Evelyn Goh

The ASEAN Regional Forum in United States East Asian strategy

This paper analyses the development of the US approach to the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), from 1991 onwards. It examines theories of why a superpower would participate in a multilateral security institution, and investigates the motivations for the attitudes and extent of participation of the George H. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations towards the ARF. It argues that, in the post-Cold War period and in the face of a rising China, US East Asia strategy has been geared towards retaining the American preponderance of power. Thus, the US has pursued a strategy of containment and deterrence centred upon the regional bilateral alliance structure. Multilateral institutions have been treated as a supplementary means of supporting the secondary strategy of engaging with China. However, the ARF is not viewed as one of the important institutions through which to fulfil this supplementary aim. Because it cannot deal with the key regional security issues, the ARF is seen as a low-stakes arena by Washington. But the paper concludes that US participation in the ARF may nevertheless be crucial in boosting the legitimacy of American security interests in the region, thus helping to safeguard US preponderance.

China’s Power in the Regional Context (II): Southeast Asia

China’s shadow has always loomed large over Southeast Asia. In its more recent history, the People’s Republic of China exported communist ideology and supported insurgencies in postcolonial Southeast Asian states and intervened militarily in Indochina. From the late 1980s, China’s dramatic economic opening and growth rendered it a primary strategic worry as well as opportunity for Southeast Asian states. China’s power in Southeast Asia is most evident in the realms of economic interdependence and rival maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS). But Southeast Asian states have been at the forefront of managing China’s rise in East Asia, and their 20-year track record suggests that while China’s growing power advantage is indubitable, its impacts on Southeast Asia’s strategic choices and regional architecture are not straightforward.

ASEAN-Led Multilateralism and Regional Order: The Great Power Bargain Deficit

Do smaller ASEAN states “punch above their weight” in regional affairs or is their multilateralism “cheap talk” and deluded ambition? An evaluation of the extent to which ASEAN-led multilateralism contributes to regional order finds less effectiveness in mediating conflicts of interest than expected. It has been effective in inclusiveness, legitimizing great power roles, and institutionalizing small state voices. Yet, its mode of multilateralism has grown less effective as regional strategic challenges have evolved. It has suffered from restricted scope and oversight domain, nondemanding and minimalist norms, and great powers in collusion with smaller states opting for “soft” balancing more than regional “rules of the game.” Overlapping institutions are helpful in muting security dilemmas, but they fail to regulate great power relations through institutionalized understandings about rules of conduct and conflict management.

Conceptualizing the Economic-Security-Identity Nexus in East Asia’s Regional Order

This chapter explains the notion of “regional order,” outlining its three dimensions of structure, norm-governed interaction, and quality. It then explores four key ways in which the economic-security-identity nexus works: two “theories,” or idealized models, of this nexus that push in opposite directions—the “virtuous cycle” and the “vicious circle”—and two “practices,” or means by which policymakers and scholars have tended to deal with the economic-security-identity nexus—the former practically by pursing “parallel realities” and the latter analytically using a “balance of effect” framework. Illustrated with examples from Northeast and Southeast Asia, this analysis elucidates the main competing ways in which regional order can be shaped by complex interactions among economics, security, and identity. It also suggests the most significant avenues for further research.

Hierarchy and Great Power Cooperation in the East Asian Security Order

Adopting this volume’s aim of studying interstate cooperation through the lens of governance, this chapter examines the relationship between collective action problems and the creation of authority in regional security. Post-Cold War East Asia amply illustrates the complex process of power transition underway as US unipolarity strains under the twin pressures of American unilateralism and rising powers. This chapter argues that the global ‘power shift’ finds most significant manifestation not in outbreaks of war, but rather in more subtle transitions of authority, as multiple actors try to sustain or challenge established authority, and as authority is diluted, diffused and differentiated. The impacts of such transitions of authority on collective action are complex, but this chapter takes a first cut at explaining how the ongoing transition impacts pathways to security cooperation in East Asia.

Power, Interest, and Identity: Reviving the Sinocentric Hierarchy in East Asia

Though the rise of China has spurred a marked increase in publications on East Asian politics and international relations (IR), many scholars have continued to wrestle with the challenge of how to develop studies that are empirically accurate and interesting as well as conceptually rigorous. Broadly three fault-lines divide the field of East Asian IR: the first separates country-specific studies and studies of subregions or the region as a whole, the second separates analyses of foreign policy and studies that develop generalizable theories, and the third separates studies that test general Western theories in an Asian context and the smaller number of studies that attempt to develop “indigenous” theories.1 China Rising is David Kang’s valiant attempt to traverse all three divides. Combining impressive coverage of wide-ranging empirical material—history, culture, policymaking motivations, processes, and interactions—with conceptual innovation, Kang has made an important contribution to the growing enterprise of “eclectic” theorizing in international relations.2 China Rising investigates the reactions of China’s neighbors in East Asia to Beijing’s rising power and influence. Kang’s answer to the puzzle posed by Western IR theories of why East Asian states are not balancing against China is that these states do not fear China. Kang advances a twofold explanation for this lack of fear. The first explanation is derived both from his demonstration that East Asia is a historically hierarchical system centered on China and from the intuitively compelling claim that “there is a logic of hierarchy that can lead, and has led, to a stable, relatively peaceful hierarchical international system under (early) modern conditions” in 1300–1900 (p. 49). The second explanation is that, rather than focusing on China’s growing power per se,