Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alice D. Ba is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Delaware

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(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................xiIn-Text Abbreviations..............................................................xiiiIntroduction.......................................................................11 The ASEAN Paradox and IR Theory..................................................172 Why ASEAN? Why 1967?.............................................................423 The Ideas That Bind: Negotiating ASEAN's Ways....................................664 The Politics and Rhetoric of "One Southeast Asia"................................1035 Locating ASEAN in East Asia and the Asia Pacific.................................1326 ASEAN of and Beyond Southeast Asia: The ASEAN Regional Forum.....................1597 Renegotiating East Asia: "The Idea That Will Not Go Away"........................193Conclusion.........................................................................223Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography.......................................249Notes..............................................................................251Bibliography.......................................................................289Index..............................................................................311

Chapter One

ASEAN is an irrelevant imitation community. David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith, 2001 Southeast Asia minus ASEAN equals greater political instability, more widespread economic deterioration and almost surely, the ascendancy of expansionist forces that thrive on the weakness, isolation and disunity of others. Narciso Reyes, ASEAN Secretary General, 1980-1982

This chapter situates ASEAN and Asia's post-Cold War regionalisms within larger theoretical debates about international relations (IR). It first describes the puzzle that ASEAN presents for dominant IR theories whose utilitarian understandings of cooperation offer limited explanations for ASEAN, its informal consensus-seeking regionalism, and its resilience in the face of change. It then offers an alternative explanation based on constructivist arguments about the role of ideas and social processes (here, argumentation, dialogue, social reinforcement) in the production and reproduction of regions and regionalisms. I build especially on the work of Barnett, Kaye, and Acharya, each of whom have similarly looked to constructivist approaches to explain particular regional politics (respectively, pan-Arabism, Arab-Israeli politics, and Southeast Asia as a security community). My framework, which highlights competing ideas as well as ideational-material interactions in the production of regions and regionalisms in first Southeast Asia and now East Asia, is detailed below.

The ASEAN Paradox

The existence of ASEAN defies most expectations. At the time of its founding in 1967, few expected ASEAN to last one year, let alone nearly four decades, given the volatile state of Southeast Asia's intra- and extraregional relations. Yet, not only has ASEAN seen cooperation deepen, grow, and expand into areas like politics and security that were once too sensitive even to mention, but ASEAN also finds itself today at the center of new arrangements that extend beyond Southeast Asia. If today we see in Southeast Asia a coherent regional entity-as opposed to what one 1954 observer characterized as "a place on the globe where certain groups of peoples, holding little in common, live contiguous to one another"-it is largely due to the existence of ASEAN, whose activities and ideas about Southeast Asia have done much to give both form and substance to this once ambiguous region.

International relations theory has not known what to do with ASEAN. Regional elites associate their organization with milieu-transforming changes in Southeast Asia. Other developing regions identify ASEAN as a model of regional cooperation for their own problematic relations. For such observers, ASEAN provides processes by which members have been able to stabilize their once volatile and fragmented region; to improve their security between one another and vis--vis larger, non-Southeast Asian powers; and ultimately to prosper. Yet predominant IR theories view ASEAN's cooperation as weak, inconsequential, even "unworthy of theoretical ref lection." Indeed, until recently, ASEAN was barely a mention in IR's mainstream journals and mostly outside its defining debates about world order, multilateral cooperation, international organizations, and regionalism.

Mostly, such conclusions reflect a tendency of approaches to measure cooperation in utilitarian terms-that is, direct material gains and outcomes. Not surprisingly, realists, for whom military power and balance of power are key to security, are most dubious about ASEAN's strategic value. While ASEAN's participants may view regionalism as a way to defend their interests against those more powerful, members have also historically avoided any collective pooling of military capabilities that is central to realist definitions of balancing behavior and world order. Political-security initiatives like ZOPFAN are seen as more or less useless as they offer states little in the way of military or material deterrent against possible territorial encroachment.

But even approaches that are more optimistic about cooperation and the resilience of institutions find it difficult to see the value in ASEAN. In fact, for contractual and neoliberal theorists, as well as realists, it is difficult to see why states would try to cooperate at all because, on the face of it, competing economic and security interests should point states away from regional cooperation. For both, the absence of formal mechanisms of cooperation in ASEAN is particularly problematic. Drawing mostly on European and North American examples, approaches argue that the value to be found in institutional arrangements is in their ability to provide "forms of hierarchy in which sanctions are employed to make self-interested choices consistent with the social good." Thus, while they may see information and transparency as important products and facilitators of institutional cooperation, cooperation is nevertheless viewed mostly in terms of formal constraints and binding obligations.

However, if contractual obligations and forms of hierarchy are measures of cooperation, what is one to make of ASEAN's minimalist institutionalism or of the fact that ASEAN's Senior Officials Meeting (SOM), the center of ASEAN agenda setting and top of the ASEAN committee hierarchy, was accorded no formal role in ASEAN for twenty years? What is one to make of ASEAN's founding declaration-a document "so general as to approach the nondescript," that identified no specific agenda for economic or political cooperation, provided no mechanism for dispute resolution, and established no central coordinating body or authority? In fact, it took ASEAN nine years just to get a minimalist secretariat and fifteen more years after that to upgrade it. By such criteria of cooperation, ASEAN, as well as expanded regional arrangements like the ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN...