the notable exception of China rely on investment from outside East Asia, the share of intra-regional foreign direct investment jumped from 24% in the latter half of the 1980s, to 40% in 1995-97.[3] On the top of economic linkages, the East Asian Community idea has been strengthened by a string of regional crises since the financial meltdown in 1997. The terrorist attacks on Bali and elsewhere in the region since October 2002, the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 have fostered a sense of shared vulnerability of the region to complex transnational disasters, which come with little warning and respect no national boundaries.
Identity
A fourth factor spurring the move towards an East Asian regionalism is the somewhat invented or imagined notion of an East Asian identity. This has been most evident in the language of the East Asian Vision Group, which unlike Mahathir’s ‘negative imagining’ of the region, presented East Asia as a positive, progressive regional identity. Hence, it stressed ‘fostering the identity of an East Asian community’ as well as ‘promotion of regional identity and consciousness’. (EAVG 2001:1-6). The EASG argued that
“Fostering a strong sense of East Asian identity and congeniality is essential for expediting genuine regional cooperation and, moreover, for helping reach the ultimate goal of East Asian integration…East Asian countries should attach great importance to the issue of regional identity and work closely to develop it. Building a strong sense of identity and an East Asian consciousness is a goal to be sought through continuous efforts by both government and civic leaders, since it is related to having people realize the common fate of the region and to changing the way of thinking. (EASG 2002:39)
The Advantages of an East Asian Framework
What are the actual and potential contributions of East Asian regionalism? At least five are noteworthy. I would discuss them under the following categories: institutional-binding, institutional-balancing, efficiency and functional logic, normative change, and the autonomy to the weak.
First, and this is a liberal institutionalist argument, East Asian regionalism provides an important additional layer of engagement between the region’s preeminent rising power, China, and its neighbours. This may create the possibility of China developing a form of what John Ikenberry, an American scholar, calls “institutional self-binding”, whereby a great power adopts a structure of restraint towards its weaker neighbours in exchange for the latter’s collective recognition of its own economic and security interests and leadership. East Asian regionalism may be a better mechanism for such Chinese self-binding than ARF or APEC, where the presence of the US makes China nervous about making concession which may be perceived as a sign of weakness and not even be reciprocated by Washington. Indeed, China has in the past seen US policies of engagement through the ARF as a form of “soft containment”.
Second, and this conforms broadly to expectations of realist theory, East Asian regionalism offers a psychological cushion to its participants against excessive US dominance. This may be seen as a form of ‘institutional balancing’, (different from institutional-binding) whereby a group of states use a regional institution to counter the dominance of a great power that remains outside the grouping. The very existence of East Asian institutions forces the US to weigh the diplomatic and political costs of action in a future regional crisis that may be construed as grossly unsympathetic or hostile by regional actors, for example the kind of behaviour mentioned earlier that sparked resentment against the US in the wake of the 1997 crisis.
Third, and this draws from neo-liberal theory, East Asian regionalism may serve as a more efficient platform for undertaking certain functional tasks that other regional groupings are less suited or inclined to perform. Financial cooperation is one of them, and has been already undertaken by the APT. East Asian regionalism has also proven useful in addressing certain types of non-traditional security threats, such as pandemics. The regional response to SARS crisis was undertaken through an East Asian framework and this may prove useful again should there be a massive outbreak of the bird flu. The focus on energy security at the 2nd EAS in Cebu is also noteworthy given the membership in the EAS of both India (not an APEC member) and China, two of the biggest consumers of energy resources.
Fourth, from a social constructivist perspective, East Asian regionalism, especially APT, may be a better platform for promoting normative change in the region, especially the much needed dilution of the non-interference doctrine. In ARF or APEC, such dilution is less likely, because of the likelihood that any such effort would be forcefully championed by their Western members such as the US or Australia, and invite suspicion and rejection by the more traditional-bound East Asian nations such as China and Vietnam. The level of comfort for negotiating what the former Thai Foreign Minister Surin Pitswuan once called “flexible engagement” may be greater within an East Asian context and forum.
Fifth and finally, (and this may conform to Mohammed Ayoob’s ‘subaltern realism’, East Asian regionalism, especially through its Summit, provides a forum for interactions between China and Asia’s two other rising powers: India and Japan. This ensures not only that the EAC will not be dominated by China, which is a concern of some of its detractors. But the simultaneous engagement of China, Japan and India through the EAS also offers the region’s weaker states a greater scope for autonomy. Weak states are known for their tendency to play great powers against one another to secure a margin of freedom for their own actions and to secure material benefits. While an extreme version of this may be destablising, some amount of competitive bidding by the Asian powers for ASEAN’s affection may be good for regional order, especially if the benefits offered include geopolitical restraint and economic assistance. Indeed, this has already happened with respect to China and Japan.
Despite offering these advantages, East Asian regionalism faces some very powerful obstacles. I identify five of them, referring them as: definition, default, duplication, distrust, dominance.
