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Constructing Regional Security Community in East Asia from Difficult Conditions: From Community of Commerce to Community of Nations
Abstract
This paper explores why is there no regional, multilateral, collective security community like NATO in East Asia and how to construct regional security community from difficult conditions. East Asian regional community originated from two divergent paths of international system: the regional community of commerce called East Asian Mediterranean and Chinese tributary system of hub-and-spokes. These divergent systems reappeared in the post-World War II. The USA constructed a hub-and-spokes system that suffocated the regional multilateral security community while a community of commerce resurrected in the post-Cold War spilled over into security community. I explore the opportunities and constraints that East Asia has faced in constructing a regional security community. Then I will investigate what is needed for East Asia to construct regional security organization, shared values and identities, and the assurance of balanced multi-polarity by core states that are the core conditions in constructing regional security community.
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East Asia is becoming more regionalized. But it is doing so in fits and starts: two steps forward and one step back. Indeed, skeptics might suggest that even such a tentative description imputes unjustified clarity and speed to the process of regional cohesion. At present Asian governments share no overarching regional vision, nor have they demonstrated the political leadership and will needed to create robust institutions aimed at deepening and regularizing state-to-state interactions across the region. Yet even with its many missteps, Asia has, beyond question, become a far more regionalized neighborhood than it was one or two decades ago. During the Cold War ideological divisions, bilateral alliances, and the legacies of colonialism kept the attention of most governments focused on nation-building and domestic matters. The result was a series of formidable barriers against widespread regional cooperation. True, Southeast Asian countries had forged ASEAN as early as 1967 but their counterpart countries in Northeast Asia were neither invited to join nor predisposed to forge any comparable body of their own. Additionally, cross-border production networks had begun to leaven previously tight national economic boundaries resulting in deeper regional economic integration (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997; Pempel 1997; inter alia). But as John Ravenhill (2008: 43-44) has correctly pointed out, the very climate that allowed individual multinational corporations to operate across national borders throughout much of East Asia served to reduce, rather than accelerate, business pressures on governments to create new regional institutions. In short, East Asia saw a bottom-up, corporate-driven regionalization, but very little top-down, government- sponsored regional institutionalization (Pempel, 2005a)
Over the last few years the institutionalization of the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) process has started to take shape. Government leaders, ministers, and senior officials from the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the three Northeast Asian states-China, Japan, and South Korea-that together comprise the participants in the process are consulting on an increasing range of issues. The question of the APT's future is explored below in four parts. The first part examines those regional trends that strongly suggest the need for an East Asian regional organization. Indeed, the APT is the latest in a succession of proposals that have arisen out of the continuing search for a vehicle for East Asian regional cooperation. Pressures for the development of an effective institutional arrangement of that sort have been mounting in the region for some time. The article's second part reviews the extent to which East Asian regionalism has been prompted by the success of similar organizations in other parts of the world and the failure of ASEAN and APEC to provide a collective voice for East Asian states. The next part explores the impact of the Asian economic crisis on the development of the APT process. It argues that the crisis gave the new cooperative regional arrangement a focus for taking concrete, practical action. Finally, the article details the main obstacles to the APT's development. Though these obstacles are rooted in the many variations to be found in the societies and economies of the East Asian countries, I argue that they are unlikely to stop the growth of the APT's influence.
This insightful book draws upon a wide range of disciplines - political economy, geography and international relations - to examine how Asia has returned to its central position in the world economy.
The focus of Fernand Braudel's great work is the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century, but Braudel ranges back in history to the world of Odysseus and forward to our time, moving out from the Mediterranean area to the New World and other destinations of Mediterranean traders. Braudel's scope embraces the natural world and material life, economics, demography, politics, and diplomacy.
