Forging a regional security community a study of the driving forces behind ASEAN and east asian regionalism 1

1
CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION


Whether or not the Asian-Pacific region will be able to develop a framework
for common action, like the European Community, is the key question.
Already many plans have been set forth for integrating Asia Ultimately, the
issue is a cultural one in that no such community of nations will be viable
without some shared language, some ideas and perspectives the participants
have in common.
1


Purpose and Scope of Dissertation
Over the past half century, the steady rise of East Asia has been a notable feature in
bringing about a perceptible shifting of the global balance of power.
2

1 Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations.
Chicago: Imprint Publications Inc., 2
nd
edition, 1992, pp. 391-92. The study of
“regions” is contested, in terms of definitions and approaches. For example, is a
“region” geographically defined or is it a mental construct? Controversial issues
include the role of identity, culture, and institutionalisation. See Rick Fawn ed.
Globalising the Regional, Regionalizing the Global, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2009, pp. 5-34.
Since the post-

Cold War era in the early 1990s, East Asian regionalism has accelerated. The central
aim of a regional security community is to eliminate war among its member-states. A
major issue is whether East Asia is becoming more integrated and peaceful, or
whether the threat of inter-state armed conflict remains real. As Shambaugh has
pointed out, “The dynamics of international relations in Asia are undergoing broad
and fundamental changes that are reverberating around the world. Primary among the

2 David L. Shambaugh, Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005. James F. Hoge, “A Global Power Shift in the
Making: Is the United States Ready?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 2, July/August 2004.
Hoge argues that global power shifts ‘are rarely peaceful’. Kishore Mahbubani, The
New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. US:
Public Affairs, 2008. John Malcolm Dowling, Future Perspectives on the Economic
Development of Asia. Singapore: World Scientific, 2009. N.S. Sisodia and V.
Krishnappa, Global Power Shifts and Strategic Transition in Asia, New Delhi:
Academic Foundation in association with the Institute for Defence Studies and
Analyses, 2009. The temporal scope of this study is end-February 2010.


2
catalysts of change in the region is the rise of China as the engine of regional
economic growth, as a major military power, as a significant voice in regional
diplomacy, and as a proactive power in multilateral institutions.”
3
‘Regionalism’ refers generally to the top-down state-driven political process
of promoting greater economic cooperation and political integration, either in a
geographical area or a mental construct among states sharing common values,
interests, identity, and goals. Regional political integration would include, as in the
West European case, the establishment of a common identity, a common foreign-
security policy, plus growing elements of supranationalism. The contemporary

benchmark of regionalism will be the EU. In contrast, ‘regionalization’ refers to the
role played by non-state actors in promoting greater economic linkages and region-
wide production networks in specific regions around the world. Akira Iriye posits that
a genuine regional political community must have both material and ideational bases:
shared norms and identities about their visions and common strategic policies for their
common destiny. The issue is: to what extent do the East Asian states share such
‘commonalities’ as identity and foreign-security policy? The EU is generally
The rise of East
Asia started with Japan’s miracle growth in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the
‘Asian Tigers’ of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore in the 1970s.
Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia followed in the 1980s. The late-1990s saw the rise
of China and India. By the early-twenty first century, East Asia had emerged as the
third pillar of the world economy, besides that of the United States (US) and the
European Union (EU). This dissertation focuses on the main driving forces that are
shaping the evolution of security regionalism in East Asia.

3 Shambaugh 2005, ibid. “Description”, cited in


3
regarded to have achieved the most advanced form of a security community. A
Deutschian security community
4
is forged when its member-states become so
integrated that war among them becomes unthinkable. War and peace in International
Relations should be conceptualized along a spectrum or continuum. If we think of
war as being placed at the extreme left hand of the continuum, and peace at the right
hand side, then the in-between categories would include militarized border clashes
and skirmishes, “gunboat diplomacy”, the setting up of regional and international
organizations, regional security complexes,

5


security regimes, ‘zone of peace’ and
military alliances. A ‘zone of peace’ is a geographical region in which armed
conflicts and even war are thinkable but unlikely to occur. (See Figure 1). A security
community can be conceptualized as both a process and an end product. The post-
Cold War era has seen a revival of regional integration around the world. This is the
result of increased globalization, an expanding world economy, the rise of economic
blocs in the EU and NAFTA in the late 1980s, the rise of China and India in the
1990s, and the spread of democracy and democratization worldwide.
4 Karl Deutsch et al. Political Community in the North Atlantic Area: International
Organization in the Light of Historical Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1957. According to Deutsch, there are two types of security
communities, ‘amalgamated’ and ‘pluralistic’. The United States of America is an
example of an amalgamated security community where its constituting entities lose
their sovereignty. The EU is a pluralistic security community in that its member
states retain their sovereignty. In this dissertation, we are referring to pluralistic
security communities. See also Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell eds. Regionalism
in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995.

5 Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International
Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. The idea of a ‘regional
security complex’ is about how geographically proximate states intentionally or
unintentionally affect each other’s security – see Johan Eriksson and Mark Rhinard,
“The Internal-External Security Nexus”, Cooperation and Conflict 44 (3) 2009: 243-
267. See also Barry Buzan, “Security Architecture in Asia: the interplay of regional
and global levels”, The Pacific Review 16 (2) June 2003: 143-173.

4





Figure 1.1
Conceptualization of War and Peace along a continuum



Source
War
: Adapted from Barry Buzan and Ole Weaver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of
International Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. David Lake,
“Anarchy, Hierarchy, and the Variety of International Relations”, International Organisation,
50 (1996): 1-36; cited in Emanuel Adler and Patricia Greve, “When security community
meets balance of power: overlapping regional mechanisms of security governance”, in Rick
Fawn ed. Globalising the Regional, Regionalising the Global. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 63.
(civil
and
inter-
state)
Militarized
border
clashes
Militarized
border

skirmishes
“Gunboat
diplomacy”
or overt
military
displays of
power
against
rivals
Regional
organizations
Regional
Security
Complexes
(armed
conflicts
are
thinkable
and likely)
Security
Regimes
(armed
conflicts
are
thinkable
and
possible)
‘Zone of
Peace’
(Armed

conflicts
are
thinkable
but
unlikely)
Military
Alliances
Peace
(Security
Community,
either at the
regional or
global
levels)

5
I will re-examine a claim made by some constructivist scholars that ASEAN is
either a nascent security community or is already one (Acharya 2001).
6
This
assessment is carried out by testing it against the two core features of the classic
Deutschian regional security community concept: Existence of a ‘we-feeling’
community; and the rise of a ‘non-war’ community. These two features can be sub-
divided into the following six components of a regional security community: a.
Mutual compatibility of values (like democracy), b. Strong economic ties and
expectations of more (based on a strong sense of mutual fair-play and benefit), c.
Multifaceted social, political and cultural transactions (strong positive feelings about
one another), d. Growing degree of institutionalized relationships, e. Mutual
responsiveness (sensitivity to one another’s legitimate interests), and f. Mutual
predictability of behaviour, especially about the practice of peaceful settlement of

disputes.
7
It is important to re-examine this contentious claim because the parties in this
scholarly debate (the ‘ASEANists’ and their critics) have for at least the past ten years
seemed to talk past one another. Both sides have basically stuck to their positions,
seemingly choosing to ignore the other party. This unhealthy situation needs to be
remedied. Not surprisingly, the scholarly literature continues to accumulate the work
of both parties, but without any clear resolution as to which claim is a better
explanation of the driving forces behind the evolution of regionalism in East Asia.
The scholarly debate has important implications which extend far beyond a mere


6 Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: The problem
of Regional Order. London: Routledge, 2001. The second edition of this book was
published in 2009.

7 Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler, The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and
Trust in World Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008, pp. 191-196.


6
intellectual discourse. It has implications for the development of regional integration
in different regions, and international relations theory more generally. William Tow
has suggested that a reason for studying the evolving Asian security order is its
‘regional-global nexus’: “such knowledge is increasingly compelling as international
security problems are more and more shaping the dynamics of Asian security
politics”.
8
Premature and misleading claims need to be highlighted and better still,
resolved so that the international relations discipline can be put on the right path. In

October 2003 the governments of the ASEAN states formally adopted the goal of
establishing a three-pillared ASEAN Community, based on the formation of an
ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, an ASEAN Economic Community, and an
ASEAN Security Community (since re-named as ASEAN Political-Security
Community) by the year 2020.
9
Second, this dissertation examines a claim by some constructivist scholars that
the ‘ASEAN Way’ (characterized by features like consensual decision-making;
informality; minimal institutionalization; sovereignty-orientation; non-intervention;
and the non-use of force in settling interstate conflicts), also known as the ‘Asia-
Pacific Way’ or the ‘East Asian Way’, has played the major role in shaping post-cold
war regional integration in Northeast Asia: “…Southeast Asian leaders and
intellectuals speak of an ‘ASEAN Way’ of regional cooperation, which is being
promoted by them as the organizing framework of multilateralism at the wider Asia-
Precisely because the ASEAN governments have
decided on creating an ASEAN Security Community, it is vital that we are clear what
is precisely meant by the notion of a security community.

8 William Tow, “Setting the context” in Tow ed. Security Politics in the Asia-Pacific:
A Regional-Global Nexus? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 4.

9 For details on the ASEAN Political-Security Community, see
www.asean.org/18741.htm. (Accessed on 31 January 2010).


7
Pacific regional level.”
10
In other words, the ASEAN elites are seeking to extend the
ASEAN Way of cooperative security to Northeast Asian regionalism. Peace, security,

and regionalism in the geographically-proximate sub-regions of Southeast Asia and
Northeast Asia are inextricably linked. There are a number of reasons why ASEAN
became concerned with regional security trends in post-Cold War Northeast Asia: the
closure of US bases in the Philippines in 1992; the unresolved territorial issues in the
South China Sea; instability on the Korean Peninsula arising from Pyongyang’s
ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons; and Sino-US tensions over Taiwan due to the
rise of pro-independence forces there.
11
I examine this claim by considering other determinants which may offer better
explanations of the growing momentum of Northeast Asian regionalism. These
include the impact of globalization on state behaviour; the implications of the rise of
China; Japan’s quest for ‘normal’ country status and its support for regional
multilateralism; the leadership role of a middle power like South Korea, and the
shifting US policy in support of an inclusive form of East Asian regionalism,
especially since the late-1990s. Realists, like Aaron Friedberg, argue that Northeast
Asia is ‘ripe for rivalry’, while constructivists like Amitav Acharya tend to be more
optimistic. At an IISS-Asia Seminar in July 2010, Acharya characterized the evolving


10 Amitav Acharya 2001 op. cit. Acharya, “Ideas, Identity, and Institution-building:
from the ‘ASEAN Way’ to the ‘Asia-Pacific Way’? Pacific Review 10(3) 1997: 319-
46. Timo Kivimaki, “The Long Peace of ASEAN,” Journal of Peace Research 38 (1)
2001: 5-25. Christopher Hughes, “New Security Dynamics in the Asia-Pacific:
Extending regionalism from Southeast Asia to Northeast Asia”, The International
Spectator, 42 (3) 2007: 319-335.

11 Jurgen Haacke and Noel M. Morada, “The ASEAN Regional Forum: origins and
evolution”, in Jurgen Haacke and Noel Morada eds. Cooperative Security in the
Asia-Pacific: The ASEAN Regional Forum, London and New York: Routledge, 2010,
pp. 14-15.

8
East Asian regional order as ‘consociational’, something between Confucian and
Kantian.
12

This dissertation is basically a qualitative study. Its key objective is to re-
examine the nature, dynamics, and implications of the main driving forces behind the
process of post-Cold War East Asian regionalism. Given that Western Europe is
generally regarded as having the most advanced form of regionalism in the world, it is
inevitable that this study has to made broad references to it. But this study makes no
attempt to do a comparative study between West European and East Asian
regionalism.

13

The main driving forces behind the rise of a security community in
Western Europe will be highlighted in Chapter Two.

12 Aaron Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia”,
International Security 18(3) Winter 1993-94: 5-33. Richard Betts, “Wealth, Power
and Instability: East Asia and the United States after the Cold War”, International
Security, 18 (3) Winter 1993-94: 34-77. Thomas Christensen, “China, the US-Japan
Alliance, and the Security Dilemma in East Asia”, International Security, 23 (4)
Spring 1999: 49-80. See also Evelyn Goh, “Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in
Southeast Asia: Analysing regional security strategies,” International Security 32 (3)
2007/8: 113-57. Hans H. Indorf, “ASEAN in extra-regional perspective,”
Contemporary Southeast Asia 9 (2) 1987: 86-105. Thomas Berger, “Set for Stability?
Prospects for Conflict and Cooperation in East Asia’, Review of International Studies
Vol. 26 (2006): 405-28. G. John Ikenberry and Jitsuo Tsuchiyama, “Between

Balance of Power and Community: The Future of Multilateral Security Cooperation
in the Asia-Pacific’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 2 (1) 2002: 69-94.
Amitav Acharya, “Between Confucius and Kant: China’s Ascent and the Future of
Asia’s Security Order”, IISS-Asia Seminar Series, Singapore, 21 July 2010
/>seminar-series-professor-amitav-acharya).

13 Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell eds. Regionalism in World Politics: Regional
Organization and International Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
“ASEAN” scholars also acknowledge this point. Peter J Katzenstein, A World of
Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2005. Khong Yuen Foong, “ASEAN and the Southeast Asian Security
Complex”, in David Lake and Patrick Morgan eds. Regional Order: Building Security
in a New York, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston eds. Crafting Cooperation: Regional
International Institutions in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007
.


9
Rationale for this Study
There are a number of reasons for choosing this topic for investigation. First, East
Asia is a vital part of the global political economy. Trends in East Asian economics,
politics, and security are shaping the international security order. The growing
importance of Asia in the regional and global balance of power is cogently captured
by William Tow in the following manner:
Asia has arguably become the most critical region in an evolving
international order. Geopolitically, the region includes three of the world’s
great powers — China, Japan and India — and two others, the United States
and Russia, lie just beyond its peripheries and interact with it extensively.

Demographically, over half of the world’s total population is Asian and that
total is forecast to reach 60 per cent by 2050. Economically, it is projected
that China and India alone will account for more than 50 per cent of global
growth between 2005 and 2030. Militarily, four key players in the broader
Asia-Pacific – the US, Russia, China and North Korea — are nuclear
weapons states. Asian defence budgets constitute the world’s largest arms
market (US$150 billion in purchases between 1990 and 2002) and the
region’s “defence transformation” programmes are growing.
14


Second, the driving forces behind the evolution of East Asian regionalism are deeply
linked to the basic issue of war and peace in the international system, and the
emergence of a new East Asian security order. In this regard, Evelyn Goh posits that
there are two key determinants linked to the nature of US-China relations: “Can the
US be persuaded that China can act as a reliable ‘regional stakeholder’ that will help
to buttress regional stability and US global security aims? Can China be convinced
that the US has neither territorial ambitions in Asia nor the desire to encircle China,
but will help to promote Chinese development and stability as part of its global
security strategy?
15

14 William Tow ed. Security Politics in the Asia-Pacific: A Regional-Global Nexus?
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 1.
Unlike realism, liberal and constructivist approaches argue that
war is not necessarily inevitable in an anarchical international system. In particular,
15 Evelyn Goh, “Hegemony, hierarchy and order”, in William T. Tow ed. Security
Politics in the Asia-Pacific: A Regional-Global Nexus? Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 119.

10
constructivist scholars argue that a socially-constructed security community offers a
promising way out of the security dilemma. Andrew Farrell has pointed out that in
the nuclear age, the study of regionalism can make a meaningful contribution to
understanding the building up of interstate tensions.
16
A study of non-Western
regionalism has profound implications for regional order and for the growth of IR
theory. If ASEAN is able to maintain its unity and makes progress in becoming
integrated into a security community, it could facilitate, as pointed out by Acharya
and Stubbs, the rise of a distinctive non-Western theory of international relations.
17
A study of the driving forces of regionalism is likely to be very useful in
generating knowledge about the nature and unique features of the evolving
East Asian regional security order. A study of the driving forces in ASEAN
and Northeast Asian regionalism can facilitate the quest to develop a non-
Western theory of international relations. Two books edited by Muthiah
Alagappa (1998, 2003) considered how “international relations theory can
help explain the interrelationships of material power, ideational perceptions
and order-building dynamics within Asia”. Another influential and
constructive study of Asian security was edited by G. John Ikenberry and
Michael Mastanduno and appeared in 2003 as International Relations Theory
and the Asia-Pacific: it focused “on regional power relations as a component
of the global security environment”. The Ikenberry/Mastanduno book
highlighted “the ongoing weakness of existing Asian security institutions
relative to their European counterparts. It posits that the United States’ early
post-war decision to manage power in Asia not by institutionalisation (along
the lines of NATO) but by hierarchy (through its bilateral system of alliances
there), established path dependency” that has since inhibited the
establishment of more robust Asian security institutions (Duffield 2003: 256-

