Foreign Policies and Diplomacies in Asia: Changes in Practice, Concepts, and Thinking in a Rising Region 9789048519101

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Still Searching for a Common Frequency
3. East Asian Governance
4. International Politics in Northeast Asia
5. ASEAN and Its People
6. Non-official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia
7. China and India as Regional Powers
8. Reinventing Japan in the Asian Century
9. The China and Central Asia Diplomatic Waltz
Bibliography

Citation preview

Foreign Policies and Diplomacies in Asia

Publications The International Institute for Asian Studies is a research and exchange platform based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote (inter)national cooperation. IIAS focuses on the humanities and social sciences and on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia Scholars. Its main research interest are reflected in the three book series published with Amsterdam University Press: Global Asia, Asian Heritages and Asian Cities. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing together various parties in Asia and other parts of the world. The Institute works as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, the construction and support of international networks and cooperative projects, and the organisation of seminars and conferences. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Europe and Asia. IIAS Publications Officer: Paul van der Velde IIAS Assistant Publications Officer: Mary Lynn van Dijk

Global Asia Asia has a long history of transnational linkage with other parts of the world. Yet the contribution of Asian knowledge, values, and practices in the making of the modern world has largely been overlooked until recent years. The rise of Asia is often viewed as a challenge to the existing world order. Such a bifurcated view overlooks the fact that the global order has been shaped by Asian experiences as much as the global formation has shaped Asia. The Global Asia Series takes this understanding as the point of departure. It addresses contemporary issues related to transnational interactions within the Asian region, as well as Asia’s projection into the world through the movement of goods, people, ideas, knowledge, ideologies, and so forth. The series aims to publish timely and well-researched books that will have the cumulative effect of developing new perspectives and theories about global Asia. Series Editor: Tak-Wing Ngo, Professor of Political Science, University of Macau, China Editorial Board: Kevin Hewison, Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Professor of Politics and International Studies, Murdoch University, Australia / Hagen Koo, Professor of Sociology, University of Hawaii, USA / Loraine Kennedy, Directrice de recherché, Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France / Guobin Yang, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Foreign Policies and Diplomacies in Asia Changes in Practice, Concepts, and Thinking in a Rising Region

Edited by Matthias Maass

Amsterdam University Press

Publications

Global Asia 1

Cover illustration: Panmunjom village, Korea © Matthias Maass Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 540 1 e-isbn 978 90 4851 910 1 (pdf) e-isbn 978 90 4851 911 8 (ePub) nur 754 © Matthias Maass / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2014 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book.

Für Max



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 11 1 Introduction 13 Contextualizing and Problematizing the ‘Rise of Asia’ Matthias Maass

An Asia-Pacific Century? Rising Asia Three Meta-debates Hegemonic Rise International Political Economy Democratization The Impact on Regional and Global Diplomatic Conduct An Asian Security Architecture Foreign Policies in a Rising Region 2 Still Searching for a Common Frequency

Silences, Cultural Gaps and Normative Deficits in Asia-Pacific Diplomacies Alan Chong

Analysing Asia-Pacific Security Regionalism: Capturing Silences and Doubletalk The Nub of Track 2 Diplomacies: Noble Intentions and the Haze of Sifting through Disagreements CSCAP General Conference & Workshop on Responsibility to Protect, November 2009 Positioning for the Responsibility to Protect Main Sessions on ‘Regional Security Architecture’ and ‘Naval Build-up in the Asia-Pacific’ Analysis of the CSCAP Case Southeast Asia Regional Security Forum (SEARSF), June 2010 SEARSF 2010 Panel 1 – Northeast Asia in the Context of Southeast Asian Security SEARSF 2010 Panel 3 – Significance of ASEAN to Regional Cooperation Analysis of SEARSF Conclusion: Why Is There No Common Diplomatic Frequency across the Asia-Pacific?

13 16 18 18 20 21 22 22 24 29

32 34 37 37 39 42 45 45 48 50 52

3 East Asian Governance

Human Security, Development, and Exceptionalism Brendan Howe

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Introduction 53 Human Security, Development and Governance 55 55 Human Security Collective Goods 59 Asian Values and Governance Exceptionalism 62 International Pressures 64 Internal Constituencies 67 Conclusion 69 4 International Politics in Northeast Asia A Case for Stability Artyom Lukin

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Introduction 73 Is Northeast Asia Headed for Demographic Peace? 75 The Emerging Institutional Architecture in Northeast Asia: A Game on Two Chessboards? 80 Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Stability in Northeast Asia 84 Conclusion: Scenarios for Northeast Asia 89 The Continuation of US Residual Hegemony 90 China’s Hegemony 91 The Balance of Power 91 5 ASEAN and Its People