Northeast Asia, where the interests of three major nuclear powers and the world's two largest economies mingle around the unstable pivot of the Korean Peninsula, is a region rife with political and economic uncertainties. It is arguably one of the most dangerous areas in the world, plagued by security problems of global importance, including nuclear and missile proliferation. It has, to be sure, been widely touted as a region of economic promise. Yet despite Northeast Asia's demonstrable economic success at the macro level, and a panoply of highly regarded individual economic managers at the micro level, its collective economic management has nevertheless been disappointing.
Rapid and sustained growth in international trade has long been a hallmark of successful growth and development strategies in East Asia. Some success stories are well known: those of the newly industrializing economies (NIEs) such as the Republic of Korea, as well as middle-income economies such as Malaysia and the transition economy of China. More recent entrants to world markets that have seen rapid export growth include low-income economies such as Cambodia and Vietnam. Trade has been an important
factor in growth in the region, enabling progress in poverty reduction. Although the 1997-98 financial crisis interrupted this progress, recovery since then has brought poverty rates in every emerging economy in the region to record lows, and in economies like that of Vietnam, trade growth has brought with it a rapid reduction in poverty. Intra-regional trade in East Asia has grown faster than trade with any other market,
and while the largest economies account for the bulk of this trade, the regional trade of most smaller economies has also grown. Trade integration has been market led, stemming from a combination of unilateral reforms, fulfillment of multilateral commitments, and a pattern of relocation of
production processes (see Kawai and Urata 2002). Intraregional trade has been driven not only by growing
demand but increasingly by improved competitiveness in regional markets, as reflected in increased market shares. China has been particularly dynamic, but almost all countries increased their competitiveness in regional markets during 1995-2001.9 This increase was accomplished without loss of competitiveness in other markets; East Asia continued to expand its market shares in the European Union (EU) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) markets in the same period.
Aaron L. Friedberg is Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Director of the Research Program in International Security at Princeton's Center of International Studies.
The author wishes to thank Desaix Anderson, Henry Bienen, Thomas Christensen, and Min Xin Pei for their comments and Geoffrey Herrera for research assistance.
1. One recent study concludes similarly that "regional multipolar processes are likely to become a more and more important feature of international politics." Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, "Predicting Alliance Patterns," International Organization, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring 1990), p. 168. For another analysis that also foresees a movement toward regionalization see Joseph A. Camilleri, "Alliances in the Emerging Post-Cold War Security System" (unpublished manuscript), March 11, 1992.
2. See John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-56.
3. For explications of these views see: Stephen Van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe After the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Winter 1990/91), pp. 7-57; Robert Jervis, "The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past?" International Security, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Winter 1991/92), pp. 39-73; Jack Snyder, "Averting Anarchy in the New Europe," International Security, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Spring 1990), pp. 5-41; James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, "Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era," International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 467-491; Richard H. Ullman, Securing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and letters by Stanley Hoffmann and Robert Keohane in "Correspondence: Back to the Future, Part II: International Relations Theory and Post-Cold War Europe," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 191-194. Jervis and Goldgeier and McFaul make the same arguments more generally about the relations among the nations of the "developed world," i.e., Western Europe, the United States and Japan (Jervis), or the "great powers" of the advanced industrial "core" (Goldgeier and McFaul).
4. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, East Asia's economic output is likely to exceed that of both North America and the European Community. See Urban C. Lehner, "Belief in an Imminent Asian Century Is Gaining Sway," Wall Street Journal, May 17, 1993, p. A12.
5. Throughout this essay I use the term "Asia" to refer to the region extending from Southwest Asia, across China to Northeast Asia and including the offlying islands at the western edge of the Pacific rim. (See map, p. 33.) The list of "poles" or "major powers" around which a new Asian sub-system will take shape includes, by virtue of their location and their actual and potential military capabilities, China, Japan, Russia, and perhaps India. Whether the United States remains an Asian power will depend on its willingness to continue to project some fraction of its military might into the region.
6. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 161.
