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Contested multilateralism 2.0 and regional order transition
Kai He1
The 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) introduced ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ into the Asia-Pacific. Different from ‘multilateralism 1.0’ of the 1990s, which was mainly led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), this second wave of multilateralism was initiated by non-ASEAN members either by inaugurating new institutions or by reinvigorating existing establishments in the region. For example, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 proposal for an Asia Pacific Community (APC), which eventually morphed into the East Asia Summit (EAS), is illustrative, as is Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s advocacy for the building of an East Asian Community (EAC) in the same year. In 2013, South Korean President Park Geun-hye proposed the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI) to strengthen security cooperation in that sub-region. Chinese President Xi Jinping simultaneously advocated the building of a ‘community of common destiny’ in Asia in 2013, along with massive Chinese investments and financial initiatives, such as the ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative (or Belt and Road Initiative—BRI). In December 2015, the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was successfully established with 57 prospective founding members despite US opposition.
As part of its ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalancing’ strategy toward Asia, the United States under the Barack Obama Administration also actively engaged in this wave of ‘multilateralism 2.0’ through formally joining the EAS in 2011. In addition, Obama proactively promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a multilateral trading bloc that excluded China, with the 12 TPP countries finally reaching an agreement in October 2015. The rise of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016 has seemingly killed the TPP in its infancy, but his determination to secure ‘better trade deals’ for the United States represents an obvious US competitive orientation and signals a continued US role to contest Chinese leadership in the Asia-Pacific through a variety of existing regional instrumentalities and institutions.
During his first trip to Asia in late 2017, Trump emphasized the ‘rules-based order in the Indo Pacific’ by reviving the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the so-called ‘Quad 2.0’) with Japan, Australia, and India. Although the ‘Quad 2.0’ may be just a strategic effort at ‘minilateralism’ instead of multilateralism, it still reflects a US institutional approach to dealing with the potential order transition in the region, especially against the background of China’s rise (Tow 2019). On June 1, 2019, the United States released its ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy Report.’ Less than one month later, the ‘ASEAN Outlook on the Indo Pacific’ was published. It represents a possible ‘Indo-Pacific’ turn of multilateralism in the region in the future.
Why do we witness this ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ after the GFC? Will multilateralism 2.0 make any difference in addressing regional security and political challenges? How did major powers perceive and engage this new wave of multilateralism in the region? Will the ‘Indo-Pacific turn’ of multilateralism be a blessing or a curse for regional stability and prosperity? It is time to seriously examine the nature, processes, and impact of this ‘contested multilateralism’ as well as the future of regional order.
This edited volume intends to address the above questions through diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives. By inviting the leading scholars to contribute their views on ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ as well as distinctive institutional strategies of major powers, this book will shed some light on the study of multilateralism and regional security as well as offer policy insights to the policy making community in the region.
This rest of the chapter aims to assess the emergence of ‘multilateralism 2.0’ following the GFC in the region, with the aim of addressing two specific questions: Why did major powers engage in this wave of ‘multilateralism 2.0’ in the Asia-Pacific? What are the implications of contested multilateralism for the evolving regional order? I suggest that two systemic variables—higher strategic uncertainties in the region and deepening economic interdependence—prompted various Asia-Pacific powers to pursue institutional balancing to compete for advantage during what is clearly a time of order transition in the region. In addition, I briefly introduce a ‘balance-of-roles’ argument to explain how states have utilized various institutional balancing strategies to pursue power and influence in the era of international order transition (He 2018).
Institutional balancing is a new type of balance of power strategy through which states can use multilateral institutions instead of traditional military means to compete for power and influence in world politics (He 2008, 2009). There are three types of institutional balancing. Inclusive institutional balancing means to include a target state in an institution and relies on the rules and norms of institutions to constrain the target state’s behavior. ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) is an example of inclusive institutional balancing, through which the ASEAN members constrained China’s behaviour in the South China Sea in the 1990s by ARF’s cooperative security rules and norms (Foot 1998; He 2008; Katsumata 2009).
Exclusive institutional balancing refers to a strategy to exclude a target state from an institution and relies on the cohesion and cooperation inside the institution to exert pressure toward, or to neutralize threats from, the target state. An example of exclusive institutional balancing is the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) in the ‘multilateralism 1.0’ era. ASEAN and three major powers—China, Japan, and South Korea—used this grouping to promote economic cooperation among Asian countries after the 1997 Asian economic crisis in order to express resentment toward, as well as countervail pressures from, the United States and its control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Stubbs 2002; Beeson 2003).
Inter-institutional balancing is an institutional strategy through which states can promote a new institution to reduce or dilute influences of existing institutions (He 2008, 2009). It is an extended form of both inclusive and exclusive institutional balancing. The target of inter-institutional balancing is not a state per se, but another institution that might or might not include the target state (Lee 2016). For example, the establishment of the East Asia Summit (EAS) has been seen as a rival institution to the APT because EAS stole the thunder of the APT in structuring regional cooperation in the 2000s (He 2008, 2009).
This chapter argues that non-ASEAN members conducted various institutional balancing strategies in the ‘multilateralism 2.0’ era after the GFC, suggesting that overlapping multilateral institutions could well become a ‘new normal’ in the Asia-Pacific as a result of intensified institutional balancing among major powers. The ‘balance-of-roles’ argument further suggests that the different role conception of states during the international order transition will shape their various institutional balancing strategies in the era of multilateralism 2.0. One unintended consequence of this process is that it may lead to a more peaceful transformation toward a new Asia-Pacific economic and political-security order.
It is worth noting that institutional balancing theory and the balance-of roles argument suggested by this chapter are by no means the consensual view of this edited volume. Instead, I intend to set a debating table for other scholars in this volume to engage with and challenge. The second section of this chapter introduces the structure of this edited volume. In conclusion, I discuss the policy implications of this new wave of multilateralism for regional security in particular and international order transition in general.
Contested multilateralism 2.0: conceptualization, causes, and implications
What is contested multilateralism 2.0?
Asian multilateralism is not new in world politics. Since the end of the Cold War, various multilateral institutions have proliferated in the Asia-Pacific, marking ‘multilateralism 1.0’ in the region. A remarkable feature of ‘multilateralism 1.0’ was that it centered on ASEAN. The establishment of ARF in 1994, which has now expanded to 27 members, was the apex of this process. The ARF is the only security forum and dialogue mechanism that includes all major powers in the world (the European Union also participates in the annual ARF meeting as an institutional member). The EAS is another example of multilateralism 1.0. This grouping is an extended version of APT, also driven by ASEAN. The United States and Russia formally joined the EAS in 2011. Although this ASEAN-centred multilateralism is widely criticized for its inefficiency or as talk-shops without teeth, ASEAN has firmly remained in the ‘driver’s seat’ for more than two decades.2
The second wave of multilateralism in the Asia-Pacific was triggered by the GFC. It involves the reinvigoration of existing institutions and the initiation of new establishments in the region. It has three distinctive features. First, it is driven by major powers—the United States, China, Australia, Japan, and South Korea—not ASEAN. Second, it is comprehensive in addressing both traditional and non-traditional security and economic challenges with a geopolitical emphasis on East Asia in particular and the Asia-Pacific in general, instead of being mainly Southeast Asian-centric. Third, it coexists, competes, and interacts with ‘multilateralism 1.0’ and with other forms of security organizations, such as US-led bilateralism, as well as nascent, ‘minilateral’ arrangements in shaping the Asia-Pacific’s future regional order.
Some scholars have proposed similar concepts to ‘contested multilateralism’ or ‘multilateralism 2.0.’ Morse and Keohane (2014, 385) define ‘contested multilateralism’ as a situation that ‘results from the pursuit of strategies by states, multilateral organizations, and non-state actors to use multilateral institutions, existing or newly created, to challenge the rules, practices, or missions of existing multilateral institutions.’ In a similar vein, Luk Van Langenhove (2010, 263) argues that a transformation of multilateralism mode 1.0 to mode 2.0 is taking place, the main characteristics being: ‘(1) the diversification of multilateral organizations; (2) the growing importance of nonstate actors such as substate regions and supranational regional organizations; (3) the increased interlinkages between policy domains; and (4) the growing space for citizen involvement.’
