Regional Organizations in International Society

ASEAN, the EU and the Politics of Normative Arguing

Kilian Spandler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319968957
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319968964
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the normative foundations of ASEAN and the EU. It revives the history of the two organizations in an in-depth narrative of the protracted arguments surrounding their establishment, legal integration and enlargement. While political actors used norms to legitimize their ideas for institutional change, the complex and dynamic nature of these norms also provided the breeding ground for contestation and, sometimes, institutional sclerosis and failure. Recasting these processes in an innovative English School framework, the volume makes a crucial contribution to the literature of Comparative Regionalism that goes beyond Eurocentric perspectives.

© The Author(s) 2019

Kilian SpandlerRegional Organizations in International Society Palgrave Studies in International Relationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96896-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kilian Spandler¹

(1)

University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Kilian Spandler

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Over the last decade, the image of regionalism has deteriorated dramatically. From the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, academics and the broader public had attached high hopes to the proliferation of regional organizations and integration. The New Regionalism literature embodied this mind-set and provided the grand narrative for it. The narrative was that there is a sustained trend toward governance on a regional scale and that it is a welcome response to many of the world’s most pressing challenges, including peacekeeping, economic development and tackling new transboundary policy problems (Mattli 1999). This optimism has slowly given way to much more ambivalent assessments by some and open frustration by others.

A look at two parts of the world where the success story of regionalism had been particularly deeply engrained provides illustrative examples of this change in perspective. The European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are regional projects that researchers used to celebrate for their positive influence on peace and prosperity in formerly war-torn regions. After the end of the Cold War, both embarked on a process of institutional widening and deepening. Post-Cold War Europe saw the successful transformation of the European Communities (EC) into the EU, the expansion of EU membership to the East and South and a far-reaching reform of its institutions by means of the Treaty of Lisbon. In Southeast Asia, ASEAN gradually incorporated Vietnam, Laos, Burma and Cambodia, weathered the Asian financial crisis and strengthened its institutional foundations with the creation of an ASEAN Community. Both organizations were lauded for establishing and progressively refining governance mechanisms in various policy fields, ranging from economic and financial integration to human rights.

Yet, they have had to navigate troubled waters in recent years, and only partially lived up to the challenge (Beeson and Diez 2018). From the stunted constitutional process to the financial turmoil and Brexit, the EU has been facing multiple legitimacy challenges. The spike in migration across its external borders in 2015 has sparked heated debates, in which some criticize the organization and its member states for the treatment of refugees and others for failing to protect its borders. The ASEAN Charter, signed in 2007, disappointed the hopes of many observers. Internal divisions, willingly exploited and fueled by external actors like China, have thwarted the group’s aspirations to play a greater role internationally. Its failure to act on norm violations by its members, such as the military coups in Thailand or the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, has drawn widespread criticism from local and international civil rights groups as well as Western governments.

This pattern of progressive institutionalization and New Regionalism euphoria followed by the frustrating experience of crisis, institutional stasis and legitimacy challenges is mirrored elsewhere, for example in the Americas, where Malamud (2012) argues that ‘Sovereignty is back, integration out’. Yes, institutional innovation is still happening, but on a less ambitious level and in a much less favorable political environment. The expectation that a unified template of organizing regional politics would at some point emerge—be it EU-style or otherwise—has not been fulfilled. Instead, each regional organization has developed unique institutional rules and procedures that prove resistant to the abounding recommendations of policy experts on how to make them more effective. For instance, while the ASEAN member states took inspiration from the EU when reforming their own regional organization, they continue to be highly skeptical about institutional arrangements that centralize decision-making and compromise state sovereignty (Pettman 2010; Yeo 2010).

If one assumes that regional organizations are instruments created by rationally calculating states to address transboundary policy issues (Koremenos et al. 2001), these developments must indeed be frustrating. Their institutional frameworks appear dysfunctional, prone to crisis and too slow to adapt to changing circumstances. However, is it possible that this overly bleak picture is based on a simplifying account of how regional organizations emerge and transform? After all, they are not designed on the drawing board but develop over time in a process that involves phases of stability and stasis as well as adaption and change. The intricacies of history inevitably cause regional organizations to elude the control of their creators to some extent and develop a life of their own (Moxon-Browne 2015). The current literature on regionalism does not account for the importance of these historical pathways. It is primarily concerned with whether regional organizations work or not in terms of providing governance for current problems. While such critical investigations into the effectiveness of regional organizations are warranted, they need to be based on a realistic appraisal of the conditions for institutional adaption to demands. Conventional approaches discuss the ability of regional organizations to provide governance in terms of ‘supply factors’ such as regional leadership or strong regional institutions (Mattli 1999). They disregard that regional organizations are developed over time by political actors who draw on and negotiate various normative ideas about how regional politics should be organized. By teasing out how this normative agency of political actors shapes institutional stability and change, this book takes a fresh look at the question: how can we understand the historical development of rules and procedures in regional organizations?

Regional Organizations and Normative Arguing

Tackling this question moves the debate beyond an analysis in terms of governance success and failure, which still often uses EU-style integration as an implicit gold standard of regionalism despite all claims that Eurocentrism is a thing of the past. Instead, it draws attention to the potentials and limits of organizational change that arise from the fact that regions are international societies, i.e. political spaces that share common norms and rules. The book thus adopts a novel approach to the unique institutional features of regional organizations that acknowledges the importance of historical normative structures and agency for different organizational pathways.

Explaining the different institutional forms of regionalism across the world is a main concern of Comparative Regionalism, a relatively new sub-field of Regionalism studies in International Relations (IR). Authors working within the paradigm have produced some important insights regarding potential sources for such divergences. They point to power-political factors such as the hegemonic influence of major states (Beeson 2005), domestic factors such as the preference structures of ruling coalitions (Solingen 2008), functional demands such as economic interdependence (Kanthak 2012), the importance of distinct regional identities (Checkel 2016; Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002), historical factors such as institutional inertia or functional spillover (Van Langenhove 2011; Moxon-Browne 2015), as well as the diffusion of organizational models and their adaption to local predispositions (Acharya 2009; Jetschke 2017).

This book offers a different perspective. It focuses on the processes of normative arguing in regional international societies and argues that they crucially shape the institutional pathways of regional organizations. Some Comparative Regionalism authors have suggested that norms are an important part of the story, arguing that regional organizations are embedded in a deeper layer of social structure (Acharya and Johnston 2007, pp. 17–19; Katzenstein 2005; Wunderlich 2007). In this perspective, differences between regional organizations are a result of diverging underlying norms. For example, the EU is more supranational and formal than ASEAN because the legitimacy of the nation-state has been challenged in Europe, whereas national sovereignty remains a strong principle in Southeast Asia. However, Comparative Regionalism has neither consistently addressed the emergence and change of these structural factors nor investigated how they translate into specific organizational features. The heavy emphasis on norms as a fixed structure with almost deterministic effects overlooks the importance of the agency of political actors who develop fundamental regional norms and use them in their arguments about regional organizations.

To rectify this longstanding neglect, the book explores the normative foundations of regional organizations in a systematic fashion. The overarching argument is that regional organizations display persistent differences because their rules and procedures—what the English School of IR calls ‘secondary institutions’—are developed by political actors in regionally specific contexts of fundamental norms, or ‘primary institutions’. These elementary understandings about how to play the game of regional politics, and who the players are, set the basic limits to the forms regional organizations can take. The structure of primary institutions shapes, and is at the same time shaped by, the agency of politically influential actors. The historical comparison of the foundation, legal integration and enlargement of ASEAN and the EU, which makes up the main part of the book, demonstrates that government elites, regional bureaucrats and public figures routinely make normative claims when promoting or opposing concrete organizational forms. By providing normative reference points, primary institutions constitute a space for these processes of normative arguing and shape the possibilities for change in regional organizations. However, as they use norms in their arguments, political actors constantly redefine the substance of primary institutions. The contested nature of these discourses and the malleability of the normative context explain why the institutional trajectories of the organizations do not follow a general logic or are determined by external conditions, but unfold in contingent and highly political ways.

In the first instance, therefore, this book makes an original theoretical claim about the connection between the institutional histories of regional organizations and normative arguments, and offers a narrative illustrating these dynamics in the EU and ASEAN cases. This is not a purely intellectual exercise. While the institutional histories of the two regional organizations are certainly interesting in their own right, their relevance for today rests on the belief that an understanding of the politics of normative arguing shaping their development also puts the current state of regionalism in Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere in a new perspective. By contextualizing their genesis and informing our expectations of change, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Politics of Normative Arguing in Regional Organizations
• 3. Decolonization: Setting the Stage for Regionalism
• 4. Founding Years: Building Regional Organizations in Postcolonial Spaces
• 5. Legal Integration: Regionalizing Judicial Authority
• 6. Enlargement: Redefining Regional Boundaries
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter