Regional economic cooperation has become a prominent feature of the global economic architecture in the post-Cold War era (e.g., Breslin and Higgott, 2000; Hettne, 2005; Wunderlich, 2007). Despite a major challenge to the European Union (EU) in 2016 through the unexpected Brexit vote,1 regional governance projects continue to proliferate in other regions. In Asia, the election of Donald Trump has seen the United States abandon the 12-member Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, alternative vehicles for regional economic cooperation are gaining steam in Asia, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-centered Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement and Chinaās āBelt and Roadā interconnectivity project (Wilson, 2015; Chacko and Jayasuriya, 2017). These add the previous regional initiative by ASEAN in bringing its ten member countries into an integrated market through the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) agreement. While these may be regional projects, the underlying political support for such initiatives comes from the social and political coalitions at the national level.
This book is concerned with analyzing the social forces and political coalitions driving regional integration projects in Asia. It asks which social forces, within the domestic political economy of Asian states, are driving governments to seek regional arrangements for economic governance. In particular, the book asks how the emergence, reorganization, and expansion of capitalist class have conditioned political support for regional economic integration. By addressing these issues, the book emphasizes that the wellspring of regional economic institution projects stem from the process of capitalist development and the social forces it has unleashed. The book aims to place the social and class relations that underpin regional projectsārather than the institutions which result from themāat the center of the analysis of regional integration.
This class and social relational perspective, as outlined in Chap. 2, is largely absent in the literature on economic regionalism, which are dominated by accounts emerging from International Relations (IR) theory. In explaining the forms, instruments, and mechanisms of regional economic institutions, IR analyzes place emphasis on understanding the objectives of regional economic integrationāand measuring its success or failure. However, they often fail to examine which social forces and political alliances drive governments to pursue such initiatives. Regionalism projects are viewed by institutionalist and liberal perspectives within IR as a functional process, which is a product of growing economic interdependence and the consequent attempt by national states to generate solutions to cross-border social and economic challenges (e.g., Mitrany, 1966; Milner, 1992; Baldwin, 1993; Keohane, 1993). In other words, the analysis of regional cooperation remains focused on the systemic and institutional factors and incentives which shape state policy-making, but do not systematically explore the domestic politics and social forces and their contestation that condition political support for regional projects.
This institutionalist viewpoint has long shaped the views of leading policy-makers whose attitudes to integration are premised on the externalities created by international institutions. On the imperative of regional cooperation, former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said that āthe challenges of climate change, drug-trafficking, terrorism and extremism cannot be tackled by any one country alone. Joint action will also help countries [of Asia] better manage natural resources, expand trade and improve transportā (Ki-moon, 2012). Hence, as emphasized by World Trade Organization (WTO) former Director-General Pascal Lamy, regional economic integration needs strong political commitment from all governments involved (Lamy, 2012, 2013). The problem with this perspective lies in the static notion of the state, without consideration of the underlying processes of social forces and political coalitions. It assumes an identity of state interests that is based on an implicit account separating the state from social forces. Importantly, it neglects the underlying social relationshipāthe coalitions and alliancesāthat underpin the state interests as well as the institutional cooperation (e.g., Poulantzas, 1974; Jessop, 1990; Glassman, 1999).
For scholars working within a political economy framework, the politics of the capitalist class and its position/s with respect to regional governance are a crucial part of the politics of regionalism. This perspective argues that regional integration is a political endeavor that is embedded in a deeper domestic structural context of coalitions and struggle for resource (e.g., Jayasuriya, 2003, 2008; Jones, 2015). Domestic capitalist class, in this sense, demonstrates a significant role through their ties with the ruling government, which generates a symbiotic relationship between political and business interests (Gomez, 2002; Nesadurai, 2003; Rodan, Hewison, and Robison, 2006). Yet, even this literature is limited by focusing on the role of ānational capitalāāthat is, capital predominantly tied to nationally defined economic circuitsāas the principal actor conditioning regionalism projects. While this literature makes substantial advances in the analysis of social foundations of regional projects, the domestic interests are static and confined to the national level. The literature is limited by its methodological nationalism, which assumes that the domestic capitalist class is defined by its national focus (see Hameiri, 2009). This methodological nationalism obscures the role of internationalization process in constituting transnational or regionalized capitalist interests and forces; those sharper social forces that in turn shape the social relations which underpin various regional political projects. In this sense, this is a āsecond image reversedā analysis of the regional integration projects (see Gourevitch, 1978). This book extends and builds on this work of political economy framework.
Departing from limitations of the existing accounts on regional integration, this book develops a new social relations approach for explaining the structure and the possible trajectories of regional governance. It explicitly argues that regional economic governance has been shaped as part of the broader context of the internationalization of capital, where the profit-making activities operate beyond territorial boundaries. This has crucially provided foundations for the vast expansion of capital across the region, specifically through the regionalization of trade flows, production networks, and capital investment. It is noteworthy that the most internationalized capitalist class has become the motor-force of this process, notably through its alliance with other socio-political forces, which manifests in the form of economic policies that support the projects of regional integration. This process is carried out in order to facilitate the expansion of this fraction of capital which already has the international scale of investment, production, and commodity (e.g., Palloix, 1977a; Bryan, 1987; Glassman, 1999).
The key contention of this book is that regional economic integration projects arise from transformations in the n...