8). Tow pointed out that if this interpretation is correct, American power has
imposed constraints on Asian order-building that impede an Asian capability
to shape and manage regional order autonomously, refuting the arguments of
Kang and others who insist that more region-centric models can be applied to
this process. On the other hand, American power endows the Asian region
with “breathing space” for developing more self-reliant institutions and
processes for achieving security.

William Tow has made a similar argument:
18



16 Farrell op. cit. 2005: 9. See also Bruce Russett, Harvey Starr, David Kinsella, World
Politics: Menu for Choice, Florence, KY, USA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2009.

17 Amitav Acharya and Richard Stubbs eds., Theorizing Southeast Asian Relations,
London: Routledge, 2009.

18 Tow ed. 2009 op cit., pp. 5-7.

11

Third, this study is important because the evolution of East Asian regionalism is
closely related to the changing dynamics of US-China strategic relations, arguably
one of the most critical factors affecting international peace and security. Jae Ho
Chung has put the long term significance of the evolving US-China strategic
relationship in the following manner:
…if America were to commit fully to mobilizing its East Asian allies and
friends, a scenario that is not highly likely under President Obama, it

would most likely spark China’s “siege mentality,” which has been
largely dormant under the tenet of “peaceful rise.” That is to say, China
would view such moves by America as provocative and even threatening,
and the nature of US-China strategic interactions might accordingly be
transformed into a zero-sum game, thereby generating fierce competition
in the region and making the option of balancing and bandwagoning
other-excluding behaviour. Beijing’s subsequent counter-efforts to curtail
Washington’s alliance management may in turn be construed as a grave
challenge to America’s primacy in East Asia. This is certainly not an
ideal situation for the region or any of its member states.
19




Fourth, there are important benefits to be derived from a qualitative study of the
driving forces behind the European regionalist project and that of East Asia. The
study of the driving forces and characteristics of East Asian regionalism is important
because the region has emerged as the third pillar of the expanding world economy.
Indeed, some observers, like the veteran Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani
(2008), have argued that the global balance of power is increasingly shifting to the
East.
20


This means that the direction of the evolution of ASEAN and East Asian
19 Jae Ho Chung, “East Asia’s Responses to China’s Rise”, Pacific Affairs, 82 (4)
Winter 2009-2010: 657-675.

20 Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Power to

the East. New York: Public Affairs, 2008. For a sceptical view, see Myongsob Kim
and Horace Jeffery Hodges, “Is the 21
st
Century an ‘Asian Century’? Raising More
Reservations than Hopes”, Pacific Focus 25 (2) August 2010: 161-180.


12
regionalism is likely to have a decisive impact on the prospects for war and peace at
the global level. The rise of China (and India) is steadily shifting the balance of
global power and influence. Over the past decade, the ASEAN Plus Three states are
making strong, determined efforts to enhance their economic interdependence by
establishing bilateral and regional-wide Free Trade Areas (FTAs). The rise of China
will be a critical factor in the evolution of multilateral East Asian regionalism. As
pointed out by Ellen Frost: “The East Asian integration movement keeps security
cooperation moving forward, particularly with regard to China. At present, there
appears to be a growing divergence between Asian economic interests, which are
closely linked to China, and Asia’s security needs, which are largely met by the US.
Whether or not these trends blend into a constructive division of labour based on
complementary interests depends enormously on how China evolves in the next
decade.”
21
Not surprisingly, it is important to closely monitor trends in ASEAN’s
relations with its more powerful neighbours in Northeast Asia, whether there are
perceptions of real mutual gains from increasing cultural, economic, and political-
strategic interactions. How are regionalisms in Southeast and Northeast Asia related?
Is it reasonable to expect a regional security community to emerge in Southeast and
Northeast Asia? Sceptics, especially realists, will argue that this is very unlikely
given the great cultural, socio-economic, political-ideological, and military-strategic
diversity of East Asia, and the historical legacy of armed conflicts and mistrust arising

from the ‘history problem’ among the Northeast Asian states. These pessimists are


21 Ellen L. Frost, Asia’s New Regionalism. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 2008.


13
likely to consider the possibility of a rise of a regional security community, especially
in Northeast Asia, as very remote.
I would instead argue that it is entirely appropriate to analyse the driving
forces behind East Asian regionalism, bearing in mind the Western European
experience, for a number of reasons. There are subtle similarities in the historical
evolution of regional cooperation between the two regions. Before World War Two,
Western Europe also had a history of devastating interstate wars, especially between
France and Germany, the two giants of continental Europe. Both countries fought
three devastating wars within 70 years: in 1870-71; 1914-1918; and 1939-1945. At
the end of World War Two, the possibility of a Franco-German political
reconciliation seemed distant. But the fact is that Franco-German reconciliation of the
early-1950s was an important milestone in the acceleration of European economic and
political integration, from the formation of the supranational European Coal and Steel
Community (1952), the European Economic Community (1957), the European
Common Market (1970s), the rise of the EU (1992), and the Euro area (1999). Like
Western Europe, Southeast Asian elites since the mid-1970s and their counterparts in
Northeast Asia since the second-half of the 1990s, have also shown great interest and
determination in accelerating the momentum to forge ever closer economic and
political cooperation, as seen in the formation of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF
1994), the ASEAN Plus Three (APT 1997) and the East Asian Summit (EAS 2005),
and the ratification of the European Union-style ASEAN Charter at end-2008.
Despite their historical enmity arising from Japanese colonialism of Korea and
militarism in China, and their current political rivalry for East Asian leadership,

