Introduction
This book presents the imagining of an East Asian Community (EAC) by a number of senior scholars with diverse backgroundsāeach informed by their life experience grounded in different parts of Asia and, at various times, in different sectors, be it in government, in the market, or in civil society. Although an East Asian Community is clearly more of an ideal image than real today, it already exists in some respects, is prefigured in aspirational ways in others, but is denied absolutely in still other aspects of how states and people conduct their affairs. Moreover, we recognize the glimpses described in this book of a hypothetical EAC are just thatāthe capturing of one aspect, from one angle, from one life experience, of a possible EAC. These ideas are worth considering, nonetheless, because ideas may be hugely influential, sometimes almost instantly, if incorporated into individual, community, and national identities.
Also, we note upfront that while the core insights offered by the authors of this book are deep and broad in their respective areas, they do not reflect the full diversity of views in the region . There are important voices that are not found in this bookāthose of indigenous peoples, islanders, youth, refugees, and many border-crossing individuals who live in the region, but also elsewhere, often at the same time. We do not apologize for these limitations. We simply draw the readerās attention to them because these voices must be heard, too, if the EAC is to ever grip the imaginations of all the necessary players in this region and become a social, cultural, and institutional reality.
That said we believe the core issues analyzed in this book are those that will shape the form, content, and structure of a full-blown EAC, no matter what configuration it takes in the long run. But before we turn to this prefigured ideal image of the EACāor rather, the multiple images of it presented in this bookāwe must first deal with the issue of āregion .ā
One Asia Region and Sub-Region Concepts
First and foremost, we admitāas Nayan Chanda explains in Chap. 2āthat āAsiaā is not an Asian construct. Ironically, āAsiaā is a Western concept. Thus, āAsiaā is actually an extraordinarily diverse set of states, communities, and cultures that have interacted for millennia via trade, migration, cultural transmission, religion, as well as harsher means such as military conquest and political subjugation at various times, with more or less unified control of territory and people given the technologies and communications of the era. At times of system crisisāwhether in reaction to western or Japanese imperialism, the demise of colonial occupations, or, in the course of national revolutionsālocals have claimed āAsiaā as their own to propagate a wider concept of āAsia for Asians .ā Thus, the notion of āOne Asia ā is not new. It has progressive and regressive antecedents. The same applies to the concept of āEast Asian Community.ā Indeed, scholars and policy practitioners have been talking about it for decades and, depending on who is doing the talking, the meaning of the term shifts dramatically.
Today, discussions of an EAC are in the midst of globalization with attendant displacement of local communities, demolition of local cultures, and the obliteration of distance and dissolution of borders by trade, information flow, andāto some extentāmigration and travel. Thus, rather than EAC, the notion of āGlobal Asia ā has emerged. Here, āAsiaā is held to play a central role in almost all global issues. No global issues can be understood, and no global problem can be solved, without comprehending the Asian dimension. But Global Asia does not refer to a region or sub-region with a shared identity any more than its predecessor, One Asia .
In contrast, South Asia, for all its division and conflict, has its regional institutions such as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) that have begun to take deep root, even if the major states in the region can bypass them at will. And Southeast Asia has its own sub-regional organizations led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. But Northeast Asia does not have such a regional entity in spite of a burgeoning set of regional meetings, communication, and coordination activities between national officials; a profound con-joining of the economies of China, Japan, and the ROK, as well as with the global economy; and limited but important common security agendas and even political-diplomatic coordination, as has occurred in response to the DPRKās nuclear threat. And, as Chung-In Moon points out in Chap. 10, an East Asian community is inconceivable until Northeast Asia brings regional political institutions into being on par with SAARC and ASEAN. Equally, he suggests, trends within East Asia as a whole may stimulate and induce Northeast Asian states to innovate and then formalize sub-regional institutions in a dialectical process.
Regional Social and Economic Integration
Of all the potential bridges that might enable a Northeast Asian sub-regional community to emerge alongside a full-blown EAC, perhaps the most promising is to facilitate cross-border trade, investment, and finance along with related infrastructural and network expansion. Already China, South Korea, and Japan (or CKJ) have a combined population of 1.54 billion (21% of the worldās population), a combined gross domestic product of $16.4 trillion in 2014 (likewise, 21% of the worldās gross domestic product), and a combined trade volume of $7 trillion in 2014 (or 18% of world trade). At first glance, such numbers suggest that the region should have an overwhelming economic incentive to create institutions that exploit this economic prowess.
But, as Choong Yong Ahn points out in Chap. 6, two competing frameworks for regional economic integration collide today in the region. These are the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) embedded in the already existing World Bank-International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank structures on the one hand, and the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) āunderpinned by Chinaās newly established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)āon the other. These two mega-frameworks and supporting institutions have competing visions and missions. Both are likely to gain traction in coming years although TPP may prove more vulnerable to domestic factors such as electoral politics in democratic states.
What hangs in the balance is whether what Ahn calls the āintersection economies ,ā that is, those that have joined both the TPP and RCEP, can prevent these two trade blocs from colliding. To do so, and avoid global economic chaos, these two trading regimes need to converge by realigning their respective trade, investment liberalization, and other arrangements on economic and technical cooperation, intellectual property, competition, and dispute settlement, etc. Creating a complementary set of free trade agreements would lay the foundation for an East Asian-wide Economic Community, in turn, the underpinning for an EAC. In this regard, the ROK, by virtue of its location between the great powers in Northeast Asia, might, alongside ASEAN states, play a leading role in brokering such an outcome.
In the short term, however, there is little reason to expect that a distinctively Northeast Asian regional identity is likely to emerge due to the economic interdependence that has grown so large between the CKJ bloc . These three states may meet regularly to discuss and coordinate on key global and regional economic issues in the future, and to set standards on integrated infrastructure and nodal links at airports, shipping ports, pipelines, power lines, and railways, etc. But these activities will be subsumed in larger regional and global frameworks that govern trade, investment, and financial relations between economies.
Other early signs of sub-regional institutional innovation in Northeast Asia exist, including extensive civilian contact and, in some instances, prolonged contact, communication, and coordination of joint activities on specific issues by civilian organizations and local governments in Northeast Asia, as described in Chap. 8 by Seung-Youn Oh.
Power Transition and Rise of China
Nonetheless, the single most important trend that unites or divides states and people in Northeast Asia is Chinaās rise , to the degree that it can challenge and, in some cases, match, and, in a few cases, exceed the power capacities of the United States to exercise military control of the geo-political landscape of Northeast Asia.
In the security dimension , states retreat quickly into hardened, militarized postures established during the Cold War, and adorned with huge amounts of conventional and, in some instances, nuclear weapons . In particular, Chinaās rapidly expanding military and regional military reach beyond its coastal zone into the Pacific and which now overlaps the zone of US military forward deployment, especially of its naval forces, as well as that of Washingtonās leading security allies, the ROK and Japan, and its security partner, Taiwan.
But as Muthiah Alagappa explains in Chap. 7, even in the aspect of community-building that is most resistant to cross-border transactions that soften and eventually corrode away the edges of hard power, that is, military force, the critical issue is not the existence of these capabilities, risky as they may be at the two primary axes of possible inter-state conflict in the region , the Taiwan Straits and the Korean Peninsula. Rather, he suggests, the rigid āknowledge structureā or strategic orientation of the political and military leaders who control these forces is uniformly ārealistā in nature. This worldview is informed by shared but radically different exposure to the application of military force in brutal wars, ranging from those fought over colonial occupation and liberation during imperial adventures by Japan and its demolition by the United States and its allies, along with China and Russia in World War II, followed by the Cold War between the superpowers punctuated by one hot war in Korea on a massive scale, a war put on hold since 1953 by the Korean Armistice Agreement, but ready to break out at a momentās notice across the Demilitarized Zone.
Overcoming this ideational obstacle , according to Alagappa in Chap. 7, entails above all rethinking the concept of nation state, and instituting a more flexible one that admits of the exercise of autonomous governance, the validity of trans-governmental zones of coordination and collaboration by local governments and agencies, especially in border zones, and that jettisons ideologically defined and rigid concepts of singular, even ethnically-based, citizenship.
However, this cross-border process that softens or supplants the hard edges of territorially-based states will take time, possibly generational time. Meanwhile, great and medium-sized states continue to exercise power in the region . As John Ikenberry explains in Chap. 4, while the post-World War II liberal international order is weakening, it is also not disappearing. Short of a new framework based on a hegemonic and dominant power, it is likely to remain the framework in which states conduct their affairs, both security and economic, and thereby remain constrained by it even if they contest elements of it, or confront each other over specific security or economic issues. With no other option, states will start to conduct multilateral governance over issues that divide in this region because the costs of not doing so will exceed the costs of jettisoning the old order. How they do this will make the region more or less stable, more or less orderly, more or less prosperous, and more or less secure. There are many possible regional futures in which the liberal international order may and likely will be sustained. In short, Ikenberry anticipates that some form of multilateral muddling through will predominate.
What is clear is the notion that China will somehow become a regionally dominant state and threaten this order due to its growing military and economic power is false, both factually and in conception. As Zhang Ruizhuang demonstrates irrefutably in Chap. 3, Chinaās primary concern is the consolidation of its domestic order, both political and economic, while ensuring that its external security environment remains conducive to this process. Of course, where its vital security interests, most critically in the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits, are threatened, China will muster all its military capabilities to deter or compel its adversaries and third parties from acting in ways that put this domestic transition at risk. Zhang holds that the future of the entire region , including the possibility of creating an EAC, is determined by the unfolding logic of power politics, not the effects of shared ideas, beliefs, norms, and institutions.
Conversely, Zhang asserts that enduring poverty, misleading statistics about Chinese economic growth rate, its military expenditure, mistaking quantitative for qualitative growth, ecological degradation, and social and political inequality, all suggest that China is not as strong and powerful as it may appear. Moreover, much of Chinaās military capability is invested in strengthening domestic security, and it confronts daunting domestic social, economic, and ecological threats that will consume much of its growth potential in the coming decades. These latter concerns also threaten the legitimacy of the leadership, which in turn may exploit popular perceptions of external threats to displace discontent and disenchantment with the one party ruling system. For all these reasons, China will remain a distant second power to the United States, which will remain dominant, albeit a declining hegemon forced to share more power with its allies and willing to accommodate China where its new capabilities cannot be blockedāas in coastal regions or infrastructural investment. How the United States manages this adjustment to China, and how China manages its relations with neighboring states, in turn, will shape the perceptions of the need for regional institutions such as the EAC, based on shared interest rather than division of the spoils arising from dominance.
Dimensions of Clashing National Identities
Such perceptions are crucial to how the national identity of each country in the region evolves. In Chap. 5, Gilbert Rozman describes how five dimensions of national identity in China, Japan, and the ROK, namely, conformist national ideology, selective historical memory of key events and periods, sectoral confidence that is cultivated to contrast with other cultures, vertical identity that subordinates minorities or civil society to a single homogenous population, and the intensity whereby these factors shape how people think, have affected, one might say, afflicted bilateral relations between these three states that would form the northern foundation stone for an EAC.
Interestingly, Rozman finds that South Korea exhibits the least ideologically defined national identity of the CJK bloc, with the domestic polarization between progressive and conservative political forces offsetting the effects of prolonged national division and anti-Japanese (and to some extent, anti-Chinese) sentiment. The resulting pragmatism may endow Korea with the ability to move flexibly and adroitly and avoid being trapped between Chinaās conservative communist project and Japanās revisionist project on the one hand and between American and Chinese strategic confrontation on the other. But even if the ROK succeeds in avoiding such traps, these regressive identities appear to be hardening, not softening, and there is little reason to think that a regional identity is forming based on underlying integration, or even that the gaps in each of the dimensions of identity are narrowing between China, Japan, and the ROK.
Regional Insecurity and Institution Building
At the other end of the spectrum of national identity as reflected in the acquisition of power resources by the state, nuclear weapons represent the most congealed and absolute means of coercion, representing the ability of one state to annihilate the military and entire population of other states beyond recovery. Peter Hayes outlines in Chap. 9 the increased role that nuclear weapons play in the relation...