7. For the first round in this debate see Karl W. Deutsch and J. David Singer, "Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability," World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (April 1964), pp. 390-406; Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 9 (Summer 1964), pp. 881-909. Waltz elaborates his position in Theory of International Politics, pp. 129-193. Similar views are expressed in Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future," pp. 13-18. For elaborations of the deductive arguments on all sides see Van Evera, "Primed for Peace," pp. 33-40; Richard Rosecrance, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Future," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 10, No. 3 (September 1966), pp. 314-327; Patrick James and Michael Brecher, "Stability and Polarity: New Paths for Inquiry," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1988), pp. 31-42; Alvin M. Saperstein, "The 'Long Peace'—Result of a Bipolar Competitive World?" Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 1991), pp. 68-79. For efforts to resolve the question empirically see Michael Haas, "International Subsystems: Stability and Polarity," American Political Science Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 (1970), pp. 98-123; and Jack...
In East Asia the United States cultivated a hub and spokes system of discrete, exclusive alliances with the Republic of Korea, the Republic of China, and Japan, a system that was distinct from the multilateral security alliances it preferred in Europe. Bilateralism emerged in East Asia as the dominant security structure because of the powerplay rationale behind U.S. postwar planning in the region. Powerplay refers to the construction of an asymmetric alliance designed to exert maximum control over the smaller ally's actions. The United States created a series of bilateral alliances in East Asia to contain the Soviet threat, but a congruent rationale was to constrain rogue alliesthat is, rabidly anticommunist dictators who might start wars for reasons of domestic legitimacy and entrap the United States in an unwanted larger war. Underscoring the U.S. desire to avoid such an outcome was a belief in the domino theory, which held that the fall of one small country in Asia could trigger a chain of countries falling to communism. The administrations of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower calculated that they could best restrain East Asia's pro-West dictators through tight bilateral alliances rather than through a regionwide multilateral mechanism. East Asia's security bilateralism today is therefore a historical artifact of this choice.
Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Contenido: Introducción. Sistemas y políticas internacionales. Actores en el sistema internacional: Propósitos de política exterior y técnicas para alcanzarlos. Explicando las políticas exteriores. Principales formas de interacción entre naciones.
In this paper, we explain why the U.S. government chose multilateral security arrangements in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. After reviewing the inadequacies of a number of universal and indeterminate explanations, we put forward three explanations-great power status, efficient responses to threats, and regional identity-which rely on the combination of material and social forces for their explanatory power. Starting with common rationalist explanations that focus on material capabilities and institutional efficiency to explain the forms of international cooperation, we add to them the important effect that America's collective identity had on the formulation of its foreign policy goals. U.S. policymakers believed that the United States was a natural part of the North Atlantic community but that Southeast Asia was part of an alien political community. This difference helped drive the U.S. government to adopt divergent policies in two regions that, far from being natural, were constructed politically only in the 1940s. We conclude by pointing to the advantage of eclectic combinations of rationalist and constructivist insights, with an extension to the politics of regional collective identity in the 1990s.
Legalization in contemporary world politics is a complex and variedmosaic rather than a universal and irreversible trend. Regional islandsof high legalization, such as Europe, coexist with other regions thathave largely rejected legalized institutions. Variation occurs acrossissue-areas as well as time. An increase in legalization in the globaltrade regime was capped by the establishment of the World TradeOrganization (WTO) in the 1990s. At the same time, exchange-ratecommitments under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) failed to returnto the levels of obligation and precision they had displayed threedecades ago. Regional security regimes display soft legalization for themost part, but certain global arms control agreements are precise,legally binding, and incorporate moderate levels of delegation.
East Asia has become more integrated as a region over the past quarter century. In looking ahead, this article identifies five central obstacles to further regionalism. Three address the composition of any future East Asian region: the arenas in which cooperation is sought, the geographic scope of any future region, and the extent to which regional ties are formalized. The other two variables will influence the future regardless of how the first three are resolved: the structure and balance of domestic political forces, and leadership. The complex interactions of these five are then examined in the recent moves toward preferential trade pacts, increased regional monetary and financial cooperation, and security.
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