Regional Internationalism and the Politics of Exclusion Math Noortmann

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Introduction 93 Elites, People and Theories of Regional Integration 94 The European Experience: Post-international Regionalism, or Bringing the People In 94 The ASEAN Model: Regional Internationalism, or Bringing the National Elites Back In 96 Bringing the People Back In? 97 Bangkok + 40: What Is in It for the Southeast Asian People? 99 The People in the ASEAN Charter 99 ASEAN’s Business Elites 103 ASEAN’s Non-governmental Elites 104 Conclusion 107

6 Non-official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia Civil Society or ‘Civil Service’?* See Seng Tan

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The Many Faces of Modern Diplomacy 110 Non-official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia 113 115 Civil Society Face of Non-official Diplomacy 119 ‘Civil Service’ Face of Non-official Diplomacy Conclusion 122 7 China and India as Regional Powers

Policies of Two Aspiring States Intersecting in Burma Ming Hwa Ting

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Prospect Theory as Analytical Framework 123 A Case Study: Burma 126 China-Burma Relations 129 India-Burma Relations 132 The Chinese and Indian Presence in Burma: Waxing and Waning 137 Conclusion 139 8 Reinventing Japan in the Asian Century Towards a New Grand Strategy? Tom Wilkins

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Introduction: Japan in a Time of Troubles? 141 Explaining Japanese Foreign Policy and Diplomacy 142 The Foundations of Japanese Diplomacy 145 External Drivers 145 Internal Drivers 150 Japan’s Grand Strategy 155 Conclusions 159 9 The China and Central Asia Diplomatic Waltz

An Analysis of China’s Methods in Interacting with Central Asian States Askhat Safiullin

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Introduction 161 Taking a Fresh Look: Introducing the Concept of Security Identity 163 Kazakhstan 172 Tajikistan 174

Uzbekistan 176 Kyrgyzstan 177 The ‘Shanghai Spirit’: China’s Delicate Steps in Central Asia 179 Conclusion 182 Bibliography 185

Acknowledgments The gestation of this volume goes back to a set of stimulating papers presented at the 2009 International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS), co-hosted by Daejeon Metropolitan City and Chungnam National University in South Korea. Dr Alan Chong was instrumental in sharpening the analytical focus of the project, and Paul van der Velde of ICAS encouraged the submission of a formal book proposal. With the help of good friends and competent colleagues the editor was able to add authors to round out the book properly. Many thanks must go to the people involved at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, at the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS), especially Paul van der Velde, Martina van den Haak, and Mary Lynn van Dijk, the editorial teams at ICAS and at Amsterdam University Press (and in particular, Saskia Gieling, Ed Hatton, Atie Vogelenzang de Jong, and Jaap Wagenaar), the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, and the excellent Research Assistants here at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies (Kim Heeya, Wee YoungZu, and So Hyun Jeon). It was a pleasure to cooperate with this truly global team on this project. Without these individuals’ help, this book would not exist.

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Introduction Contextualizing and Problematizing the ‘Rise of Asia’ Matthias Maass

The wider Eastern Asian region has been one of the economically most vibrant and successful geographic areas of the world recently, but at the same time still faces major political challenges. The objective here is to probe and explore how the changing regional dynamics are reshaping the political landscape in a rising Asia.

An Asia-Pacific Century? The observation of a rising Asia and of rapidly growing economic powerhouses in the region has become a truism. Nonetheless, the impressive economic development stories in the region provide the backbone for the growing political strength and assertiveness of Asian countries. Asia’s economic prowess is rapidly being transferred onto the diplomatic stage. It is at this interface of rising Asia and Asian foreign policy dynamics that this collection of essays makes its contribution. By examining emerging regional political dynamics, the authors add diplomatic and foreign policy facets to the broad discourse on the implications of the rise of Asia. In other words, the objective here is to further our understanding of changing international dynamics, adjustments in foreign policy strategies and the evolution of diplomacy in the context of the economically and politically dynamic region of Asia. The end of the Cold War did not produce a ‘New World Order’ (Bush 1990) akin to the post-war settlements in 1945, 1919, or 1815. Even the ‘unipolar moment’ (Krauthammer 1991) lasted only briefly. And in 2008, the liberal economic ‘Washington Consensus’ was crippled by the financial meltdown and the ensuing global economic crises. The recent rise of Asia, however, is persisting, and with it comes the argument that this will challenge postCold War international politics at all levels of analysis. It is in particular the rise of China – economically, politically, militarily and, increasingly, culturally – that has caused politicians to reconsider their strategies and scholars to question their assumptions. Given China’s recent economic development, coupled with its prominence and importance in Asia, the attention it has been receiving is hardly

