(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804760705
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804760706
- Pub. Date:
- 03/26/2009
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804760705
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804760706
- Pub. Date:
- 03/26/2009
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations / Edition 1
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Overview
According to Alice Ba, the answers lie in ASEAN's founding arguments: arguments that were premised on an assumed regional disunity. She demonstrates how these arguments draw critical causal connections that make Southeast Asian regionalism a necessary response to problems, give rise to its defining informality and consensus-seeking process, and also constrain ASEAN's regionalism. Tracing debates about ASEAN's intra- and extra-regional relations over four decades, she argues for a process-driven view of cooperation, sheds light on intervening processes of argument and debate, and highlights interacting material, ideational, and social forces in the construction of regions and regionalisms.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804760706 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2009 |
| Series: | Studies in Asian Security |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia
REGION, REGIONALISM, AND THE ASSOCIATION OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATIONSBy Alice D. Ba
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6069-0
Chapter One
The ASEAN Paradox and IR Theory
ASEAN is an irrelevant imitation community. David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith, 2001 Southeast Asia minus ASEAN equals greater political instability, more widespread economic deterioration and almost surely, the ascendancy of expansionist forces that thrive on the weakness, isolation and disunity of others. Narciso Reyes, ASEAN Secretary General, 1980-1982
This chapter situates ASEAN and Asia's post-Cold War regionalisms within larger theoretical debates about international relations (IR). It first describes the puzzle that ASEAN presents for dominant IR theories whose utilitarian understandings of cooperation offer limited explanations for ASEAN, its informal consensus-seeking regionalism, and its resilience in the face of change. It then offers an alternative explanation based on constructivist arguments about the role of ideas and social processes (here, argumentation, dialogue, social reinforcement) in the production and reproduction of regions and regionalisms. I build especially on the work of Barnett, Kaye, and Acharya, each of whom have similarly looked to constructivist approaches to explain particular regional politics (respectively, pan-Arabism, Arab-Israeli politics, and Southeast Asia as a security community). My framework, which highlights competing ideas as well as ideational-material interactions in the production of regions and regionalisms in first Southeast Asia and now East Asia, is detailed below.
The ASEAN Paradox
The existence of ASEAN defies most expectations. At the time of its founding in 1967, few expected ASEAN to last one year, let alone nearly four decades, given the volatile state of Southeast Asia's intra- and extraregional relations. Yet, not only has ASEAN seen cooperation deepen, grow, and expand into areas like politics and security that were once too sensitive even to mention, but ASEAN also finds itself today at the center of new arrangements that extend beyond Southeast Asia. If today we see in Southeast Asia a coherent regional entity-as opposed to what one 1954 observer characterized as "a place on the globe where certain groups of peoples, holding little in common, live contiguous to one another"-it is largely due to the existence of ASEAN, whose activities and ideas about Southeast Asia have done much to give both form and substance to this once ambiguous region.
International relations theory has not known what to do with ASEAN. Regional elites associate their organization with milieu-transforming changes in Southeast Asia. Other developing regions identify ASEAN as a model of regional cooperation for their own problematic relations. For such observers, ASEAN provides processes by which members have been able to stabilize their once volatile and fragmented region; to improve their security between one another and vis-à-vis larger, non-Southeast Asian powers; and ultimately to prosper. Yet predominant IR theories view ASEAN's cooperation as weak, inconsequential, even "unworthy of theoretical ref lection." Indeed, until recently, ASEAN was barely a mention in IR's mainstream journals and mostly outside its defining debates about world order, multilateral cooperation, international organizations, and regionalism.
Mostly, such conclusions reflect a tendency of approaches to measure cooperation in utilitarian terms-that is, direct material gains and outcomes. Not surprisingly, realists, for whom military power and balance of power are key to security, are most dubious about ASEAN's strategic value. While ASEAN's participants may view regionalism as a way to defend their interests against those more powerful, members have also historically avoided any collective pooling of military capabilities that is central to realist definitions of balancing behavior and world order. Political-security initiatives like ZOPFAN are seen as more or less useless as they offer states little in the way of military or material deterrent against possible territorial encroachment.
But even approaches that are more optimistic about cooperation and the resilience of institutions find it difficult to see the value in ASEAN. In fact, for contractual and neoliberal theorists, as well as realists, it is difficult to see why states would try to cooperate at all because, on the face of it, competing economic and security interests should point states away from regional cooperation. For both, the absence of formal mechanisms of cooperation in ASEAN is particularly problematic. Drawing mostly on European and North American examples, approaches argue that the value to be found in institutional arrangements is in their ability to provide "forms of hierarchy in which sanctions are employed to make self-interested choices consistent with the social good." Thus, while they may see information and transparency as important products and facilitators of institutional cooperation, cooperation is nevertheless viewed mostly in terms of formal constraints and binding obligations.
