(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia

Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

Alice D. Ba

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780804760706, 9780804760690
• eBook ISBN: 9780804776301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book seeks to explain two core paradoxes associated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): How have diverse states hung together and stabilized relations in the face of competing interests, divergent preferences, and arguably weak cooperation? How has a group of lesser, self-identified Southeast Asian powers gone beyond its original regional purview to shape the form and content of Asian Pacific and East Asian regionalisms?

According to Alice Ba, the answers lie in ASEAN's founding arguments: arguments that were premised on an assumed regional disunity. She demonstrates how these arguments draw critical causal connections that make Southeast Asian regionalism a necessary response to problems, give rise to its defining informality and consensus-seeking process, and also constrain ASEAN's regionalism. Tracing debates about ASEAN's intra- and extra-regional relations over four decades, she argues for a process-driven view of cooperation, sheds light on intervening processes of argument and debate, and highlights interacting material, ideational, and social forces in the construction of regions and regionalisms.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1

Durian is a fruit common in much of Southeast Asia. It is as pungent as it is popular.

2

The argument about ASEAN’s role in the construction of a Southeast Asian security community is most associated with Acharya, but most students of ASEAN have at one time or another weighed in. Acharya 1991, 1995, 1998, 2001. See also Alagappa 1991; Busse 1999; Buzan and Segal 1994; Dupont 1996; Emmerson 1996; Jones and Smith 2001; Narine 2002b; Simon 1982, 1998; Sopiee 1980; Tilman 1987.

3

Haacke 1998; Haas 1989: 282. Also, Wurfel 1996.

4

My conceptualization of regionalism as a “cumulative dialogue” or “series of negotiations” on regional organization draws on Kaye’s study on Middle East multilaterals, in which she argues that “multilateral cooperation must be appreciated as a process of interaction rather than solely as a set of outcomes” and on Barnett’s study, which characterizes pan-Arabism as “a series of dialogues between Arab states regarding the desired regional order.” See Kaye 2001; Barnett 1998: viii.

5

Antolik 1990; Soesastro 2003.

6

Leifer’s work, which has been defining in the study of ASEAN, may be especially illustrative, even if his work is better described as implicitly, not explicitly, realist. See, e.g., Leifer 1986b, 1989, and 1996.

7

In cases like Indonesia, there is the belief that ethnic division had been one important reason for their conquest by the Dutch. See, for example, Elson 2006: 267–68.

8

This list can be compared to Alagappa’s (2003) “pathways” to regional order.

9

Caballero-Anthony 2005; Emmers 2003.

10

Ravenhill 2001.

11

In particular, see Goldstein and Keohane 1993: 5–8.

12

As Johnston notes, focal points have a prominent place in neoliberal, contractual approaches toward institutions, but such approaches have oddly expressed little “curiosity about the social and historical origins of focal points.” Johnston 2001: 490.

13

While there are historical examples of “Southeast Asian” regions, the particular Southeast Asian region that we know today as being the ten states of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar is unique.

14

Dirlik 1992.

CHAPTER 1

1

ASEAN website: www.ASEANsecorg/92.htm.

2

Peffer 1954: 311–312.

3

Those identifying ASEAN as a model or potential model for regional cooperation include: South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) (See, e.g., Jetly 2003); Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) (See, for example, Centre for Democracy and Development 2002); the Middle East (see Leifer 1998; Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, The Arab View: The ASEAN Experiment, Money Clips (9 August)); the Shanghai Cooperation Council (see, for example, Tang 2002). See also United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2004).

4

Tan with Cossa 2001: 18.

5

Consider, for example, ASEAN’s absence from earlier “neo-neo” theoretical debates. ASEAN received only one passing reference in Baldwin (1993) and none in Keohane’s (1986) compilation of debates. ASEAN was better represented in political economy discussions, though as a subset of larger East Asian and Asian Pacific processes, which were similarly viewed critically. See, for example, Grieco’s and Haggard’s chapters in Mansfield and Milner 1997. Fawcett and Hurrell’s (1996) volume on regionalism may best include ASEAN as part of the discussion; but here, too, ASEAN is mostly dismissed and not discussed at great length. Recent years have seen new interest due largely to Acharya’s work (e.g., Acharya 2001, 2003/4, 2004), which by virtue of argument and prominence has become a particular focal point for theoretical discussion on ASEAN, for example, Jones and Smith 2001, Khoo 2004, special is...

Table of contents

• SERIES EDITORS
• Studies in Asian Security - A SERIES SPONSORED BY THE EAST-WEST CENTER
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• In-Text Abbreviations
• Introduction
• ONE - Theory and Origins
• TWO - ASEAN’s New Regionalisms
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Studies in Asian Security - A SERIES SPONSORED BY THE EAST-WEST CENTER