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surprising. However, this edited volume offers a wider angle, one that looks at Asia, not just China. The purpose is threefold: First, it would simply be misleading to suggest that what is happening in Asia is merely the rapid growth of only one national economy. Second, it is suggested that only a wider regional perspective can properly account for the complexities at play. For example, the impressive economic performance of China was in fact preceded by that of the so-called ‘tiger economies’, which had been growing under quite different types of domestic government. Third, a wider, Asian viewpoint can incorporate the influences, the impact and the relevance that foreign policy dynamics have in and outside the Asian region. However, while the geographic perspective is thus broadened, the thematic focus will be tightened on foreign policy. Specifically, the guiding question for the essays below is ‘What are the implications on foreign policies and diplomacies generated by and in this dynamic region?’ To be sure, since China is emerging as the dominant actor in Asia, it will have a major impact on the emerging regional order, its procedures, institutions and foreign policies. It is important to be cognizant of the fact that in the past, China had been at the core of an international system that it had shaped and dominated. It was in the context of European imperialism in the 19th century that China’s regional hegemony fell apart and Beijing was forced to accept the status of a minor state in the Westphalian state system. As Barry Buzan put it, China’s encounter with the West destroyed the Sino-centric international society and required China for the first time in its history to come to terms with an alien and externally imposed international order. China was pushed from being an empire to being a state, and from constituting the core to being part of the periphery. (Buzan 2010: 9)

China fell from the top of a regional system to the status of a subject of Western colonial aspirations and imperial competition. Soon, China became part of the periphery of the (Wallersteinian) world system (Wallerstein 1974), before further colonization and being turned into a puppet state. Even after it regained independence in the 20th century, it took China decades before it would re-engage fully with the modern international political environment. When it did, China faced a system in which it had no historical precedent of its own. The late 20th century’s multipolar state system was completely new territory for Beijing (Kissinger 1995: 25). And finally, China’s political leadership had to consider its domestic politics. In fact, ‘[n]ot until the 1980s were China’s domestic affairs settled enough to allow it to engage

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politically with the international society on a non-revolutionary basis’ (Buzan 2010: 12). However, when China entered the international system of states, it accepted the terms and conditions and integrated itself into the international system without any structural revolutionary ambitions. The modernizing People’s Republic of China (PRC) became a sovereign state in the Westphalian sense. In fact, China adopted a rather conservative perspective of sovereign statehood – and has been resisting the imposition of ‘Western’ standards on issues regarding domestic human rights and good governance. Actually, in broad strokes, China’s experience with ‘Western’ colonialism is symptomatic for the Asian region as a whole (with the notable exception of Japan). After regaining their legal independence through self-determination and colonial wars, former Asian colonies adopted the model of a ‘conservative’ Westphalian state and applied the concept of sovereignty in a rigorous fashion. In many societies in Asia, the perceived imposition of ‘Western’ political norms and values can be seen as new forms of colonialism. With its new-found confidence in the strength of a rising Asia, there is little willingness to accept modern limitations on state sovereignty that was originated in the ‘West’. The insistence on a particular ‘ASEAN Way’ is just one example. In fact, given the region’s shared regional peculiarities in political, historical and cultural terms, it is possible to speak of ‘East Asian regional international society’ as follows: With many of its neighbours China shares several important values: a rather traditional Westphalian view of sovereignty and nonintervention, a priority to regime security, a desire to preserve distinctive cultural values, and a commitment to joint development through trade and investment. More broadly, there is a view that East Asia not just takes a stronger view of sovereignty and non-intervention than the global level, but that much of it shares a Confucian culture, and is more inclined to hierarchy and bandwagoning than to balance of power. All this suggests that a distinctive East Asian regional international society is already partly in existence. (Buzan 2010: 14)

Given the ongoing growth of the region in broad economic and political terms, the characteristics of this emerging ‘regional international society’ need to be properly understood. An East Asia sub-system is emerging, and its impact on the wider Asian region and on world politics will probably be substantive. The critique by regional experts that East Asia still needs

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to develop its ‘habits of constructive global involvement’ (Abramowitz & Bosworth 2006: 148) is indicative of the impact Asian foreign policies already have on regional and global politics. The essays in this volume are geared towards this line of investigation. For the purpose of this project, ‘Asia’ is understood to include the geographic regions of Southeast and Northeast Asia, plus the bordering zones of South and Central Asia. In Huntington’s terminology it includes the Sinic, Hindu, Buddhist and Japanese ‘civilizations’, plus the Orthodox Philippines, Islamic Malaysia, Indonesia and parts of Central Asia (Huntington 1993; 1996). To be sure, the book neither endorses nor rejects Huntington’s argument. Its geographic component is used here simply by way of illustration. However, it is supposed that this larger region, despite a significant amount of heterogeneity, can be usefully grouped together here under the label ‘Asia’.

Rising Asia The challenges and changes stemming from the ‘rise of Asia’ have been moving up the political and academic agendas consistently, and today, there is no end in sight. If anything, more changes are appearing on the horizon. The transformation of the international political and economic landscape will necessitate new thinking on regional Asia and worldwide international relations. What is more, the impact of these changes have been felt far beyond Asia, and given that there remains an imbalance between the region’s overall ‘economic weight’ and its ‘international political influence’ (Abramowitz & Bosworth 2006: 147), the Asian imprint on global affairs is likely to grow further. Today, it appears safe to say that Asia is already far into the process of emerging as a principal center of global power (Haas 2009: vii). At the same time, however, ‘[t]he Asian subsystem of the global order is experiencing substantial change’ (Shambaugh 2006: 153; Shambaugh 2005). China’s rise has been well documented, although disagreements remain over its future projection (Buzan 2010; Yue 2008). At the same time, much disagreement persists with regard to Beijing’s future strategy. China has been claiming to pursue the goal of taking on the role of a ‘responsible stakeholder’ (Zoellick 2005), insisting on its desire for a ‘peaceful rise’ (Choo 2009; Xinhua 2011), and has rejected hegemonic ambitions (Beijing Review 2009; People’s Daily Online 2010a). Other observers, in fact, are interpreting Chinese foreign policy as showing early signs of dominance (Jacques 2009;

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Mosher 2000; Roy 1994; Seth 2011). Yet other analysts have pointed towards even more problems created by China’s rise, claiming that ‘[i]t is increasingly evident that China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization is one of the major developments of the late 20th and early 21st century’ (Economy & Oksenberg 1999: 2). This necessitates a clear focus on the ‘implications of China’s rise in world affairs’ (Economy & Oksenberg 1999: 2). Much of the same must be said about India. The South Asian state is quickly becoming an economic powerhouse; it has already established itself as a nuclear power. In fact, if compared to China’s, India’s ‘rise’ is equally remarkable (Friedman & Gilley 2005). However, the security relationship between India and China has produced armed conflict and remains unstable and conflictual (Holslag 2010). Moreover, India is situated in an unsettled geographic area. Not only does India have ongoing border disputes with China, but also with its neighbour, Pakistan, which is also a nuclear power and has been under immense pressure from terrorist groups and religious extremism. Finally, in the wider Asian region, the relationships between nuclear-armed superpowers, including the US, remains in flux (Sieff 2010). In other words, India’s own economic growth and its rising foreign policy clout are broader elements of the rise of Asia. Two more top-twelve economies are located in Northeast Asia: Japan and South Korea. The former built itself up into a global economic superpower after World War II, and the latter belonged to the ‘Asian tiger economies’ that saw a rapid economic rise during the later stages of the Cold War. However, since the inconclusive end of the Korean War in 1953, Northeast Asia has been marred by hostilities with North Korea, nuclear proliferation and security dilemmas. Early in the 21st century, the outlook for a comprehensive security settlement remains bleak. However, given Northeast Asia’s economic weight, the region’s unsettled security situation remains high on the international agenda. In fact, what will happen in Northeast Asia in this respect may be a ‘more profound and consequential event than the rise of China’ (Calder & Ye 2010: 265). In contrast, with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Southeast Asia has seen a fair degree of integration and economic progress, but it has also been experiencing a heightened sense of self-awareness of its own ways and means, captured by the catchphrase ‘Asian values’. The issues and developments outlined above are meant only as an illustration of the broad spectrum of issues that stem from or are tightly related to the economic and political rise of a broad, heterogenic region. Clearly, this list is not meant to be comprehensive. Further changes within Asia are also contributing to the transformation of the environment in

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which regional and global foreign policies are being conducted. However, while many of the effects of the rise of Asia are now coming increasingly into focus, the final, accumulative impact on the global states system is still impossible to predict. However, it seems fair to assume that the future states system will feature a higher level of complexity, not the least since ‘[n]ever before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale’ (Kissinger 1995: 26). Within the complex ‘new world order’, Asia will figure prominently.

Three Meta-debates Recently, much attention has been paid to the rise of China specifically. The second-largest economy in the world is underpinning a strengthened and ambitious state. Hosting the Olympics in 2008 symbolized China’s arrival as a fully-fledged global superpower. In light of this, the current debates on China prominently feature three broader issue areas: the hegemonic rise of China, China’s economic model, and the prospect of democratization and the advancement of human rights in China. Many of these issues are also related to developments in Asian countries other than China. Hegemonic Rise There is a considerable consensus that the US has slid down from its predominant post-Cold War position in the region and that China has made up considerable ground. A ‘sea-change’ has been dated to ‘post-1989’, when ‘[t]he ability of the United States to pursue its traditional goals of maintaining a balance of power, keeping the region open to trade and investment, and pressing for the expansion of democracy [became] more constrained because this is now a region in some ways much more pro-active and resistant to U.S. influence’ (Pyle 2007b: 11). In light of this, Washington certainly needs to adjust to the massive changes, in particular those in East Asia (Abramowitz & Bosworth 2006: 150). But how much adjustment will be necessary, and how much influence will China gain? Will China achieve dominance over the region (Sutter 2012)? Is there still a chance for ‘strategic economic engagement’ or a ‘partnership of equals’? At this point in time, answers to these questions remain speculative. Asian countries – China, in particular – are in the process of reconsidering their interests and ambitions, and for now, only a few trend lines appear stable enough to

