Wednesday 4 March 2009

Contest over idea of an East Asia region

Should East Asian duality be addressed by designing regionalism or allowing it to evolve?

1 comment:

Guanyu said...

Contest over idea of an East Asia region

Should East Asian duality be addressed by designing regionalism or allowing it to evolve?

By DEEPAK NAIR
4 March 2009

THE conception of a region is the most fundamental starting point for both the thinking and practice of regionalism. This elemental point of reference can, however, also be a point of departure, and the experience of East Asian regionalism and its two leading projects - the Asean Plus Three (APT) and the East Asia Summit (EAS) - disclose the challenges for regionalism when dual and contesting conceptions of a region are at work.

With the EAS and APT annual summits slated for April 2009, state leaders, diplomatic elites and epistemic actors will have to consider the choices before them: to design a East Asia or to let the dual conceptions play themselves out.

Founded in 1997, the APT gave formal expression to an exclusive East Asian regionalism that contrasted with the preceding strand of a more inclusive Asia-Pacific regionalism. The resentment in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, and the perceived need for a regionalism for and by ‘Asians’, underpinned its consolidation into an exclusive ‘East Asian’ model for regional cooperation.

By bringing together North-east and South-east Asia, the APT expressed a geographical conception of East Asia. Its success in pursuing financial and monetary regional cooperation cemented the perception that it was the regional institution for East Asia. To deepen its institutionalisation and impute it a more holistic character the APT was envisioned to ‘evolve’ into the EAS.

With its first summit in 2005, however, it was apparent that the EAS had not realised this planned evolution. With the inclusion of Australia, India and New Zealand, the EAS emerged as a separate framework for regional cooperation. Unease with Chinese dominance in the APT, and anxieties over its likely extension into the EAS was instrumental in changing these blueprints.

While only another addition to the thickening ‘noodle bowl’ of Asian regional bodies, the implications of its founding have been more profound. With the EAS, the conception of East Asia has come to include parts of South Asia and Pacific Asia. In doing so, the EAS has come to represent a revision, if not an alternative, to the idea of the East Asia embodied by the APT.

That the EAS and the APT operate as coexisting regional bodies with concurrent claims to a putative ‘East Asian’ region should not be surprising. It demonstrates that far from being fixed, natural and objective spaces, regions are products of social construction and imagining.

But while multiple conceptions of a region are plausible, are they necessarily desirable? This question informs current concerns over the nature of the relationship between the APT and the EAS: that is, are they complementary or competitive?

The arguments on the ‘complementary’ nature of this relationship are not unfounded. It is possible that within a decade either one of these institutions, riding on deeper institutional development and substantive outcomes, will secure greater credibility, thereby resolving this duality.

Moreover, multiple regions and regional institutions offer greater space for states to pursue their evolving national interests. Considering how state anxieties played their part in changing the planned evolution of the APT to the EAS, it is instructive to factor into account the enduring role of realist international politics in the region.

Traditional security structures, it is argued, remain relevant and provide states the platform from which, over time, they may move towards newer forms of security derived from the interdependence wrought by regional institutions. These hopes are not entirely without credence: the theories on institutions and empirical research have demonstrated the powerful effects of institutions in international relations. Moreover, the experience of Asean indicates the possibility of such deeper institutionalisation.

These arguments nonetheless rest substantially on the hope that some regional bodies will undergo deeper institutionalisation and outdo others; that over time, states will reduce their dependence on realist conceptions of, and militaristic approaches to, security.

The risk of this duality is not the prospect of outright failure, but of simple drawn out stasis or inertia creeping into East Asian regionalism, one where regional institutions are unable to achieve outcomes - both bold functional cooperation and socialisation - and remain vulnerable to the agendas of major powers who seek to steer institutions to serve their strategic goals.

Asia-Pacific regionalism

The point on drawn out stasis is exemplified by the experience of Asia-Pacific regionalism, where both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) and the Asean Regional Forum (ARF) are regional bodies that have experienced difficulty in pursuing their goals: of economic liberalisation in the case of Apec, and a three-phase move from confidence building, preventive diplomacy to conflict resolution in the case of the ARF.

East Asian regionalism will have to be dynamic and innovative if it is to counter the inertia that describes Asia-Pacific regionalism. Crafting attainable goals, pursuing robust functional cooperation, and sustaining political will for institutionalisation are prerequisites. However, the lingering contestation over the ‘East Asian’ region throws up a separate set of challenges for both regional bodies to grapple with. This is evident by the uncertainty over the proposals for a Free Trade Area spanning the East Asian region. While the APT has proposed an East Asian Free Trade Area (EAFTA) covering North-east and South-east Asia, the EAS is working towards a Comprehensive Economic Partnership in East Asia (CEPEA) encompassing the APT as well as Australia, India and New Zealand.

Both FTAs seek to operate over an East Asian region, and besides questions over their viability, it is unclear if they would necessarily complement each other.

A similar ambiguity exists on the specific roles of the APT and the EAS in constructing a formal East Asian Community. While the official discourse emphasises the APT as the principal driver for community building, the role of the EAS remains unspecified. Even if an East Asian Community were realised along APT terms, it is unclear how it would fit with the rationales of the EAS. An APT defined East Asian Community with the APT members at the ‘core’ and with India, Australia and New Zealand at a lower tier would deprive these states with the incentive to be stronger stakeholders in the region’s politics and security.

At the heart of any attempt to address the duality of ‘East Asia’ is the question of whether to design regionalism or of allowing it to evolve. This translates into whether either one of these bodies should be changed to reflect an East Asia - contributing to a more conceptually coherent East Asian regionalism - or alternatively allow the duality to persist and resolve itself in due course, with, however, its attendant complications.

The writer is a Research Associate at the Institute of South-east Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore.

The views expressed are his own