However, the idea of ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ in the Asia-Pacific introduced here differs from Morse and Keohane (2014) and van Langenhove (2010) in two different and important ways. First, the nation-state remains the major actor of ‘contested multilateralism 2.0,’ superseding institutional, sub-state and non-state actors. Second, the ‘contestation’ aspect of the multilateralism 2.0 variant under review here refers to both intra-institutional and inter-institutional competition among state actors through multilateral means. The reason for coining ‘multilateralism 2.0’ in this context is to differentiate this second wave of multilateralism as it is now unfolding in Asia from the previous ‘multilateralism 1.0’ led by ASEAN soon after the Cold War. It does not imply that the changing nature of world politics is based on the primacy shifting from nation-states to non-state actors, as the other two conceptualizations cited above suggest (although it is clear that the roles of non-state actors are commanding increased importance in international relations).
Why is there contested multilateralism 2.0?
Different arguments have been offered to explain why ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ has become more prominent. Neorealists and some others embracing a broader realist outlook suggest that institutions are just an epiphenomenon of power politics among great powers (Mearsheimer 1994). Therefore, so-called contested multilateralism is just another name for power politics among states. For example, Marc Lanteigne (2005) suggests that China used multilateral institutions such as the ARF as a diplomatic tool to pursue its great-power status after the Cold War.
At a time when observers are increasingly engrossed with China’s (invariable) rise, America’s (possible) decline and an increasingly multipolar international security environment, Gill and Green (2008, 3) point out that ‘Asia’s new multilateralism is still at a stage where it is best understood as an extension and intersection of national power and purpose rather than as an objective force in itself.’ For example, China actively advocated the ‘New Asian Security’ concept—the ‘Asia-for-Asians’ idea—at the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in 2014. This initiative was seen by outside observers as a countervailing effort against the United States, which started to ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2011 (Anderlini 2014).
Conversely, liberalism, especially neoliberalism, argues that the impact of institutions in contemporary world politics is significant because they reduce transaction costs and foster cooperation among states (Keohane and Martin 1995). This outlook likewise privileges the nation-state as the primary agent of concern, although in a markedly different way than its realist/neorealist counterpart. Liberals/neoliberals insist that multilateralism 2.0 is rooted in the functional imperative for states facing emerging regional security challenges in Asia to embrace targeted modes of cooperation which, if absent, could only lead to crisis escalation or worse. For example, Richard Stubbs (2002) praises the functional success of APT as a new regional institution in promoting economic cooperation between Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia after the 1997 Asian economic crisis. Similarly, the establishment of the AIIB led by China in 2015 is also intended to address the insufficient investments in infrastructure in Asian developing countries.
Last, but not least, a constructivist school of thought sees institutions and multilateralism as reflecting certain ideas and the norms emanating from them as underwriting world politics (Wendt 1995, 1999). In the case of the Asia-Pacific region, the ASEAN-dominated ‘multilateralism 1.0’ in the 1990s was built on a shared ‘we-feeling’ among ASEAN members about how their collective identity was nurtured relative to regional order building (Acharya 2001). For the ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ phenomenon, constructivists suggest that it is a clash of different visions or ideas among major powers on how regional order building should evolve (He 2016).
For example, former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama proposed an EAC, which is based on a shared culture and civilization among Asian countries. A particularly unique aspect of Asians’ approaches to order building is their emphasis on a distinct regional culture or civilization. As Hatoyama (2010) states,
one characteristic of Asians is that we do not perceive ourselves and others or humans and the environment in a western dualistic manner, but rather attach importance to the sameness between the two … This will surely also serve as a launching point for a ‘cultural community.’
Hatoyama’s civilization-based EAC proposal is quite different from Rudd’s more ‘Western-centric’ APC suggestion, which embodied a much broader geographical scope, including non-Asian countries (Australia and the United States) as well as normative and legalistic principles (Frost 2009; Rudd 2008). Arguably, these different visions and ideas of regional order led to the emergence of ‘contested multilateral 2.0’ in the Asia-Pacific.
Although these three contending approaches reveal some elements of truth, they fail to explain the timing, complicity among actors, and dynamics of ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ after the GFC. Realists are correct to suggest that multilateralism and multilateral institutions are an extension of power politics among major powers. However, why and how did major powers instigate this new wave of multilateralism after the 2008 GFC? Power transition theorists would explain this development as a result of inten...