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allow for modest prediction. One of them, it appears, is the relative decline of the US, and the other is China’s rise. However, whether this constellation will lead to a conflict between the current and future hegemons remains controversial. The fact that China has become more confident and assertive, even in military terms, over its territorial claims in the ‘South China Sea’ (Wines 2011), gives some credence to those analysts who want to detect early signs of a rising hegemon challenging the existing system. The response for the US might be seeing China as a threat and implementing a policy of containment (Mearsheimer 2005; 2006; 2001), since ‘the fact is that international politics is a nasty and dangerous business, and no amount of goodwill can ameliorate the intense security competition that sets in when an aspiring hegemon appears in Eurasia. That is the tragedy of great power politics’ (Mearsheimer 2006: 162). At the very least, it has been argued, China must be seen as a security maximizer, and its rapidly growing military arm creates a major regional security dilemma (Economy & Oksenberg 1999: vii). In fact, America’s current ‘pivot’ back to Asia and the Obama administration’s new Asia strategy may be signs of more to come (Whitlock 2012). A different perspective is offered by scholars who accept the prediction of further Chinese growth but reject the prediction that this development will lead to conflict. Prominent Chinese intellectuals have been arguing that China’s further rise will stay peaceful (Zheng 2005); this view is widely shared and has official support (Shim 2011: 14, 18). Others agree, claiming that the overall costs to China if it began to settle territorial disputes by coercion would be high, given the country’s economic interdependence with the outside world (Fravel 2011: 511-525). Finally, the applicability of hegemonic rise theory has been put in doubt. G. John Ikenberry argues at the systems level, claiming that today’s states system is fundamentally different from earlier versions, on which hegemonic rise theory is largely based. Today, he insists, the states system is ‘open, integrated and rule-based’ (Ikenberry 2008), allowing for China’s peaceful rise. Recently, Barry Buzan has taken a middle ground. After a substantial peaceful rise, China has now reached a ‘turning point’, at which the political leadership must now adjust its policies (Buzan 2010). From now on, he finds, Beijing cannot rely on the policies of the past. While conflict is certainly not a foregone conclusion, its avoidance requires new policy choices. China’s ongoing rise will create tensions, regionally and globally, but ‘tensions need not be incompatible with peaceful rise’ (Buzan 2010: 34).

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International Political Economy The second broad debate about the implications of China’s rise falls into the theoretical framework of international political economy. The interplay between economics and politics became stunningly clear in 2011, when financially strong China told debt-ridden America to pay its bills and solve its domestic budget crisis in the interest of the world economy (Wassener & Saltmarsh 2011). China was exploiting its economic and financial position of strength to challenge the US. In fact, ‘[t]he Chinese have flexed their economic prowess in nearly every corner of the world’ (Archibold 2012). All indications are that as China’s economy grows and matures, Beijing will claim a much more prominent role regionally and globally (Zhang 2011). The success of a number of Asian economies, including China’s, amounts to an indirect challenge to the traditional liberal paradigm. Instead of developing liberal economic and political systems domestically, Asian countries have created their own particular versions, generally by combining a relatively free economic sphere with a closed or controlled political arena. In particular, after the financial collapse in 2008/09, China felt strongly that its ‘Beijing consensus’ of state capitalism offered a better paradigm than the ‘Washington consensus’ of ever more market deregulation (Huang 2008; The Economist 2012). However, while Asian variations of state capitalism certainly have worked well for developing economies, the model’s usefulness for future development is unclear. If Beijing can no longer generate the same growth rates of the past, it might be forced into political concessions. Furthermore, modern economies might not mesh well with the various forms of state capitalism. It has been argued that South Korea, for example, has developed its national economy to a level that now requires new economic policies and strategies (The Economist 2011). Despite these structural problems, the strategic thinking of many Asian governments regarding further economic development should not be underestimated. Even Henry Kissinger reportedly misjudged the underlying strategic thinking in the national economic policy of the Asian states. In the 1970s, he felt that the Japanese were only thinking in ‘commercial terms’, not in ‘strategic terms’ and ‘[t]he implication was that pursuing economic advantage was not a means of [the] strategic pursuit of power’ (Pyle 2007b: 6). Today, there appears to be a remarkably similar attitude in the US, this time in regards to China, since overall America’s ‘concerns about China are mostly centred on the military dimension’ (Page & Xie 2010: 58-62). This impression might be due in large part to China’s remarkable participation in world trade while at the same time hesitating to pursue

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fuller ‘global integration’ beyond the economic dimensions of it (Pei 2012). However, the benefits of world trade may produce limitations on Beijing’s political options. It appears that China does not want to be unnecessarily confrontational towards the world economic system that has served it so well in the recent past. Thus, China ultimately responded to international critique over its monetary policy (to ‘abandon its currency peg’) in good measure because of international pressure (Back & Browne 2010). In the same way that China arguably has come to a ‘turning point’ where its further peaceful rise needs to be reconceptualized, China’s economic model may also be at a point at which adjustments must be made. Democratization Much ink has been spilt on the question if and how China might democratize. This question is set within the larger discourses on the ‘success’ of political and economic liberalism and the ‘End of History’ (Fukuyama 1989; 1992). Moreover, the issue is clearly relevant within the larger Asian context, where states across a broad spectrum have been adopting democratic principles to widely different degrees. India’s democratic political system is paired with a developing economy; Singapore has adopted the version of a lawand-order state and has built a first-rate economy; South Korea has moved from a military dictatorship to a functioning democracy within decades and developed a national economy that ranks among the top twelve worldwide; China and Vietnam have been developing versions of market economies but have been resisting democratization. Needless to say, these examples are a random selection. However, they serve the purpose of demonstrating the complexities of democratization in Asia, and may point towards a more modest, alternative path to democratization (Kivimäki 2011). However, given the prominent place China has in the region, much of the discussion on democratization is centred on developments in China. In fact, there is much merit to this focus, since China would pose a much more significant challenge to the European-American concept of democracy than many of the smaller Asian states. What is more, in particular in the US, there is a perception among many that a non-democratic and increasingly powerful China would fundamentally change the world order (Fingleton 2008; Abramowitz & Bosworth 2006: 115). In fact, the underlying fear is that China might constitute a fundamental challenge to political liberalism and that new international ideological conflict may emerge in the future. The counterargument is that China will resist challenging an international system that has served it quite well in the past.

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However, the very question of whether China will democratize or not remains equally contested. While some analysts present a rather optimistic viewpoint with regard to China’s future of democratization (Gilley 2004), or are at least hopeful (Thornton 2008), others are much more cautious regarding their evaluation (Zakaria 2004). More recently, factors that can advance or undermine the process of democratization in China have been pointed out; information technology and, in particular, the internet might play a significant role in China’s further democratization (Keane 2012). At the same time, democratization might be slowed down by a potentially overriding need to integrate very different population groups in China and advance Chinese nationalism at the expense of democratization (Liew 1997; Liu 2011). In fact, the problems associated with evaluating China’s prospects for future democratization are aggravated by the lack of consensus not only regarding the status quo but also regarding the end result of any such process (Li 2008). In short, what kind of democracy China may develop into remains as ambiguous as the process of democratization itself.

The Impact on Regional and Global Diplomatic Conduct An Asian Security Architecture Yet further challenges for Asian diplomacy are generated by slowly evolving security arrangements. To be sure, the American-centred hub-and-spokes system remains the ‘predominant regional security architecture across Asia’ (Shambaugh 2006: 153) for the time being. At the same time, China is not only becoming active and assertive regionally and globally, but it is also quickly emerging as a structurally critical factor for the regional order (Shambaugh 2006: 155). Therefore, China must be tightly integrated into any security arrangement that may emerge in the future. However, at the moment, how such a security arrangement may look and how China can be integrated remains unclear. The situation is certainly not helped by the fact that US-China relations remain distrustful. Neither do consistently poor relations between China and Japan help, nor does Washington’s traditional policy of strong support for Taiwan (Sieff 2010). But is China ready to take on the leadership position the US has held in the recent past? While the US is in the process of reconf iguring its Asia-Pacif ic policy and recovering some ground lost during the ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, China might not be

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ready yet to supplant the US, largely due to its lack of soft power (Buzan 2010: 20; Li 2011). Moreover, as of today, there is little consensus regarding the nature of an Asian security arrangement. On the one hand, there appears to be an emerging ‘regional security community’. This arrangement brings together the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Thus, the argument can be made that the wider Asian region is increasingly becoming integrated and interconnected in matters of traditional security. If the existing institutions are an indication of future trends, it is possible to assume that further regional integration will reject supranationalism, but emphasize the sovereign nation-state. ASEAN has been promoting its so-called ASEAN Way, which emphasizes the principle of non-intervention. In the 1976 Bali Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, the signatories committed themselves to: –– mutual respect for the independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity and national identity of all nations; –– the right of every State to lead its national existence free from external interference, subversion or coercion; –– non-interference in the internal affairs of one another (ASEAN Secretariat 1976). The SCO’s ‘Shanghai Spirit’ similarly emphasizes non-interference and the principle of sovereignty. The 2001 declaration, the organization’s constitutive document, states that its members will ‘mutually respect independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, [and] not interfere in each other’s internal affairs’ (Declaration on the Establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization 2001). Whether these institutions will be strengthened to a sufficient degree, however, remains to be seen. In fact, it has been argued that so far these institutions offer little beyond being a forum for dialogue. The critique is that the regional multilateral security arrangements have been tackling few substantive issues and have in fact been avoiding related issues more often than not (Feigenbaum & Manning 2009: 9). Somewhat provocatively, Amitav Acharya has suggested that Asia might find a regional security arrangement that is modelled after the European concert system of the early 19th century (Acharya 1999a). A concert system does not need formal institutions but relies on regular coordination among the most powerful regional actors on an ad hoc basis. Underlying the concert system is the notion of only somewhat limited power politics.

