Howard Loewen

Towards a Dynamic Model of the Interplay Between International Institutions

International institutions increasingly affect each others development, maintenance and effectiveness. Research so far has merely focused on the issue of effectiveness and broader consequences. The paper argues firstly that theoretical progress could be promoted by integrating variables explaining the formation and maintenance of international institutions into a dynamic model of institutional interplay. Secondly, research ought to be extended to institutions governing issue areas like trade, finance, and security as well as their respective interactions. Thirdly, East Asia is a highly interesting region regarding regime interaction, since regional cooperation is slowly but steadily evolving in different issue areas as a reaction to institutional operations on the global level of governance.

Democracy and Human Rights in the European-Asian Dialogue: A Clash of Cooperation Cultures?

Whereas the European Union (EU) favors a formal, binding, output-oriented, and to some extent supranational approach to cooperation, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is based on informal, non-binding, process-oriented intergovernmental forms of cooperation. This article addresses the question of whether these differences between European and Asian cooperation norms or cultures can account for interregional cooperation problems in the areas of democracy and human rights within the institutional context of EU-ASEAN and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM). The author argues that a clash of cooperation cultures basically occurs in both forms of interregional collaboration between Asia and Europe, with slight differences due to the institutional context: while disagreements over the question of democracy and human rights between the EU and ASEAN have led to a temporary and then a complete standstill in cooperation, the flexible institutional mechanisms of ASEM seem, at first glance, to mitigate the disruptive effects of such dialogues. Yet informality does not remove the issues from the agenda, as the recurrent disputes over Myanmars participation and the nonintervention norm favored by the Asian side of ASEM clearly indicate. Antagonistic cooperation cultures thus play a significant role in explaining the obstructive nature of the interregional human rights and democracy dialogue between Asia and Europe.