However, if contractual obligations and forms of hierarchy are measures of cooperation, what is one to make of ASEAN's minimalist institutionalism or of the fact that ASEAN's Senior Officials Meeting (SOM), the center of ASEAN agenda setting and top of the ASEAN committee hierarchy, was accorded no formal role in ASEAN for twenty years? What is one to make of ASEAN's founding declaration-a document "so general as to approach the nondescript," that identified no specific agenda for economic or political cooperation, provided no mechanism for dispute resolution, and established no central coordinating body or authority? In fact, it took ASEAN nine years just to get a minimalist secretariat and fifteen more years after that to upgrade it. By such criteria of cooperation, ASEAN, as well as expanded regional arrangements like the ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN Plus Three-arrangements that similarly offer no firm conflict resolution mechanisms or routes of sanction-are all examples of "soft" or "weak institutionalism" that compare unfavorably against the "strong institutionalism" of the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the World Trade Organization (WTO). If such formal mechanisms are the criteria for strong cooperation, then, as Katzenstein puts it, "the history of formal regional institutions in Asia is a history of failures so conspicuous, in comparison to Europe, as to beg for an explanation."
However, the preoccupation of traditional approaches also make quite clear why ASEAN has not received more theoretical attention from international relations' main theories: As an example of neither military balancing nor legal contract, ASEAN quite simply offers these theories little to discuss. ASEAN is "weak" because institutional strength is measured in terms of legalization and militarization-neither of which describes ASEAN well. To look at ASEAN's minimalist economic and security initiatives is to conclude that ASEAN is an empty or weak exercise in cooperation-a mere "talk shop." But while ASEAN has certainly had its share of problems, the stabilization of regional relations and growth in cooperation over time counters such an extreme conclusion. Whether or not ASEAN is a security community, Southeast Asia is today more stable, cooperative, and coherent than it was four decades ago. Unlike the situation in the mid-1960s when conflict and intervention were the norm in intra-Southeast Asian relations, today exchanges, dialogue, and collaboration take place regularly at multiple levels and in a variety of areas. Even some contentious territorial disputes-the ultimate realist test-have been referred to the International Court of Justice, shelved, and in some cases, resolved.
My point here is that while utilitarian explanations provide plausible reasons for the limitations of ASEAN cooperation and for why ASEAN has not done more, they have difficulty explaining why ASEAN has not done less. Utilitarian explanations are right to a point: Divergent interests do often make cooperation difficult, more open ended, less binding; and states do often opt for unilateral and bilateral solutions whose gains are more certain or at least less complicated. Nevertheless, absent all the things that theorists say make institutions worthwhile, it is difficult to explain what justifies or sustains the organization, what states hope to gain from ASEAN cooperation, or the whys and hows behind the significant changes since ASEAN's founding. In short, the real puzzle for traditional approaches is not why ASEAN cooperation has not been more materially fruitful but rather why members have pursued ASEAN regionalism for so long if there were nothing going on.
The now-forty-year-old ASEAN thus presents an important puzzle for what have been the dominant approaches of international relations. Left unanswered are the very basic and fundamental questions: Why ASEAN? And what does it do? If ASEAN has mitigated the uncertainty of Southeast Asia's strategic environment-and I will argue that it has-it simply has not done so in many of the ways identified by dominant theoretical accounts. In other words, as Katzenstein argues, the contrast between European and Asian institutions should not lead to the automatic and common conclusion of "Asian failure" versus "European success" but instead openness to different kinds of regional processes and a search for alternative explanations.
This thus provides the starting point for my alternative argument and framework. Drawing on constructivist approaches, my explanation begins with a discussion about the need to think about regionalism as a cumulative, social process. I then turn to the specific pieces of my framework-relational power (ASEAN's small power identity, extraregional uncertainties), regional ideas (especially, a nationalist bounded regional unity norm), and regionalism as a dialogue-driven, consensus-seeking process of social change. I argue that social constructivism's language of ideas, norms, and social process can speak to and capture the dynamics of ASEAN's regionalism in ways that the dominant theories of international relations and their language of material gains cannot.
Thinking Differently about ASEAN Regionalism: Regionalism as Social Process
I argue that we need to think differently about ASEAN regionalism and about cooperation in general. One of the limitations of more traditional approaches is that cooperation is understood mostly in terms of discrete collective action problems involving the provision and division of direct gains. Similarly, order-the contributions of regional institutions included-is also understood in mostly material and mechanical terms: balance of power, hegemonic leadership, forms of hierarchy, the structure of economic and security incentives. However, order and international institutions can also be understood in social, cultural, and organic terms-that is, the social ideas that regulate interactions and give meaning to relationships.
Thus, rather than thinking about cooperation solely in terms of functionally driven end products or instances of collective action, cooperation is, as Kaye argues, better understood as a dynamic, social "process of interactions" by which actors negotiate, not just specific interests but also new norms and thinking about relationships. Thus for constructivists like Kaye and others, international institutions are more than places where actors go to bargain and negotiate predefined, fixed interests; they are also more than a set of "material rewards and punishments" that constrain state action. Instead, as Johnston similarly argues, institutions are also social environments where actors negotiate their different identities, where they debate ideas, and where they arrive at "collective interpretations of the external world" and how best to respond to it. These social exchanges and interactions then produce changes in how states conceive their interests and themselves in relation to others. Put another way, actors do not enter and exit international organizations exactly the same as they entered it. Viewed in such terms, institutions may be better viewed as "norms builders" as much "norms enforcers;" they are social and socializing arenas, where new ideas, new definitions of self and other, and thus new politics-for better or worse-may emerge, take hold, and reproduce.
By this view, cooperation can be viewed as a dialogue-driven process that aims to identify, seek out, and build on areas of agreement. I argue that ASEAN regionalism is best understood as an ongoing search for consensus and a series of dialogues, debates, and exchanges about both the material and social foundations of regional order: the role of great powers in Southeast Asia, the desire for self-determination, the relationship between nation and region, the causal connection between fragmentation and intervention, the normative idea of Southeast Asia as a distinct region with a distinct point of view. It is through these interactive, cumulative dialogues that regions and regionalisms have been shaped. Most important, states have come to new and common agreement about economic and political-security cooperation through this dialogue-driven process. Consequently, in contrast to 1967, when differences and intra-ASEAN relations were such that states could not even list politics or security as areas for ASEAN cooperation, today not only are both those areas explicitly acknowledged but annual "ASEAN Defense Ministers Meetings (ADMM)" and "informal" meetings of ASEAN defense chiefs have now been made regular and "integral" parts of the ASEAN process. Such developments clearly reflect a radical change in intra-ASEAN relations; but, by many utilitarian accounts, these meetings neither register as significant cooperation nor are they easily explainable.
Thus, Kaye and others argue, thinking about cooperation as a process offers new insights into activities that might otherwise be viewed as empty and pointless. To view cooperation as a cumulative social process allows us to see individual ASEAN initiatives not so much as endpoints to negotiation but rather as parts of larger social trends and series of changes. Individual initiatives may be fraught with problems and fall short of what ASEAN policymakers would like to see, but each also represents points and movement in a larger, more extended social negotiation.
Put another way, to understand cooperation as a cumulative social process is to draw attention to the ways that social interactions and exchanges can create common understandings and the ways that those understandings, in turn, can inform, direct, and constrain subsequent interactions, negotiations, and relations. In this specific Southeast Asian case, exchanges over time have produced new agreement about both intra- and extraregional relations and, most important, a culture of dialogue that forms a basis for more stable relations. That, in turn, has at minimum allowed states to devote more attention and resources to domestic and economic development, improving states' material situation and welfare by almost every indicator. Social constructivist approaches can provide important insight into the kinds of changes and exchanges taking place in ASEAN and the ways that ASEAN facilitates them.
At the same time, such processes-their social dynamics, products, how they contribute to change-have not always been well detailed in ASEAN discussions. Indeed, it is not often clear what the intervening processes were that helped us get from here to there. For example, constructivist discussions can get caught up in testing the strength or weakness of particular ASEAN norms at particular moments, rather than focusing on the dynamic content of norms and practices over time. Consequently, we know less about "incremental processes of socialization" that build ASEAN as "ASEAN."
Another example of how this critical middle part of the story is sometimes overlooked in discussions on ASEAN can be found in discussions that explain ASEAN norms in terms of history or existing international norms. Specifically, ASEAN's contemporary regionalism is said to be the product of the consultative, consensus-building practices of the Malay village, the Westphalian practices and norms of the international system, the principles of coexistence laid out at the 1955 Bandung Conference, and/or similar in form to Southeast Asia's precolonial empires-mandala systems that were highly personal and nonterritorial and whose generally relaxed pattern of intraregional relations are said to provide kinds of preregions for today's regionalism in Southeast Asia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from (Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia by Alice D. Ba Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
In-Text Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Part 1 Theory and Origins
1 The Asean Paradox and IR Theory 17
2 Why Asean? Why 1967? 42
3 The Ideas That Bind: Negotiating Asean's Ways 66
Part 2 Asean's New Regionalisms
4 The Politics and Rhetoric of "One Southeast Asia" 103
5 Locating Asean in East Asia and the Asia Pacific 132
6 Asean of and Beyond Southeast Asia: The Asean Regional Forum 159
7 Renegotiating East Asia: "The Idea That Will Not Go Away" 193
Conclusion 223
Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography 249
Notes 251
Bibliography 289
Index 311
What People are Saying About This
"In this stimulating work, Ba provides a new interpretation that fills important gaps in our understanding of ASEAN. Her theoretical categories and empirical analysis allow her to come closer than most in capturing the spoken and unspoken rationales behind ASEANs actions and policies-and in ways that the policymakers of the region will recognize and applaud. A must-read for all those who want to come to grips with the regional architecture of East and Southeast Asia." --(Yuen Foong Khong, Professor of International Relations, Oxford University)