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Further avenues may include the revival of the US-dominated huband-spokes system, regional institutions without direct US participation (along the lines of the ASEAN Plus Three cooperation), or indeed a broad Asia-Pacific community that brings in not only the US but also Australia (Feigenbaum & Manning 2009: 4). At the beginning of the 21st century, the future design of an Asian security architecture remains difficult to foretell. However, this is the context in which the foreign policies and diplomacy in Asia will have to operate. Hence, in the following chapters we look at a whole variety of changes in practice, concepts and thinking on foreign affairs issues in Asia.

Foreign Policies in a Rising Region Despite the remarkable achievements of the wider Asian region in political, economic, and cultural terms, many critics have pointed out the lack of progress towards a regional security community. In his essay on the prospects for an Asia-Pacific security community, Alan Chong laments the lack of progress on this issue. Investigating ‘why a sustainable Asia-Pacific security community is simply not in sight’, he points towards the lack of consensus over common and shared values as a major cause. As he explains, major disputes over common values have been hampering the region’s diplomacy. What is missing is a true ‘value conversion’. Without it, notions of nationality trump regionalism. In the end, the effect is that the development of a ‘thick version’ of a regional Asia-Pacific security community is effectively stalled by deep value risks across the region and beyond. Brendan Howe puts the discussion over values squarely in the context of the larger human rights debates. In his essay ‘East Asian Governance: Human Security, Development, and Exceptionalism’, he questions whether Asia can claim to be exceptional with regards to human security and development. His answer is negative, and he claims that certain rights, norms, and entitlements are indeed universal. Howe takes the position that human security and economic development do not only constitute basic human needs and entitlements, but are also, in fact, not mutually exclusive. In fact, he detects significant evolution in international law that allows for the concept of state sovereignty to be synchronized with the emerging norm of a Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Howe acknowledges the sovereignty-centred, non-interventionist paradigm that underlies the politicized idea of ‘Asian values’. However, as he points out, even within this paradigm there is a consensus regarding

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certain human entitlements and the prevention of major violations of them. In particular, the most extreme violations of basic human rights today are already considered to be a ‘universal wrong’. In East Asia, he finds that the traditional concept of sovereignty has been modified to accommodate R2P not so much because of the persuasiveness of Western values but because of decreasing opposition to these ideas in the region, the strengthening of soft law on this issue, and the strength of (Aristotelian) natural law notions regarding individual human rights. According to Howe, these developments then lead to a ‘stronger paradigm of overlapping consensus’ with respect to human security, development and sovereignty. The next set of essays investigates a broad spectrum of issues in the regional contexts of Northeast and Southeast Asia. It becomes clear that despite the unifying label ‘Asia’, and an overall ‘rise’ in the larger region, the sub-regional perspective is crucial to understanding the dynamics in Asia properly. Nowhere in Asia is the issue of security and stability more pressing than in Northeast Asia. On the Korean Peninsula, Cold War-type ideological conflict, nuclear proliferation, great power confrontation and the persistence of the division of the Korean nation have been preventing the establishment of regional stability. In his essay ‘International Politics in Northeast Asia: A Case for Stability’, Artyom Lukin challenges the pessimistic projections for Northeast Asian stability and in fact makes the case for regional stability in this sub-region. He claims that three factors are at work, all of which might contribute to increasing regional stability in Northeast Asia. First, demographic trend lines, he suggests, indicate that the overall populations are aging and declining in size which, in turn, will alter the outlook of the societies towards confrontational policies. Although this argument is clearly different from liberal democratic peace theory, it nevertheless connects with it in so far as it preserves a prominent role for the domestic audience. Second, Lukin argues that increasing economic integration combined with the multilateral political process of the so-called ‘Six-Party Talks’ is beginning to create an institutional environment in which China is primus inter pares, but at the same time limited in its policy options. Third, the author demonstrates that regional nuclear proliferation may in fact have a stabilizing effect in Northeast Asia, similar to nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. All in all, Lukin makes the argument that stability in Northeast Asia might be more feasible and in fact more likely than is generally perceived. At the same time, there are few, if any, indications that the region might be able to move further and begin a process of integration akin to the one