Beijing and Tokyo have since the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997-98 forged
closer economic and financial cooperation, as evidenced by the formation in year

14
2000 of the Chiang Mai Initiative (the building up of East Asian financial reserves
through bilateral currency swaps in order to prevent a repeat of the AFC meltdown)
and the fact that they are each other’s major trading partners. Indeed, as Michael
Schuman has recently pointed out, the Asian economic miracle is the epic story of
Asia’s relentless quest to create wealth, of searching for political stability and
prosperity for their peoples.
22
Virtually all of East Asia, except for North Korea, has
adopted the free-market capitalist economic system to release the energies of their
peoples to generate wealth. Post-Cold War East Asian elites are pragmatic.
Intensifying economic interdependence in East Asia and the nuclear age have made
the cost of wars very prohibitive for most states in the international system. It is in
this sense that the threat of war in East Asia and virtually the rest of the world
(perhaps except Africa) has become a sunset industry. The spread of free-market
capitalism and literacy, higher levels of economic development and wealth, and
greater experience with state-building and nation-building have contributed to the rise
of more stable states throughout most of East Asia over the past three decades. In
turn, this is resulting in what Benjamin Miller calls the reduced “war-propensity” in
East Asia.
23

22 Michael Schuman, The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth. New
York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009.
Miller posits that ‘failing’ or ‘failed’ states are more likely to increase
‘war-propensity’ in a specific region. This would appear to make intuitive sense
given that political instability and civil war within a specific state is more likely to

spill-over into neighbouring states. One example was Indonesian President Sukarno’s
belligerent policy of Confrontation against the formation of the Federation of

23 Benjamin Miller, “Between the revisionist state and the frontier state: regional
variations in state war-propensity”, in Rick Fawn ed. Globalizing the Regional,
Regionalizing the Global. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp.
85-119.


15
Malaysia in the mid-1960s in order to distract domestic attention from his
government’s economic mismanagement.
24
Western policymakers appear to be increasingly aware and understand the new
determination of East Asian elites to forge a more united East Asia in order to prevent
intra-regional disputes and conflicts from becoming militarized. An unstable East
Asia would also tend to invite external Great Power interventions. As US Secretary
of Defence Robert Gates stated in his speech to the Singapore-based Shangri-la
Dialogue in 2008: “The United States notes the stirrings of a new regionalism, a pan-
Asian desire for new frameworks to encompass and thereby moderate inter-state
competition. We welcome the resulting search for a ‘new security
architecture’…This search will continue…after all, one can hardly suggest that it is
appropriate for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to develop regional security
institutions, but not for Asia to do so.”

25

The greater assertiveness of East Asian
elites in seeking to become active managers of the emerging regional order is also a
clear reflection of their new-found confidence arising from the region’s rapid

economic transformation over the past three decades.



24 John Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno: British, American, Australian and New
Zealand Diplomacy in the Malaysian-Indonesian Confrontation, 1961-65, New York:
St. Martin’s, 2000. Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Indonesia in ASEAN: Foreign Policy and
Regionalism. Singapore: ISEAS, 1994. J.A.C. Mackie, Konfrontasi: the Indonesia-
Malaysia Dispute, 1963-1966, New York: published for the Australian Institute of
International Affairs by Oxford University Press, 1974.

25 Robert Gates, “Challenges to Stability in the Asia-Pacific,” in Tim Huxley and
Alexander Nicholl eds., Perspectives on International Security. London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), 2008. Speech by the US Secretary of Defense at
the Shangri-La Dialogue held in Singapore on 31 May 2008.


16
Theoretical approaches to the study of ‘Security Communities’
The Deutschian ‘security community’ concept, as applied to the East Asian region, is
as pointed out by Sorpong Peou
26
, based on the assumption that individual states can
relate to one another more positively as their values and interests converge. This
makes intuitive sense as the forging of ‘we-feeling’ between states is an integral
process of establishing truly mutually beneficial relations. There are two main
theoretical approaches to the study of security communities, the Deutschian and
constructivist approaches. First, the Deutschian integration theory which focuses on
material transactions (termed as “transactionalism’) between states like the
quantifiable economic flows of trade, investment, and measures of interpersonal

communication such as the volume of mail, telephone calls, or tourism, which are
taken as measurable indicators of ‘integration’.
27
But the Deutschian concepts of
“integration” and “dependable expectations of peaceful change” can be quite
subjective and difficult to measure at the empirical level. Throughout the Cold War
period, the Deutschian theoretical approach made little headway in the non-Western
world because its concepts proved “relatively imprecise, and the concept of security
communities has proved difficult to apply in empirical research”, as argued by
Gleditsch.
28

26 Sorpong Peou, “Security community-building in the Asia-Pacific”, in William T.
Tow ed., Security Politics in the Asia-Pacific: A Regional-Global Nexus?,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 144.