Obstacles and Challenges
Defining East Asia: Opportunistic Regions
Its first challenge is contested regional definition. Proponents argue that East Asia is economically more integrated and politically and culturally more coherent than unwieldy Asia-Pacific institutions like ARF and APEC that include the US, Canada and Australia. Yet, the inaugural Kuala Lumpur summit defined East Asia in “political rather than geographical terms”.[4] The broadening of the summit to include India, Australia and New Zealand, at the behest of Japan and Singapore,[5] and justified as a way of underscoring “open” and “inclusive” nature of the grouping, became a source of considerable controversy. Ironically, Mahathir himself disowned the summit for its inclusion of these non-East Asian countries, especially Australia. He accused Canberra of being America’s “deputy sheriff” that would “represent not the east but the views…of America.”[6] But Mahathir’s conception of East Asia is not shared by others, not the least by his former deputy and political nemesis Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar contends that the term East Asia is “of course a misnomer”, and urges the advocates of the East Asian Community idea “to think in terms of a truly Asian, original identity.” Referring to Indian participation, he argues “Ignoring India means ignoring an emerging economic giant and its contributions to the civilization of South East Asia.”[7]
Such politically-motivated differences over regional definition cloud the future institutional development of the East Asian Community. China had opposed moves to include Australia, New Zealand and India in the lead up to the summit. Whereas the move to broaden the Summit was undertaken by Japan and Singapore partly due to fears of Chinese dominance, Beijing saw this move as a Japanese ploy to weaken Chinese influence in East Asia. While Japan and India want the Summit to be the basis for the development of the East Asia Community, Beijing would prefer to develop such a community through the APT process, which does not include Australia, New Zealand and India.[8]
Default Leadership: ASEAN
The next challenge facing East Asian regionalism concerns its leadership. The inaugural KL Summit declaration made it clear that ASEAN would be the “driving force” of the summit. Institutionally, this implies that the EAS will be hosted and chaired by an ASEAN member state which assumes the ASEAN chairmanship and held back to back with the annual ASEAN summit. ASEAN’s leadership of the EAC is a function of its political standing. As Singapore’s Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong states, “ASEAN does not threaten anybody and the big countries in the region will want ASEAN to play that facilitating role.”[9]
But ASEAN’s capacity for leadership is undermined by internal weaknesses, which include the challenge of economic competition from China, intra-mural political bickering, and domestic political problems in member states. ASEAN is leading the EAC process mainly by default, because neither of the region’s two major powers, China and Japan, is in a political position to do so. “Cooperation in East Asia”, argues Japanese scholar Takashi Shiraisi, “cannot work if the prime mover is either or the two countries.”[10]
Duplication: EAC Versus Asia Pacific Institutions
What are the functions of East Asian institutions that are not undertaken by Asia Pacific regional groups, the ARF and APEC? As noted, one such area is financial cooperation undertaken by APT, including the system of bilateral currency swaps. But East Asian institutions are also supposed to tackle non-traditional security issues, such as terrorism, natural disasters, and environmental degradation, etc., that also fall within the mandate of APEC and ARF. The EAS’ mandate for undertaking “strategic dialogue and cooperation in political and security issues”, is also the key mission of the ARF. The EAS also seeks to promote “development, financial stability, energy security and economic integration”.[11] APEC suffered by ignoring development, and could do without a role in energy or finance. But the issue of economic integration is problematic, given the existence of competing blueprints for FTAs in the region: Asia Pacific wide (APEC-based), EAS-wide (pushed by Japan) and APT-wide (backed by China).
Although the EAS claims to provide for “open and spontaneous Leaders’-led discussions on strategic issues of peace and stability” in the region and in the world. (Chairman’s Statement, 2nd EAS, Cebu), it is not clear why APEC with its own annual summitry cannot provide such a medium. Hence, avoiding institutional competition and duplication of tasks is a major challenge for regional institution-building in general and East Asian regionalism in particular.
Distrust: The Unstable Sino-Japanese Core
The most serious challenge to East Asian Community idea is the spiral of mistrust between China and Japan. Sino-Japanese tensions reverses decades of reconciliation which might otherwise have served as the basis for a genuine East Asian Community. In many ways, China and Japan have complemented each other as benefactors to the region. In the 1980s and 90s, outward Japanese investment contributed to common prosperity in East Asia. The Chinese economy has increasingly assumed the role of regional integrator. In the 1997 crisis, aid offered by Japan was an important psychological factor behind Malaysia's ability to withstand the crisis, while China's pledge not to devalue its currency helped to stave off any further aggravation of the crisis. The SARS crisis moved China closer to the region after Beijing made up for its earlier secrecy over the outbreak by cooperating closely with neighbours in containing the pandemic. And Japan was the largest provider of humanitarian economic aid in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami.
