Regionalism in East Asia

Fu-kuo Liu, Philippe Regnier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780700716128
• eBook ISBN: 9781136869532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Regional cooperation and integration have emerged as key issues for East Asia following the financial crisis. This book explores these issues, and examines the degree to which a new paradigm is emerging. It reviews the evolution of the concepts and practices of regionalism in East Asia, and considers the factors which are shaping new patterns of regional co-operation and integration. It includes discussions of historical developments, economic co-operation, socio-political factors, and defence and security. It considers the role of those states, including China and Japan, which have distinctive approaches to international relations, and assesses the role of regional international bodies such as ASEAN.

Part I

The critical review of regional concepts and theories of regionalism

1 East Asian regionalism

Theoretical perspectives

Fu-Kuo Liu

Over the years, East Asia as a region has become increasingly integrated through intense economic links, growing intra-regional trade, and, more recently, the general demand for regional security cooperation, all of which have been occurring at an unprecedented pace. The processes of economic development serve as an impetus for heightening regional cooperation, which continues to hold the politically divided region together. At first, it was the momentum of economic growth, coupled with market forces that propelled the whole progress of regional economic cooperation and the emergence of regional arrangements. Later, East Asian outward-looking economies had to come to terms with tighter international trade competition and the pressures of trading constraints, since trade blocs elsewhere in Europe and North America had emerged and were attempting to regulate trade relations with outsiders according to their preferences. During the period when the global trade regimes were under the prolonged negotiation process of the Uruguay Round, East Asian countries began to respond to these external challenging new factors and came to realise that they did not have much choice but to stand together and work collectively. Economic regionalism has thus taken shape in East Asia. Its characteristics may be explored from three dimensions: economic dynamic division of labour, institutional characteristics through industrial cooperation, and regional organisations.¹ While economists may have focused more on the first two dimensions, political scientists tend to look at the effect of the last dimension on regional process in a broader perspective. Apart from the above-mentioned dimensions, several other dimensions within the regional process may also have been emerging; for example, integration of labour markets, underground transnational movements and illegal business networking across borders have also been accelerated by the process of regional economic growth. These potentially resilient regional dynamics will obviously also have substantial effects on the development of regionalism as much as the above-mentioned dimensions, and may have paved the way for future regional integration. They have however not yet been sufficiently explored, and deserve our closer attention and further analysis.

Economic regionalism in East Asia is characterised by a prevailing outward-looking tendency and thus has come to be depicted as the ‘new regionalism.’² The open regionalism that has prevailed in the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) process has been at the centre of this new regionalism.³ In addition to an economic-based regionalism, the post-Cold War environment has found itself observing the multi-dimensional development of regionalism. These new circumstances have supplied the region with an exceptional opportunity within which to include the broader security aspect, which is based upon a comprehensive concept of security still within the thrust of the existing regionalism.⁴ The development of regional cooperation with both economic and security aspects has substantively enriched the development of regionalism. To some extent, the desire for regional security cooperation and the buildup of security establishments has implied that regional countries are attempting to step up efforts to deepen the process of regional cooperation. Although right from the very beginning the security aspect has not been an outcome of any deliberate regional integration, the process of security cooperation has so far at least been conducive to the continuous process of fostering mutual understanding and enhancing the degree of confidence-building within the region. It may not yet have produced something credible to long-term regional integration, but it is certainly beneficial to the process.

In the same vein, the general structure of regional cooperation in East Asia was severely shaken in the wake of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which left numerous economic, political and social scars throughout the region. It has even challenged the long-standing dominant thinking of regional cooperation, which has for the past few decades favoured external powers' involvement in the regional process. The conventional East Asian view of international politics conceives that the theories of the balance of power and of hegemony would work better for the region because of the protracted political divisions in existence. Yet external powers, which presumably acts as a stabiliser to the regional order, were to blame for the impotency of existing regional establishments during the financial crisis. As a result, regional countries have responded to the crisis by putting up both a united and an ambitious regional attempt to establish a new regional mechanism, or perhaps a regional decision-making establishment, while strictly limiting participation to regional countries. Regional identity emerges and is rigidly reinforced during the process. To begin with there have been efforts to manage the regional financial rather than the trade order, and some have even termed the present move under the ‘ASEAN plus three’ process ‘Asia's monetary regionalism.’⁵ Although the future of this new dynamism remains to be seen, it is now working to combine both Southeast and Northeast Asian regionalism, and is likely to dominate the regional scene as well as possibly lead the way to constructive and extensive regional arrangements and even regional integration. The progress of regional cooperation has thus evolved with new features and regenerated what had already been termed the ‘new regionalism.’

This chapter concentrates on theoretical arguments encompassing regional integration and regional cooperation in East Asia by proposing that there are distinctive features of ‘East Asian regionalism.’⁶ It is important to identify the more inclusive features of regionalism with economic and security perspectives in the changing East Asian setting and, more significantly, to explore the perspective of regionalism prevailing in the region to date. As such, by studying the implications of developing regionalism for further regional cooperation in East Asia, it will certainly help us survey the analytical underpinnings of the necessity to reappraise the current understandings on regionalism and regional cooperation. Thus, regionalism with an East Asian perspective could be further defined and perhaps may even be conceptualised, which bears out the major intention of this chapter.

In search of defining regionalism with an East Asian outlook

In the past few decades, the outgrowth of regional cooperation and the subsequent formation of regionalism has become one of the landmarks by which we depict the changing world system. The development of regional efforts has been largely characterised by the transforming nature of the regionalisation and globalisation processes. Since the 1980s, the world has witnessed several new waves of emerging regionalism. Essentially, this trend has been a result of the rising degree of economic interdependence and trade competition among regional trade blocs as well as among countries. What is even more salient is the fact that the increasing impetus for economic, social, political, security, and other interactions across national borders has pushed forward strongly to link together regional countries. As the scale of the market has gradually come to attract more attention than that of the national boundaries, to many, the relationships between international trading partners has become more significant than those between states. Many analysts have been inclined to explore this arising phenomenon as a way of leading towards the ‘borderless economy’ or the ‘borderless world.’⁷

With the abrupt end of the Cold War, though to the surprise of many, a new international context began to emerge and has since allowed the transformation of the worldview from an insistence on ideological confrontation to the realisation of economic interdependence. Thereafter, it has been more than fair to argue that the international norms have quickly shifted towards a multidimensional and cooperative nature. Promoting cooperation has become the central theme of new international norms rather than confrontation, and the nature of this new trend in international relations emphasises competition rather than conflict. Along with these new norms for international relations, we have seen that regional cooperation coupled closely with the economic regionalisation process is thriving everywhere.

In East Asia, dynamic regional cooperation within the economic and security fields is greatly encouraged by these new international norms. With more and more regional mechanisms emerging in the post-Cold war regional scene, it is reasonable to push forward the ideas of trade liberalisation, the principle of non-discrimination and security cooperation through dialogue mechanisms and so on in order to strengthen the course of economic growth and to seek persistent prosperity. Even after the Asian financial crisis, East Asia began to take up an ambitious regional proposal and, as a result the building of effective regional arrangements has been given due attention. Through various regional cooperation schemes commonly in practice, the region has bounced back from the crisis with new hopes for generating further regional integration. It will be interesting to see whether there will be a continuation of the existing regional cooperation or whether the region is marching towards regional integration. What kinds of regionalism are we referring to? How, in fact, might one define Asian regionalism while there is as yet no universal one in existence? Will this new dynamism to date bring forth any new implications for the definition of regionalism?

Definition of regionalism: a brief review

To begin with, regionalism seems to be regarded more generally as a notion that describes the outcome or the tendency of regional efforts by varying regional actors, including state and non-state actors. Most economists and perhaps some political scientists however tend to see regionalism in a rigid way as a synonym of regional trade mechanisms.⁸ These different standpoints that have been projected on to the term ‘regionalism’ may of course promote quite a diverse trail of thinking.

Moreover, the concept of regionalism has gradually come to be defined by various analysts in a rather ambiguous and much broader scope than exists in practice. Some regard regionalism as the making of regional associations in which a government's involvement will be drawn into the process through a formal gathering among regional countries.⁹ Thus, this explication envelops an analytic focus of regional activities within an existing formal set-up of regional establishments and their related func...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Prologue Whither regionalism in East Asia?
• Part I The critical review of regional concepts and theories of regionalism
• Part II Regional cooperation in practice in East Asia and encountering regional theories
• Part III The new direction of East Asia regionalism
• Bibliography
• Index