Contested Ideas Of Regionalism In Asia

Deepening regionalism in Asia demands new leadership. Strong elites who are committed to a supranational identity are a minimum requirement of successful regionalism. Regional leaders are increasingly seen as a new set of leaders in Europe. Currently, Asian regional leaders largely come from the diplomacy community, or trade and economic sectors. Yet further regionalization demands a new type of leadership from civil society and citizens. In this context it is important to cultivate new regional leadership through the development of regional citizenship. This book examines contested ideas of regionalism in Asia with a particular focus on two competing ideas of pan-Asianism and Pacificism. It also identifies a new trend and contestation, the fundamental shift from a civilization understanding of regionalism to a technocratic and functional understanding of regionalism in the form of regulatory regionalism. It also examines the other contested imaginations of regionalism in Asia including elitist versus participatory approaches to regionalism, and democracy-centric versus nationalism-centric approaches to regionalism.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian Regionalism is a definitive introduction to, and analysis of, the development of regionalism in Asia, including coverage of East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The contributors engage in a comprehensive exploration of what is arguably the most dynamic and important region in the world. Significantly, this volume addresses the multiple manifestations of regionalism in Asia and is consequently organised thematically under the headings of: conceptualizing the region economic issues political issues strategic issues regional organizations As such, the Handbook presents some of the key elements of the competing interpretations of this important and highly contested topic, giving the reader a chance to evaluate not just where Asian regionalism is going but also how the scholarship on Asian regionalism is analysing these trends and events. This book will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Asian politics, international relations and regionalism.

With its long history of internal divisiveness and its intersecting cultural and linguistic cleavages, East Asia is undoubtedly a complex area. However, the idea of East Asia as a regional entity is one that is relatively recent – a concept that gained momentum after the financial crisis that rocked the region in the 1990s. In recent years, East Asia has become considerably more interdependent, connected and cohesive. This increased cohesiveness has been driven by a dense network of trade and investments, technology sharing and communication, among many other variables and has been reflected in the increasing institutionalisation of regional mechanisms like the ASEAN. Regionalism is not, however, entirely about economic interdependence. In today’s day and age, it means not only overarching social networks and a regional identity, but also strategic thinking that recognises common security interests. This book takes into account the regional discourses of two of East Asia’s biggest players – the United States and China. While the former has been a power to reckon with, albeit “externally”, deeply entrenched in the region since the end of the Second World War, the rise of China in the 21st century and its emergence as the largest power in East Asia has brought a new perspective to East Asian regionalism. In 2010, the United States began reasserting itself in East Asia, bringing into sharp focus the ideological differences between itself and China as each vied to shape the architecture of East Asian security. There is no doubt that heightened American interest comes at a time when China’s own views of regionalism have become noticeably less cooperative. While balance of power politics is one way to look at the geopolitical tug-of-war in East Asia, there are questions that have not yet been answered. How do the two countries look at a region that is so important for them? How has that perception influenced their foreign policy within the same arena? More importantly, how do they define East Asia? This book studies American and Chinese regional discourses from the end of the Cold War to the present day in order to highlight the rationale behind the natural balance of power politics between an established power and a rising one, and its subsequent effects on security regionalism in East Asia.

One of the apparent contradictions which has puzzled observers of East Asian politics is why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. This book stems from the observation that the study of actual forms of economic governance in Asia has been impeded by the dominance of a ‘regionalism’ problematique. Scholars have focused on the emergence – or not – of regional multilateral institutions, seeking to evaluate these institutions’ capacities to enforce disciplines on Asian states. However, they have also neglected prior, and more pertinent, questions regarding the causal determinants of regional economic governance, which animate the contributions to this collection: What factors shape the scale and instruments of economic governance in Asia; and how and why is economic governance being rescaled between the sub-national, national and regional levels? In the chapters of this book, the contributors explore the social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance. They identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance, explain the factors shaping the spatial scale of economic governance in Asia, and discern the patterns of regional integration to which they give rise. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

In the 1990s there was a wave of multilateralism in the Asia Pacific, led primarily by ASEAN. Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, however, many non-ASEAN states have attempted to seize the initiative, including the USA, Japan, China, South Korea, and Australia. Kai He and his contributors debate the reasons for this contested multilateralism and the impacts it will have on the region’s security and political challenges. Will the "Indo-Pacific turn" be a blessing or a curse for regional stability and prosperity? Using a diverse range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, these leading scholars contribute views on this question and on the diverse strategies of the great and middle powers in the region. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students of international relations in the Asia Pacific and of great value to policy makers in the region and beyond.

Especially since the Cold War, research relating to international relations is Asia has grown expoentially and, to make sense of what is now a vast and unweidly corpus of literature, this collection from the Critical Issues in Modern Politics series brings together the best and most influential work in the field.

Asia is a crucial battleground for power and influence in the international system. It is also a theater of new experiments in regional cooperation that could redefine global order. Whose Ideas Matter? is the first book to explore the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system from the perspective of local actors, with Asian regional institutions as its main focus. There's no Asian equivalent of the EU or of NATO. Why has Asia, and in particular Southeast Asia, avoided such multilateral institutions? Most accounts focus on U.S. interests and perceptions or intraregional rivalries to explain the design and effectiveness of regional institutions in Asia such as SEATO, ASEAN, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Amitav Acharya instead foregrounds the ideas of Asian policymakers, including their response to the global norms of sovereignty and nonintervention. Asian regional institutions are shaped by contestations and compromises involving emerging global norms and the preexisting beliefs and practices of local actors. Acharya terms this perspective "constitutive localization" and argues that international politics is not all about Western ideas and norms forcing their way into non-Western societies while the latter remain passive recipients. Rather, ideas are conditioned and accepted by local agents who shape the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system. Acharya sketches a normative trajectory of Asian regionalism that constitutes an important contribution to the global sovereignty regime and explains a remarkable continuity in the design and functions of Asian regional institutions.