But while their economic and functional ties with the region have been largely complimentary, the political and strategic roles of China and Japan in East Asia have become increasingly competitive. Japan was alarmed by Chinese nuclear tests and military expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. Responding, it strengthened its alliance with the US, which in turn fuelled Chinese perceptions of renewed Japanese militarism. Japan's prolonged economic stagnation at a time of China's meteoric rise fuelled Japanese insecurity. North Korea's missile tests and nuclear programme aggravated Japan’s insecurity and moved Tokyo closer to Washington's strategic agenda.
The Bush administration's war on terror offered an opportune framework for Japan to carry out political and constitutional changes which in reality have their basis in its concerns about the rise of China. These changes, which permit an expansive role for Japan's military are interpreted by neo-nationalist elements in China as a further sign of Japanese militarism. These forces have also exploited anti-Japanese sentiments over the visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by the former Prime Minister Koizumi and the publication of Japanese textbooks that glossed over Japanese war-time atrocities in East Asia. Anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, sometimes tolerated by the authorities in Beijing, produced a nationalist backlash in Japan. As a result, Sino-Japanese competition and mistrust creates a kind of unstable core at the heart of the EAC concept. It remains to be seen whether there would be any genuine improvement under the Abe government.
Dominance: The US as the Victim or Spoiler?
The United States has a history of anxiety attacks over East Asian regionalism. In his memoirs, US Secretary of State James Baker confesses to having done his best to “kill” Mahathir’s proposal for an East Asian Economic Caucus, “even though in public [he] took a moderate line.”[12] Today, the EAC is seen by some sections of the US policymaking community as a wedge between the US and East Asia, and an instrument for Chinese strategic gain at the expense of the US. Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State under the first George W. Bush administration, describes East Asian regionalism as ‘thinly-veiled way to make the point that the US is not totally welcomed in Asia.[13]
There has been some speculation that US might one day be invited to the EAS. But even friends of Washington do not see this as either necessary or desirable. Singapore’s Goh Chok Tong argues that “East Asia cannot be extending to countries in the Pacific, for then even the political definitions would get stretched beyond belief.” In Goh’s view, the region’s “engagement with the US could be through the APEC and the ARF.”[14]
In the meantime, while feigning disinterest and a lack of concern, sections of the US establishment are worried about potential Chinese dominance of East Asian regionalism. The famously conciliatory speech by the then Deputy Secretary of State, Robert Zoellick, in September 2005 warned that American concerns about China “will grow if China seeks to maneuver toward a predominance of power [in East Asia].” To prevent this, he urged ASEAN, Japan, Australia, and others to work with the US “for regional security and prosperity through the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum”, institutional competitors to EAC inn which America is a member.
If the past is any guide, overt or covert US pressure and manipulation could stifle progress towards an East Asian Community. On example of such an approach comes from neo-conservatives like Dana Dillon of the Heritage Foundation, who believes that “[w]ith artful management of the process by engaged American diplomats, the U.S. can either neutralize EAS into another Asian talk-shop, like the ASEAN Regional Forum, or use it to help harness China’s economy while muzzling its military.”[15] Already, America’s regional allies, such as Japan and Singapore, are seen to be acting in support of US interests (as well as their own), by keeping the EAS “open” and “transparent”.
Conclusion
In conclusion, East Asia’s nascent regionalism, while not being doomed from the start, or dead on arrival, has a lot of ground to cover before it can lay the foundations for a regional community. It will co-exist with, rather than subsume subregional mechanisms such as ASEAN, SCO, or supplant Asia-Pacific institutions like ARF and even the almost defunct APEC. The vision of an East Asian Community has been, and may well remain, an imagined community. As I have written elsewhere, “To describe it this way is not to dismiss it as an illusion, or to deny its potential for transforming East Asia’s future... [Rather] ‘imagined’ is meant to emphasize the bold aspirations that underlie the notion, aspirations which seek to transcend powerful physical, political and even cultural barriers confronting them. Many great transformations in history start with a vision, which is essentially an imagined outcome. Some acts of imagination carry a strong dose of wishful thinking that remains unfulfilled. The East Asian Community could turn out to be just that. But some imaginations can and do find their cherished outcome. The key to success or failure for the EAC lies not in its imaginary beginning, but in the process of translating it into reality…The challenge here is not just to resolve questions and uncertainties about its membership, leadership, functional scope, and intra-mural harmony, but also to find an institutional niche so as to accentuate the distinctive contributions it can make to regional stability and economic well-being which other institutional mechanisms have been unwilling or unable to make.
[1] Richard Stubbs, “ASEAN Plus Three: Emerging East Asian Regionalism?”, Asian Survey, vol.42, no.3 (2002), p.449.
[2] “Towards a Borderless Asia: A Perspective on Asian Economic Integration” Speech by Haruhiko Kuroda President Asian Development Bank, At The Emerging Markets Forum 10 December 2005 Oxford , UK Available at: http://www.adb.org/Documents/Speeches/2005/ms2005088.asp#_ftn3
Accessed 14 May 2006
[3] Takashi Isogai and Shunichi Shibanuma, “East Asia's Intra- and Inter-Regional Economic Relations; Data Analyses on Trade, Direct Investments and Currency Transactions” Bank of Japan Working Paper, 2000. Available at: http://www.boj.or.jp/en/type/ronbun/ron/wps/kako/iwp00e04.htm
Accessed 14 May 2006.
[4] “East Asia Summit will help to build trust”, The Straits Times, 5 November 2005.
[5] “Inaugural E Asia summit to boost Asian economic integration: Singapore”, Agence France Presse, 6 September 2005).
[6] “Australia Out of Place at Summit,”, ABC Online, 7 December 2005. www.abcnet.au/news/newsitems/200512/s1526124.htm
[7] Anwar Ibrahim, “Whither East Asia?”, AsiaViews, January 2006, p.2.
[8] “Japan, China clash over East Asia summit”, The Yomuri Shimbun, 25 November 2005.
[9] “East Asia Summit will help to build trust”, The Straits Times, 5 November 2005.
[10] Takashi Shiraishi, “Insights into the World/ East Asian Community Won’t Hurt U.S. Interests”, Daily Yomiuri, 4 September 2005.
[11] “East Asia Summit simply described as a dialogue forum”, Jiji Press, 28 November 2005.
[12] James A. Baker III, with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989-1992, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995.
[13] Bernard Gordon, “The FTA Fetish”, Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2005, p.A.16.
[14] “High stakes at the Kuala Lumpur summit”, Financial Express, 9 November 2005.
[15] Dana Robert Dillon, “Watching the East Asian Summit,” The Heritage Foundation Policy Research and Analysis, 18 August 2005, p.1.
International Relations Theory and Western Dominance:
Amitav Acharya
Excerpts from Lecture delivered at the “Reenvisioning Global Justice/Global Order” Seminar Series, Centre for International Studies, Oxford University, 22 February 2007
In the field of international relations, there is now a growing recognition that what passes for theory has been, and continues to be, shaped mainly by the Western ideas, experiences, and practices. Stanley Hoffman once famously described the field of international relations as an ‘American social science.’ If this is true of the entire field, it is even more so of its theory, although the latter is more accurately characterised as “western”, rather than merely “American”, despite the latter’s greater claim to “social scientifism”. Moreover, international relations as a field of study is no longer the exclusive preserve of either American or Western universities. Some of the fastest advances in the discipline are taking place in non-Western countries, especially China, India and even Indonesia. In China, for example, some 48 universities are now conferring bachelor degree in international studies. Yet, IR theory remains stubbornly Western, incorporating relatively few insights and voices from the non-West.
Why is this the case? A recent investigation into this question by a project led by Barry Buzan and this writer and entitled “Why is there no Non-Western IR Theory: Reflections on and from Asia”, came up with a number of possible explanations. These explanations, which can apply to other parts of the non-Western world, range from the hegemonic status of Western scholars, publications and institutions in IR, to a realisation that Western IRT has discovered the right path to understanding IR, or the right answers to the puzzles and problems of the day, to a serious lack of institutional resources, the problem of language, and the close nexus between IR academics and the government which discourages theoretical work. We also found an uncritical acceptance of Western theory, a lack of confidence to take on Western theorists, blind deference to scholars from prestigious Western institutions, such as Australian scholars studying Indonesia who “may think Indonesia as their academic backyard”, and too much social life for scholars. What passes for theory in Asia is mostly theory-testing, scholars looking at Western thinking, and applying to the local context, rather than injecting indigenous ideas and insights from local practices to the main body of IR theory.
Of these, the first explanation, namely the hegemonic status of Western IRT, is of particular importance. To elaborate, this project is:
...not about whether Western IRT has found all the right paths to truth. It is about whether, because Western IRT has been carried by the dominance of Western power over the last few centuries, it has acquired a Gramscian hegemonic status that operates largely unconsciously in the minds of others, and regardless of whether the theory is correct or not. Here one would need to take into account the intellectual impact of Western imperialism and the success of the powerful in imprinting their own understandings onto the minds and practices of the non-Western world...the process of decolonisation left in its wake a world remodelled, sometimes badly, on the lines of the European state and its ‘anarchical society’ form of international relations. The price of independence was that local elites accept this structure, and a good case can be made that they not only did so under duress, but absorbed and made their own a whole set of key Western ideas about the practice of political economy, including most conspicuously and most universally, sovereignty, territoriality and nationalism. (Introduction to the Acharya and Buzan Volume)
It is this type of Western dominance that forms the rationale for my project of which this lecture is a very preliminary and truncated version. In this project, I explore the following questions:
1. If we assume some form of Western dominance in IR theory exists, can we come to some agreement as to what it actually means, or how is it manifested?
2. Is Western dominance merely an intellectual question, i.e. establishing the ‘non-universality’ of IR theory, or a normative one, extending to an examination of whether and how IRT has legitimised the West’s dominant position in the international system?
3. How is Western dominance reflected in some of the principal approaches to international order?
I should note here that it is not my aim to start a new ‘debate,’ as happened in the past between Idealists and Realists, or traditionalists and behaviouralists, or rationalists and post-positivists. This would amount to taking an extreme position for and against something or someone. I do not dismiss, much less denounce, the contribution of IR theory in spreading the discipline of international relations in the non-West. I also acknowledge that IR theory is not a monolith, and that some theories are more sensitive to non-Western experience and hence more cognizant of the dominance of the West over the non-West, than others. These include post-colonialism, feminism, and even some versions of what may be called “subaltern constructivism”, i.e. social constructivism that recognises the two-way diffusion of ideas and norms and examines the patterns of socialisation leading to community-building in the non-Western world. I also do not consider the problem of Western dominance as a grand conspiracy by Western intellectual elites and their leaders to keep the rest of the world down and out. Instead, I view Western dominance as inevitable, perhaps even necessary, deriving from the West’s recent historical position. Instead of being a grand conspiracy, I see it as a series of loosely connected intellectual discourses, which have excluded the non-West, due as much to the intellectual conditioning associated with Western power and influence as to the ignorance or laziness of the theorist, or his/her proclivity for generating testable hypotheses by keeping the relevant samples relatively small and familiar, and thus Western. ....
Western Dominance
I then turn to the second concept that requires clarification: what do I mean by Western dominance. This is a far more difficult task. Normally, dominance means physical subjugation of the weak by the strong. But there can be other, softer forms of dominance. The Gramscian notion of hegemony offers a useful framework for capturing the essence of dominance. First, dominance, like the Gramscian notion of hegemony is both material and ideational. Since IR theory is essentially a set of ideas, it is a natural arena where Western dominance would be clearly manifested. Second, drawing upon the well-known formulation of Robert Cox (1986: 207) that ‘Theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, IR theory can be generally understood as serving the purpose of the dominant Western actors. Last but not the least, dominance, like hegemony, is both sustained by coercion and consent, but consent may be the more important element. It is therefore not surprising to see many scholars in the non-West accepting and using IR theory without much hesitance, at least initially, and that the field of international relations has progressed in the non-West despite having been rooted in Western historiography and foreign policy experience.
Dominance can take many different forms: exclusion, ethnocentrism, marginalization, oppression, contempt, ignorance, etc. In this project, I define Western dominance in terms of four dimensions: (1) auto-centrism (2) universalism, (3) disjuncture, and (4) agency denials. Together, they have contributed to four essential tendencies in IR theorizing.
· Auto-centrism refers to the tendency of theorizing about key principles of mechanisms of international order from mainly Western ideas, culture, politics, historical experiences and contemporary praxis. Conversely, it is reflected in the disregard, exclusion and marginalisation of non-Western ideas, culture, politics, historical experiences and contemporary praxis. Part of this auto-centrism can be attributed to a sense of superiority of the Western pattern over non-Western one.. For elaboration, see may paper on Ethnocentrism and Emancipatory IR Theory.
· Universalism: refers to the tendency to view or present Western ideas and practices as the universal standard, while non-Western principles and practices are viewed as particularisms, aberrations or inferiorities. As Steve Walt found out while seeking justification for his selection of Middle East case studies to develop a theory about the origin of alliances, “international relations scholars have long relied on historical cases and quantitative data drawn from European diplomatic history without being accused of a narrow geographic, temporal, or cultural focus.” (Stephen Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Cornell, 1987), pp.14-15. Much of what passes for IR theory then is European diplomatic history and contemporary American foreign policy management.
· Disjuncture refers to the lack of fit between what passes for IR theory and the experience of the non-Western world, although Western scholars seldom see this as an obstacle to theory-building. We have serious problems when applying theories of conflict, cooperation, institution-building, norm diffusion dynamics, that dominate the literature of IR to the non-West.
· Agency denial refers to the lack of acknowledgment of the agency of non-western states, regional institutions, civil society actors in contributing to world order, even serious additions and extensions to the principles and mechanisms which were devised by the West; the non-West is seen as consumers, rather than producers, at least passive recipients rather than active borrowers of theoretical knowledge claims.
