Anja Jetschke

Institutionalizing ASEAN: celebrating Europe through network governance

This article provides a new piece for two of the puzzles of institutionalized cooperation in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). First, with regard to the organizations four decades of existence, there has always been a marked gap between ASEANs rhetorical goals of cooperation and its actual achievements. What explains these systematic failures of implementation? Second, from the outset, ASEAN was criticized for its light institutionalization, which failed to deliver the substantial cooperation goals. Despite selected institutional reforms, ASEANs autonomy has not increased remarkably and it has not made any major institutional innovations. Why does ASEAN design institutions it does not use? Why does this transformation gap occur? The author suggests a sociological institutional explanation and argues that major impulses for cooperation have come from outside Southeast Asia, most importantly from Europe. By mimicking the European integration process, ASEAN member states have effectively created an isomorphic organization. The Associations institutional development reflects a concern for international legitimacy and less an objective functional demand arising from the specific interactions of member states. This copying process has led to network governance within the organization.

DOES REGIONALISM DIFFUSE? A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

In the post-World War Two era, regional organizations have proliferated. The accompanying literature focuses on analysing the drivers and effects of regionalism, but has, to date, largely neglected a series of puzzling macro-phenomena: the marked spatial and temporal clustering of regional organizations, as well as similarities in their institutional design. This contribution argues that the existing approaches analyse regional organizations primarily as independent phenomena, whose genesis and design are seen as being determined either by dynamics internal to the region itself or by external forces such as powerful hegemons and globalizing pressures. Against this background, this research note argues for the broadening of existing analytical perspectives and sketches a diffusion-oriented research agenda that instead conceives of regional organizations as being interdependent.

Decoupling rhetoric and practice: the cultural limits of ASEAN cooperation

Abstract Why have ASEAN member states declared and why do they continue to declare their intention to enhance cooperation and devise projects when implementation lags behind their rhetoric? Why do they rhetorically commit themselves to cooperation, when they continue to stick to self-interested policies to the detriment of ASEANs collective interest? And given these diverging practices, how likely is it that the objective of a more legalized and binding cooperation associated with the recently ratified ASEAN Charter is being implemented? This article draws attention to ASEANs hybrid or dual character of international cooperation, consisting of the emulation of the European integration project and the persistence of deeper cultural strata of Southeast Asias cooperation project that determine the limits of cooperation: Southeast Asias social structure and political culture that have not produced those mechanisms that might facilitate international cooperation. If our explanation is correct that cooperation within ASEAN comes about as a simultaneous process of emulation and established cultural practices, we expect change only under specified conditions. Based on our argument and the theoretical literature on normative change, we identify and discuss in greater detail three potential outcomes of change: inertia, localization and transformation. The three modes make different predictions concerning change within ASEAN. Based on an analysis of the two major shocks with which ASEAN has had to contend in the last two decades, namely the Cold War in Asia and the Asian financial crisis, we argue that ASEANs dominant response to major ideational challenges has been combinations of localization and inertia and has not been followed by a fundamental change of practice

Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines

1. Human Rights and State Security in International Relations 2. International Norms and Their Contestation in Human Rights Dialogues 3. Indonesias New Order 1965-1978: Transnational Advocacy and State Security under Military-Led Modernization 4. The Philippine New Society 1972-1986: Transnational Advocacy and Human Rights Change 5. Indonesias New Order 1986-1998: Transnational Advocacy and Human Rights Change 6. Subcontracted Violence in the Philippines 1986-1992: Excusing Violations 7. Excuses and Paramilitary Violence in East Timor and Indonesia 1999-2005 8. The Philippines 1999-2008: Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights Violations 9. Contested Norms and Human Rights Change Notes Abbreviations References

Vergleichende Regionalismusforschung und Diffusion: Eine neue Forschungsagenda

The number of regional organizations and regional trade agreements has risen sharply since the 1990s. In its wake, comparative research on regionalism has seen a re- vival. An important strand of this literature asks about the drivers of these developments, but has to date largely neglected a puzzling phenomenon: the similarities between regional organizations in their institutional design and the chosen methods of integration. Existing perspectives analyze different cases of regionalism primarily as phenomena that develop independently of each other, and whose genesis and design are determined either endog- enously by domestic regional dynamics or exogenously by powerful hegemons. Against this background, this article argues for an extension of existing analytical perspectives and sketches a diffusion-oriented research agenda that conceives of regional organizations as interdependent phenomena.