27 Gleditsch, Kristian Skrede, All International Politics is Local: the Diffusion of
Conflict, Integration, and Democratization, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 2002, p. 34.

28 Gleditsch, p. 35. See also Joseph S. Nye ed. International Regionalism, Boston,
USA: Little, Brown, 1968. James Rosenau ed., International Politics and Foreign
Policy, New York: Free Press, 1961. Joseph S. Nye, “Comparative regional
integration: concept and measurement”, in Fred H. Lawson ed., Comparative
Regionalism, England: Ashgate, 2009.

17
Second, the constructivist approach, pioneered by Adler and Barnett (1998)
focuses on the role of ideas, peaceful norms of interstate behaviour, and ‘collective

meanings’ in facilitating the rise of security communities.
29
That is, how inter-
subjective “meaning” or “identity” can promote the rise of security communities
among states. In the view of Adler (2008), security communities are “communities of
practices” and have developed “dispositions of self-restraint” towards other states.
30
The security community concept and the ‘balance of power’ are not mutually
exclusive. Both concepts assume that the state is the key player in international
relations. In their study in 2009, Adler and Greve argued that security community and
balance of power should be conceptualized as “overlapping regional mechanisms of
security governance”.
31
The intellectual discourse on ‘security community’ is closely linked to the
concept of regional integration theory. Deutsch and his associates pioneered the
concept; it has to do with the fundamental issue of war and peace in the international
system. Deutsch’s focus was on the North Atlantic region. His focus was not
surprising in that European Powers initiated the two most devastating wars in human
This point makes sense because the balance of power and
security community concepts arise from an attempt to forge regional peace and
security.



29 Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett eds., Security Communities, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is what States make
of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics”, International Organization, 41:
335-70.

30 Emanuel Adler, “The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice,

Self-Restraint, and NATO’s post-Cold War Transformation”, European Journal of
International Relations 14 (2) 2008: 195-230.

31 Emanuel Adler and Patricia Greve, “When security community meets balance of
power: overlapping regional mechanism of security governance”, in Rick Fawn ed.
Globalising the Regional, Regionalizing the Global, 2009, op cit., pp. 59-84.

18
history, between 1914 and 1945. The end result of World Wars One and Two was the
destruction of Europe as the centre of world power. A major assumption behind
Deutsch’s study is that inter-state war in the nuclear age will be very costly and even
nationally suicidal for all the combatants, and hence great efforts must be made to
avoid future inter-state wars, specifically in the Atlantic region.
In this dissertation, I take the view that any conception of a ‘security
community’, whether Deutschian or constructivist-ideational, must contain the central
idea that war among its member-states becomes unthinkable. Sixty five years after
the end of World War Two, only a few regions in the Western world have established
durable pluralistic ‘security communities’: Western Europe, North America (US-
Canada), and Australia-New Zealand. In 2001, Amitav Acharya
32
claimed in a
formal study, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the
Problem of Regional Order, that ASEAN can be regarded as a nascent security
community. Acharya’s claim has since been supported by a number of other analysts,
including Sorpong Peou in a 2009 study.
33
The key difference between a Deutschian security community and a
constructivist-security community has to do with the role of ideational forces in
shaping inter-subjective, collective meanings about norms, state ‘identity’ and
‘interests”. Adler and Barnett made an interesting innovation with their idea of three

stages (phases) in the emergence of a durable security community: ‘nascent’;
‘ascendant’; and ‘mature’ Adler and Barnett’s three stages will be reviewed in greater


32 Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, London:
Routledge, 2001.

33 Sorpong Peou, “Security community-building in the Asia-Pacific”, in William Tow
ed. Security Politics in the Asia-Pacific: A Regional-Global Nexus? Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 144.

19
depth in Chapter Two.
34
But I argue that the first two stages (nascent and ascendant)
cannot be regarded as true regional security communities. It is meaningless and
misleading to speak of a ‘nascent’ security community.
35
Another variation in the conceptualization of a ‘security community’ is that
advanced by the Indonesian scholar, Rizal Sukma, in his 2003 concept paper outlining
the elements of a potential ASEAN Security Community (ASC). At the 2003
ASEAN Summit in Bali, the member governments endorsed an Indonesian proposal
to establish a three-pillared ASEAN Community by the year 2020 (the target date was
changed to 2015 at the ASEAN Summit in Cebu in January 2007). The three pillars
are an ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, an ASEAN Economic Community, and
an ASEAN Security Community. The Indonesian proposal came from a concept
paper by Rizal Sukma, a scholar at the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and
This is analogous to
‘sovereignty’: there is no such thing as a ‘semi’ sovereign state. Thus, only a
‘mature’ security community (in the sense used by Adler and Barnett) can really be

regarded as a Deutschian security community. A security community must have two
core components, that is, a ‘we-feeling’ and a ‘non-war’ community. This will be my
position when I evaluate a claim made by constructivist scholars that ASEAN is a
‘nascent’ security community in Chapter Three.

34 Christopher Roberts has suggested that a ‘security community’ is more
comprehensively defined as a ‘transnational community of two or more states whose
sovereignty is increasingly amalgamated and whose people maintain dependable
expectations of peaceful change.” See his ASEAN’s Myanmar Crisis: Challenges to
the Pursuit of a Security Community, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
(ISEAS), 2010, p. 4.

35 This point was made by Alan Collins in an email correspondence with the author on 9
October 2009: “The stage of being a nascent security community actually does not
indicate a security community will form, just that it might. So attaching security
community to a stage that might, or might not, lead to its creation is misleading.”