I should stress here is that these four dimensions of Western dominance are not mutually exclusive, but inter-related and can run parallel, or in sequence, with each other. But the scope of my analysis of Western dominance does not stop with an investigation of these four dimensions. This is not just a project about investigating how the development of IR theory has mainly been a Western enterprise and contribution. I have framed the title of my project in a deliberately ambiguous manner. My argument is that these above four tendencies in IR theory, which reflect the dominant position of the West in the international system, have also legitimized Western dominance of the international system. Most academic studies of IR theory’s lack of universality focus mainly on the issue of Western intellectual hegemony. But no consideration of western dominance in the formulation of IR theory can be complete without looking at the other part of equation: how IR theory, while itself being a product of Western dominance, has also legitimized Western dominance. This interactive relationship between IR theory and Western dominance is at the core of my investigation. Simply put, the development of IR theory is reflective of the dominant position of the West in the international system. And conversely, IR theory ahs helped to legitimize that dominance.
International Order
While international relations theory has a broad and complex domain, this project looks specifically at the ordering principles and mechanisms in world politics. This is based on the assumption, contestably so perhaps, that issues and mechanisms of international order dominate the theories of international relations or constitute the core of the theory of the discipline. IR theory is in many ways about investigating the sources, mechanisms and limitations of international order building. In this project, I look specifically at four ordering elements:
1. Sovereignties (to signify multiple conceptions of sovereignty): As the organizing principle of international order
2. Powers: Great Power relationships
3. Institutions: International and regional institutions
4. Values and Norms: Norm dynamics and normative change
There are other mechanisms which could be added to the above list: international law, balance of power, democracy etc. But I hope to include discussion of international law in sovereignty and institutions, while balance of power in the discussion of great powers and democracy can be looked at within the context of institutions.
Although my project does not specify a historical timeframe, it is very much concerned with exploring continuities between Western dominance in the classical notions and practices of international order and those in the contemporary setting. Ideas change, so do theories of international order. Contributions to IR theory which reflected primarily Western ideas and sanctioned Western dominance in 17-19th centuries may have lost their relevance or appeal today. Yet, some elements of Western dominance that marked the origins of these ideas may still persist. The study of international relations is changing in major ways, but an important question is whether western dominance of it persists, in terms of the four dimensions identified earlier, and whether the lack of non-Western voices and weak representation of non-Western experiences in IR theory today can be partly explained by the foundational principles and practices of international order in earlier junctures. This is a major intellectual puzzle and challenge for my project.....
Conclusion
In this lecture, I have concentrated on identifying four dimensions of Western dominance with respect to four major instruments of international order. I should end by issuing a note of caution about the limitations of drawing too sharp a distinction between the West and the non-West. As Martin Wight noted in his analysis of Western values, neither West nor the non-West are categories that could be regarded as homogenous. The West is no longer one, if it ever was. Nor can there be any certainty about the shape and identity of the entity that has been excluded from IR theory. Is there a Third World, or South? The concept of the Third World has fallen into serious disuse since the end of the Cold War. But South is not entirely uncontroversial either.
I do not assume that only non-Western scholars are taking up the issue of Western dominance in IR theory. Many Western scholars, including many speakers in this Oxford series and its director are also uncomfortable with the status quo. This has led some to object that this distinction between West and non-West has become increasingly unsustainable and should be subsumed under a single global conversation about the nature and purpose of IR theory. While a global conversation is what we should really aim for, just because “west” and “non-west” are not homogenous categories does not mean that there is no such problem as IR Theory and Western dominance, both historically and in contemporary times. Like global warming, the problem of IR Theory and Western dominance can no longer be wished away. But unlike global warming, it may be desirable here to let the temperature rise a bit for a much overdue debate, which unlike the grand inter-paradigm debates before, might actually end in international relations being a more ‘uniting’, rather than a ‘dividing discipline.’
Excerpts from Lecture delivered at the “Reenvisioning Global Justice/Global Order” Seminar Series, Centre for International Studies, Oxford University, 22 February 2007
In the field of international relations, there is now a growing recognition that what passes for theory has been, and continues to be, shaped mainly by the Western ideas, experiences, and practices. Stanley Hoffman once famously described the field of international relations as an ‘American social science.’ If this is true of the entire field, it is even more so of its theory, although the latter is more accurately characterised as “western”, rather than merely “American”, despite the latter’s greater claim to “social scientifism”. Moreover, international relations as a field of study is no longer the exclusive preserve of either American or Western universities. Some of the fastest advances in the discipline are taking place in non-Western countries, especially China, India and even Indonesia. In China, for example, some 48 universities are now conferring bachelor degree in international studies. Yet, IR theory remains stubbornly Western, incorporating relatively few insights and voices from the non-West.
Why is this the case? A recent investigation into this question by a project led by Barry Buzan and this writer and entitled “Why is there no Non-Western IR Theory: Reflections on and from Asia”, came up with a number of possible explanations. These explanations, which can apply to other parts of the non-Western world, range from the hegemonic status of Western scholars, publications and institutions in IR, to a realisation that Western IRT has discovered the right path to understanding IR, or the right answers to the puzzles and problems of the day, to a serious lack of institutional resources, the problem of language, and the close nexus between IR academics and the government which discourages theoretical work. We also found an uncritical acceptance of Western theory, a lack of confidence to take on Western theorists, blind deference to scholars from prestigious Western institutions, such as Australian scholars studying Indonesia who “may think Indonesia as their academic backyard”, and too much social life for scholars. What passes for theory in Asia is mostly theory-testing, scholars looking at Western thinking, and applying to the local context, rather than injecting indigenous ideas and insights from local practices to the main body of IR theory.
Of these, the first explanation, namely the hegemonic status of Western IRT, is of particular importance. To elaborate, this project is:
...not about whether Western IRT has found all the right paths to truth. It is about whether, because Western IRT has been carried by the dominance of Western power over the last few centuries, it has acquired a Gramscian hegemonic status that operates largely unconsciously in the minds of others, and regardless of whether the theory is correct or not. Here one would need to take into account the intellectual impact of Western imperialism and the success of the powerful in imprinting their own understandings onto the minds and practices of the non-Western world...the process of decolonisation left in its wake a world remodelled, sometimes badly, on the lines of the European state and its ‘anarchical society’ form of international relations. The price of independence was that local elites accept this structure, and a good case can be made that they not only did so under duress, but absorbed and made their own a whole set of key Western ideas about the practice of political economy, including most conspicuously and most universally, sovereignty, territoriality and nationalism. (Introduction to the Acharya and Buzan Volume)
It is this type of Western dominance that forms the rationale for my project of which this lecture is a very preliminary and truncated version. In this project, I explore the following questions:
1. If we assume some form of Western dominance in IR theory exists, can we come to some agreement as to what it actually means, or how is it manifested?
2. Is Western dominance merely an intellectual question, i.e. establishing the ‘non-universality’ of IR theory, or a normative one, extending to an examination of whether and how IRT has legitimised the West’s dominant position in the international system?
3. How is Western dominance reflected in some of the principal approaches to international order?
I should note here that it is not my aim to start a new ‘debate,’ as happened in the past between Idealists and Realists, or traditionalists and behaviouralists, or rationalists and post-positivists. This would amount to taking an extreme position for and against something or someone. I do not dismiss, much less denounce, the contribution of IR theory in spreading the discipline of international relations in the non-West. I also acknowledge that IR theory is not a monolith, and that some theories are more sensitive to non-Western experience and hence more cognizant of the dominance of the West over the non-West, than others. These include post-colonialism, feminism, and even some versions of what may be called “subaltern constructivism”, i.e. social constructivism that recognises the two-way diffusion of ideas and norms and examines the patterns of socialisation leading to community-building in the non-Western world. I also do not consider the problem of Western dominance as a grand conspiracy by Western intellectual elites and their leaders to keep the rest of the world down and out. Instead, I view Western dominance as inevitable, perhaps even necessary, deriving from the West’s recent historical position. Instead of being a grand conspiracy, I see it as a series of loosely connected intellectual discourses, which have excluded the non-West, due as much to the intellectual conditioning associated with Western power and influence as to the ignorance or laziness of the theorist, or his/her proclivity for generating testable hypotheses by keeping the relevant samples relatively small and familiar, and thus Western. ....
Western Dominance
I then turn to the second concept that requires clarification: what do I mean by Western dominance. This is a far more difficult task. Normally, dominance means physical subjugation of the weak by the strong. But there can be other, softer forms of dominance. The Gramscian notion of hegemony offers a useful framework for capturing the essence of dominance. First, dominance, like the Gramscian notion of hegemony is both material and ideational. Since IR theory is essentially a set of ideas, it is a natural arena where Western dominance would be clearly manifested. Second, drawing upon the well-known formulation of Robert Cox (1986: 207) that ‘Theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, IR theory can be generally understood as serving the purpose of the dominant Western actors. Last but not the least, dominance, like hegemony, is both sustained by coercion and consent, but consent may be the more important element. It is therefore not surprising to see many scholars in the non-West accepting and using IR theory without much hesitance, at least initially, and that the field of international relations has progressed in the non-West despite having been rooted in Western historiography and foreign policy experience.
Dominance can take many different forms: exclusion, ethnocentrism, marginalization, oppression, contempt, ignorance, etc. In this project, I define Western dominance in terms of four dimensions: (1) auto-centrism (2) universalism, (3) disjuncture, and (4) agency denials. Together, they have contributed to four essential tendencies in IR theorizing.
· Auto-centrism refers to the tendency of theorizing about key principles of mechanisms of international order from mainly Western ideas, culture, politics, historical experiences and contemporary praxis. Conversely, it is reflected in the disregard, exclusion and marginalisation of non-Western ideas, culture, politics, historical experiences and contemporary praxis. Part of this auto-centrism can be attributed to a sense of superiority of the Western pattern over non-Western one.. For elaboration, see may paper on Ethnocentrism and Emancipatory IR Theory.