Regional Integration Support by the EU in Asia: Aims and Prospects

This chapter examines the aims and scope of the EU’s regional integration support (RIS) and the achievements it has had in Southeast Asia. ASEAN invited the EU to support its aim to achieve ASEAN economic integration in September 2003. In parallel to this programme, ASEAN has undergone considerable transformation. It has revamped its institutional structure and transformed in ways that invite comparisons to the EU. Naturally, the fact that the EU has a policy of RIS, and that ASEAN member states express their commitment to create an economic community along the lines of the European Economic Community (EEC) raises the question as to whether the EU acts as a ‘driver’ of regional integration in Southeast Asia. This chapter argues that not the EU rather than economic competition from China is the real driver behind changes along the lines of the EU.

Regionalisierung im politikwissenschaftlichen Vergleich

Wir befinden uns in einem Zeitalter der Regionalisierung der internationalen Beziehungen, wie aber werden Regionalismus und Regionalisierung in vergleichender Perspektive untersucht? In Anbetracht der Vielfalt an Konzepten und Zugangen zu diesem wiederbelebten Forschungsfeld definiert dieser Beitrag zunachst zentrale Konzepte (Regionalisierung, Regionalismus und regionale Integration) und grenzt sie voneinander ab. Er stellt dann zwei unterschiedliche Zugange zu komparativem Regionalismus dar. Der starker disziplinar politikwissenschaftliche Zugang ist durch die Internationalen Beziehungen gepragt und untersucht das Phanomen Regionalismus als den eines Aufbaus unabhangiger Entscheidungsstrukturen auf regionaler Ebene. Ihm wird ein starker an den Area Studies ausgerichteter, qualitativer Zugang gegenuber gestellt und dessen Vergleichsmethodik erlautert.

The Diffusion of Institutional Design Among Regional Organizations

Why are there clones of the European Union (EU) in Africa and the Caribbean, i.e. regional organizations that are very similar to the institutional design of the EU? Why do regional organizations (RO) in general develop similar goals such as common markets or mechanisms of intervention within and across regions? Are such similarities the outcome of random co-evolution, functional adaptation, or are they the outcome of outside coercion? Questioning the standard explanations for the design of international institutions, the Comparative Regional Organizations Project (CROP) investigates the extent to which institutional designs are determined by processes of diffusion between regional organizations. This is motivated by two observations: First, a number of regional organizations are quite similar in their institutional design. Second, the emergence of regional organizations occurs in waves. Over the last five decades, states have decided at specific points in time to either establish regional organizations or to amend them. Both observations indicate that regional organizations and their member states take their decisions in dependence on the decisions of other regional organizations the similarity might be a consequence of diffusion. The project has begun to systematically survey the characteristics and content of the founding and/or amending documents of more than 100 regional organizations, and developed an index of similarity between texts, and therefore institutions. The paper presents CROPs methodological approach and first substantive insights, such as a quantitative evaluation of the argument that some regional organizations develop a model character for other regional organizations.

Why Create a Regional Human Rights Regime? The ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission for Human Rights

On 18 November 2012, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) took the historical step of issuing an ASEAN Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration is only the last of a number of steps expressing ASEAN’s commitment to human rights. This commitment first became visible in the ASEAN Charter of 2007 and promised that the regional grouping would establish its own human rights mechanism. The mechanism was eventually set up in October 2009 as the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). The development towards greater commitment has surprised many observers, as ASEAN and individual members were quite active in the so-called Asian values debate in the early 1990s, in which they promoted a relativist position on human rights, emphasizing economic development to the detriment of civil and political rights (Emmerson 1995; Kausikan 1994). Moreover, ASEAN’s earlier constitutional documents never mentioned human rights or democracy. The new policy also appears to weaken the support for constructivist explanations of ASEAN as a regional organization, which have emphasized deeply embedded norms of non-interference, state sovereignty, and non-intervention into domestic affairs (Narine 2002, 2012). The policy does not fit with the organization’s earlier record on human rights and its principled stance towards non-interference in domestic affairs.