20
International Studies.
36

Sukma’s proposals called for, among other things, the
establishment of a maritime surveillance centre; a counter-terrorism centre; an
ASEAN Peacekeeping Force; a centre for cooperation against non-traditional threats;
and regular meetings of ASEAN police and national defence ministers. A major
problem with the idea of an ASEAN Peacekeeping Force had to do with its command
and control and the conditions for its deployment: would such an entity also be
dominated by Indonesia? An analysis of the generally adverse ASEAN reaction to
this Indonesian proposal is at Chapter Three.

Extending the ‘ASEAN Way’ to Northeast Asia (NEA)
The extension of the ‘ASEAN Way’ of cooperative security to Northeast Asian
regionalism is the second question I will be examining in the dissertation. The issue
is the extent to which the ‘ASEAN Way’ has played in promoting East Asian
regionalism over the past two decades. Some scholars have argued that the ‘ASEAN
Way’ is the most important factor to forge greater Northeast Asian regionalism, and
hence ultimately an East Asian security community. For example, writing in 1997,
Acharya noted that Southeast Asian leaders and intellectuals saw the ASEAN Way
“as the organizing principle of multilateralism at the wider Asia-Pacific regional
level.”
37

36 Rizal Sukma, “The Future of ASEAN: Towards a Security Community,” Paper
presented at a seminar on “ASEAN Cooperation: Challenges and Prospects in the
Current International Situation,” Permanent Mission of the Republic of Indonesia to
the United Nations, New York, 3 June 2003. Available at <http:
//www.indonesiamission-ny.org/issuebaru/mission/asean/photogallery.htm>.
But critics of East Asian regionalism, like David Martin Jones, Michael

37 David Capie and Paul Evans, The Asia-Pacific Security Lexicon, Singapore: ISEAS
2007. Amitav Acharya, “Ideas, Identity, and Institution-Building: From the ‘ASEAN
way’ to the ‘Asia-Pacific way’, Pacific Review 10 (3) 1997: 319-46. Alice D. Ba,
(Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association

21
Smith, Nicholas Khoo, Michael Leifer, Donald Emmerson, have in effect argued that
the ASEAN Way is all a myth, that ASEAN is an ‘imitation community’ and a
delusion.
38
They have argued that the ASEAN states are still beset with serious intra-

regional conflicts, and have failed to achieve regional identity and solidarity as shown
by their failure to respond quickly and adequately to regional threats like the Asian
Financial Crisis of 1997-98, the regional haze problem since 1998, Myanmar’s gross
violations of human rights, and the lack of a unified ASEAN strategy on the South
China Sea dispute. In contrast, ‘ASEANists’ (like Amitav Acharya, Khong Yuen
Foong, Alice Ba, and Rodolfo Severino) have argued that the norms of the ASEAN
Way has resulted in ASEAN becoming a ‘nascent’ security community, or is already
one.
39

This question will be examined in Chapters Three and Four.

of Southeast Asian Nations, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009, p.
4.

38 ‘ASEAN-sceptics’ would include the following: David Martin Jones and Michael
L.R. Smith, “ASEAN’s imitation community,” Orbis 46 (1) Winter 2002: 93-109.
Nicholas Khoo, “Deconstructing the ASEAN security community: A review essay,”
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 4(1) 2004: 35-46. Michael Leifer, op cit.
Donald K. Emmerson, “Southeast Asia: What’s in a name?” Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies, 15 (1) March 1984: 1-24. Sheldon Simon, “Realism and
Neoliberalism: international relations theory and Southeast Asian security,” Pacific
Review, 8 (1) 1995: 5-24. Rodolfo Severino, Southeast Asia in search of an ASEAN
community: Insights from the former ASEAN Secretary-General, Singapore: ISEAS,
2006.

39 Constructivist scholars include: Amitav Acharya op cit. Nicholas Busse, “Constructivism and
Southeast Asian Security”, Pacific Review, 12 (1) 1999: 39-60. Jurgen Haacke, “ASEAN’s
Diplomatic and Security Culture: A Constructivist Assessment”, International Relations of the
Asia-Pacific, 3 (1) 2003: 57-87. Khong Yuen Foong, “Making bricks without straw in the

Asia Pacific?” Pacific Review 10 (2) 1997: 289-300. Ralf Emmers, “The Influence of the
Balance of Power Factor within the ASEAN Regional Forum,” Contemporary Southeast Asia
23 (2) August 2001: 275-291. Alastair Iain Johnston, “The myth of the ASEAN Way?
Explaining the evolution of the ASEAN Regional Forum,” in Helga Haftendorn, Robert
Keohane and Celeste Wallander eds. Imperfect Unions: Security Institutions Over Time and
Space, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Mely Caballero-Anthony, Regional
Security in Southeast Asia: Beyond the ASEAN Way. Singapore: ISEAS, 2005.


22
Chapters Three and Four of this study are linked in a number of ways. It is
meaningless to talk about peace and security in Southeast Asia without analysing the
impact that Northeast Asia has on it. Historically, the Northeast Asian states of China
and Japan have cast a long shadow over the fate of Southeast Asia. Long before the
arrival of European powers, scholars have noted the influence of Imperial China’s
‘tributary system’ on Southeast Asia.
40
Today, some scholars believe that Beijing is
trying to re-establish a Sino-centric regional order.
41

During the Cold War, especially
in the late-1950s and 1960s, Maoist China actively supported revolutionary
communism in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The armed
interventions by the US, China, and the Soviet Union in the Vietnam War were a
primary reason for the formation of ASEAN in August 1967. In the early-1990s,
Beijing’s assertiveness over its territorial claims in the South China Sea led to serious
security concerns among the ASEAN states. This led to ASEAN’s initiative to
establish the ARF in 1994, which seeks the peaceful engagement of the Great Powers,
especially the US and China. The security and well-being of the Southeast Asian

states are deeply affected by their more powerful neighbours in Northeast Asia,
especially China and Japan. A study of the major driving forces behind peace,
security, and regionalism in Southeast Asia makes sense only in the larger context of
the evolving security order in Northeast Asia and East Asia.


40
JK Fairbank, “Tributary Trade and China’s Relations with the West”, The Far Eastern
Quarterly 1 (1) February 1942: 129-149. Heita Kawakatsu and John Latham eds. Japanese
Industrialization and the Asian Economy. London: Routledge, 1994. Giovanni Andornino,
“The nature and linkages of China’s tributary system under the Ming and Qing dynasties”.
Working Papers of the Global Economic History Network (GEHN), 21/06, 2006. Department
of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science. (See

41
Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal, “Rethinking East Asian Security”, Survival 36 (2) 1994: 3-21.

23
Research Questions
My aim is to analyse the following research questions: First, what have been the
major material or ideational driving forces shaping the evolution of regionalism in
ASEAN and Northeast Asia? How are these driving forces similar or different from
those of Western Europe? Can a regional grouping of small and medium-sized states,
unlike the case of France and Germany in the European case, also be effective and
successful in protecting their individual national interests and sovereignty without
ceding power and authority to supra-national institutions? Are these driving forces
unique in the ASEAN case? The point here is that each ASEAN member-state is
actively seeking to enhance its own national economic-political-security interests
within the broader ASEAN regional framework. There is no necessary contradiction
here between the national and regional levels of foreign policy formulation and

policymaking. The ASEAN states are seeking to advance their own national interest
goals by using their regional organization, ASEAN, as their own foreign policy tool.
The underlying basis to forging ASEAN ‘regional resilience’ is the ‘national
resilience’ of each ASEAN state itself, which includes the interests of the ruling elites
of the ASEAN states.
I argue that both material and ideational factors are important driving forces
behind the development and trends in ASEAN and East Asian regionalism. They are
not mutually exclusive. Material and ideational factors interact in very complex and
as yet not fully understood ways that ultimately lead to national foreign policy
responses and state behaviour. In my view, a theoretical framework to analyse the
forging of an East Asian security community must include considerations of states’
perceptions of the prevailing and likely changes to the global balance of power,
worldwide ideological-political struggles for power between the Great Powers,

24
regional challenges and perceptions of security threats, the challenges of nation-
building and ethnic-and religious anti-government rebellions. The founding visions
and political declaratory goals of the ASEAN governments are also important
considerations to examine in the quest to explain the pattern of East Asian
regionalism.
In the West European case, the strong support of an external Great Power, i.e.
the US, for a united Europe, appears to be necessary for the forging of a regional
security community. The driving force behind the strong US support for European
regional integration was the protection of US national interests against the Soviet
Threat. The context was the bipolar Cold War rivalry between the democratic US and
the communist Soviet Union. Both the US and Western Europe shared the same
values of free and open societies based on democratic capitalism. US hegemony
meant that Washington would be able to cap any threat of revived German militarism,
and thereby assure other European states, especially France. In contrast, the US
pursued a divide-and-rule, hub-and-spokes alliance strategy from 1945 till the late-

1980s in East Asia to contain communism, thereby preventing the spread and
emergence of any pan-Asian communist bloc that might threaten US primacy and
hegemony in the region.
Second, is ASEAN a genuine regional security community, as claimed by
some constructivist scholars? I will attempt to answer this question by a qualitative
study of the two core criteria of a security community: existence of a ‘we-feeling’ and
a ‘non-war’ community. A related debate here has to do with the linkage between
democracy and the rise of a security community. Sorpong Peou has made several
interesting comments as to the reasons why democratic regimes are more likely to
want and be able to establish durable security communities:

25
that various studies show that ‘alliances between democracies …
appear to be more durable’ …, while others demonstrate that
international security regimes with non-liberal members are less
robust than those with liberal democratic members. Democracies
… tend to resolve their disputes in a manner short of war. Two of
the most important mechanisms for doing this are peaceful dispute
settlement and legal equality. Among themselves, liberal states that
adopt the norm of self-restraint and non-violence tend to favour
negotiation and compromise. They are highly institutionalised and
thus tend to rely on legal means as the way to resolve conflict.
42


Proponents of the democratic peace thesis, like Sorpong Peou, have pointed out that
the liberal norms of self-restraint and non-violence may prove important in the
process of security community-building among democracies, but norms relatively
more capable of promoting mutual trust among democratic states are the liberal values
of political and racial equality (major elements of modern liberalism). Democratic

state leaders who treat others states, including democracies, as politically or racially
inferior do not have a clean record of self-restraint and non-violence.
43

42 Sorpong Peou, “Security community-building in the Asia-Pacific”, in Tow ed. 2009
op cit., p. 150.
Peou argued
that because of their shared liberal norms and values, democracies — whether
powerful or weak — may cooperate with one another more effectively than
autocracies. A powerful democracy tends to enjoy more legitimacy with other
democracies than a powerful autocracy with weaker autocracies. This is because
political leaders within any democracy tend to enjoy political legitimacy from their
populations. Powerful democracies may find it easier to deal with other democratic
states than with non-democratic ones and are thus more willing and able to provide

43 Peou 2009, ibid., pp. 150-51.