· Universalism: refers to the tendency to view or present Western ideas and practices as the universal standard, while non-Western principles and practices are viewed as particularisms, aberrations or inferiorities. As Steve Walt found out while seeking justification for his selection of Middle East case studies to develop a theory about the origin of alliances, “international relations scholars have long relied on historical cases and quantitative data drawn from European diplomatic history without being accused of a narrow geographic, temporal, or cultural focus.” (Stephen Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Cornell, 1987), pp.14-15. Much of what passes for IR theory then is European diplomatic history and contemporary American foreign policy management.
· Disjuncture refers to the lack of fit between what passes for IR theory and the experience of the non-Western world, although Western scholars seldom see this as an obstacle to theory-building. We have serious problems when applying theories of conflict, cooperation, institution-building, norm diffusion dynamics, that dominate the literature of IR to the non-West.
· Agency denial refers to the lack of acknowledgment of the agency of non-western states, regional institutions, civil society actors in contributing to world order, even serious additions and extensions to the principles and mechanisms which were devised by the West; the non-West is seen as consumers, rather than producers, at least passive recipients rather than active borrowers of theoretical knowledge claims.
I should stress here is that these four dimensions of Western dominance are not mutually exclusive, but inter-related and can run parallel, or in sequence, with each other. But the scope of my analysis of Western dominance does not stop with an investigation of these four dimensions. This is not just a project about investigating how the development of IR theory has mainly been a Western enterprise and contribution. I have framed the title of my project in a deliberately ambiguous manner. My argument is that these above four tendencies in IR theory, which reflect the dominant position of the West in the international system, have also legitimized Western dominance of the international system. Most academic studies of IR theory’s lack of universality focus mainly on the issue of Western intellectual hegemony. But no consideration of western dominance in the formulation of IR theory can be complete without looking at the other part of equation: how IR theory, while itself being a product of Western dominance, has also legitimized Western dominance. This interactive relationship between IR theory and Western dominance is at the core of my investigation. Simply put, the development of IR theory is reflective of the dominant position of the West in the international system. And conversely, IR theory ahs helped to legitimize that dominance.
International Order
While international relations theory has a broad and complex domain, this project looks specifically at the ordering principles and mechanisms in world politics. This is based on the assumption, contestably so perhaps, that issues and mechanisms of international order dominate the theories of international relations or constitute the core of the theory of the discipline. IR theory is in many ways about investigating the sources, mechanisms and limitations of international order building. In this project, I look specifically at four ordering elements:
1. Sovereignties (to signify multiple conceptions of sovereignty): As the organizing principle of international order
2. Powers: Great Power relationships
3. Institutions: International and regional institutions
4. Values and Norms: Norm dynamics and normative change
There are other mechanisms which could be added to the above list: international law, balance of power, democracy etc. But I hope to include discussion of international law in sovereignty and institutions, while balance of power in the discussion of great powers and democracy can be looked at within the context of institutions.
Although my project does not specify a historical timeframe, it is very much concerned with exploring continuities between Western dominance in the classical notions and practices of international order and those in the contemporary setting. Ideas change, so do theories of international order. Contributions to IR theory which reflected primarily Western ideas and sanctioned Western dominance in 17-19th centuries may have lost their relevance or appeal today. Yet, some elements of Western dominance that marked the origins of these ideas may still persist. The study of international relations is changing in major ways, but an important question is whether western dominance of it persists, in terms of the four dimensions identified earlier, and whether the lack of non-Western voices and weak representation of non-Western experiences in IR theory today can be partly explained by the foundational principles and practices of international order in earlier junctures. This is a major intellectual puzzle and challenge for my project.....
Conclusion
In this lecture, I have concentrated on identifying four dimensions of Western dominance with respect to four major instruments of international order. I should end by issuing a note of caution about the limitations of drawing too sharp a distinction between the West and the non-West. As Martin Wight noted in his analysis of Western values, neither West nor the non-West are categories that could be regarded as homogenous. The West is no longer one, if it ever was. Nor can there be any certainty about the shape and identity of the entity that has been excluded from IR theory. Is there a Third World, or South? The concept of the Third World has fallen into serious disuse since the end of the Cold War. But South is not entirely uncontroversial either.
I do not assume that only non-Western scholars are taking up the issue of Western dominance in IR theory. Many Western scholars, including many speakers in this Oxford series and its director are also uncomfortable with the status quo. This has led some to object that this distinction between West and non-West has become increasingly unsustainable and should be subsumed under a single global conversation about the nature and purpose of IR theory. While a global conversation is what we should really aim for, just because “west” and “non-west” are not homogenous categories does not mean that there is no such problem as IR Theory and Western dominance, both historically and in contemporary times. Like global warming, the problem of IR Theory and Western dominance can no longer be wished away. But unlike global warming, it may be desirable here to let the temperature rise a bit for a much overdue debate, which unlike the grand inter-paradigm debates before, might actually end in international relations being a more ‘uniting’, rather than a ‘dividing discipline.’
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