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in Southeast Asia. This is the region on which the next two chapters are focused. Southeast Asia began a formal integration process decades ago but, as the authors indicate, problems persist. Focusing on ASEAN, Math Noortmann detects a democracy def icit regarding this international organization. He investigates the regional integration and finds that it is shaped largely by government-level processes. He points to the fact that there is indeed little, if any, inclusion of peoples into the regional integration process. In fact, Noortmann critiques the ‘intergovernmentalist politics of exclusion’ in which high-level government officials proceed with regional integration without bringing along their own citizens. This analysis leads Noortmann to the conclusion that what has been happening in Southeast Asia and, in particular, with regards to ASEAN, has not yet evolved to the level of true regionalism. Instead, the author claims, the best way to conceptualize the regional developments is as ‘quasi-regionalism’, or ‘regional internationalism’. In a similar vein, See Seng Tan criticizes the top-heavy, governmentcentred diplomatic processes in Southeast Asia as lacking in responsiveness to the ideas and ideals of civil society. In his essay entitled ‘Non-official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia: Civil Society or “Civil Service”?’, he looks at Track 2 diplomacy in particular and detects that here, too, the agendas are set and the discussions are conducted by representatives from the national civil services and not by non-governmental individuals. The effect is that even in this purportedly more flexible and informal instrument, Track 2 diplomacy, the common discourses of state interests are not challenged. The preferences and ideas of civil society are not promoted while the primacy of the state interest is not questioned. Thus, Track 2 diplomacy in Southeast Asia has so far failed to challenge the state-centred Track 1 discourses in the region. The final three essays move the discussion towards the key actors in the region and the related foreign policy strategies in light of the overall rise of Asia. Ting Ming Hwa focuses on the rising great powers: China and India. Her interest is in understanding the possible impact of these ‘two aspiring states’. In her chapter ‘China and India as Regional Powers: Policies of Two Aspiring States Intersecting in Burma’, she uses the case of the Southeast Asian state of Myanmar, formerly Burma, as a test case. Prospect theory is applied to reveal exactly what the rise of China and India may mean in the regional and global contexts. Both powers have been involved in Myanmar for quite some time; however, the Southeast Asian state is rather peripheral for both. Nevertheless, both Delhi and Beijing have been committing significant resources to advance their interests there. In light of these developments and consistent with prospect theory, Ting concludes that

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neither China nor India is likely to make significant political concessions once they have secured political inroads and have achieved successes in their sub-regional foreign policies. The outcome of this study meshes well with the projection of future conflict in the region that is generated by the rise of its main actors. As indicated above, hegemonic rise theory suggests that the rise of China, in particular, may very well lead to a future conflict. In response to this possibility and the current and anticipated changes in the Asian security environment, states across the region are in the process of re-evaluating their security posture. As Tom Wilkins demonstrates, Japan is indeed coming up to a decision point on its future regional strategy. In his chapter ‘Reinventing Japan in the Asian Century: Towards a New Grand Strategy?’, he presents Japan’s options as either becoming a major power (conceptualized largely in the realist paradigm) or to fill the role of a modern, ‘enlightened’ middle power that works through multilateral organizations, supports international law and pursues the norms associated with ‘good international citizenship’. In many ways, the decision has been forced upon Japan by the rapidly changing security environment, especially in Northeast Asia. As Wilkins points out, Tokyo’s foreign policy elite has not yet fully committed to either course. However, it is already becoming quite clear that the systemic changes in Asia have triggered a reinvigoration of Japan as a regional actor and power. While Japan can rely largely on its own resources and an established alliance with the US to respond to the changing security dynamics, Central Asian states have to find new ways to adjust to a rising China and post-Soviet Russia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) figures prominently in this regard. In the final chapter, Askhat Safiullin investigates the impact that China’s diplomatic methods have had on the Central Asian states. His focus is on the SCO as an instrument for ‘induced multilateral diplomacy’. On the basis of constructivist theory, he argues that the constructed notions of the so-called Shanghai Spirit and Good Neighbourliness that originated with the SCO have been shaping not only the regional security identity but also the member states’ national security identity. In fact, notions of identity have been moving from the organization to the foreign policy elites at the national levels and on to the domestic discourses. As of today, two major developments can be identified: First, China has been channelling its agenda via the SCO to the Central Asian states. Second, the evolving regional security identity is in fact bringing the Central Asian region closer together and creating a common regional identity.

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Still Searching for a Common Frequency Silences, Cultural Gaps and Normative Deficits in AsiaPacific Diplomacies Alan Chong

At the dawn of the 21 st century, there is still no discernible integrative civility to the diplomacies practised by nation-states inhabiting the panregion stretching from the Kurile Islands in the northern Pacific down to that part of the Indian Ocean rim formed by the contiguous borders of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and India. A thin community founded upon a negative peace groups these states in the sense that they have not resorted to conventional war to resolve bilateral disputes, but they have yet to foster a political community on the order of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Presently, what is evident is a cacophony of diplomatic postures that have produced accidental peace through procedures of tentative toleration. By ‘cacophony’, we are referring to the malaise in the Asia-Pacific in forging consensus towards creating a Deutschean security community. States occupying the Asian rim of the Pacific Ocean seem to aspire towards myriad embryonic developmental goals ranging from affirmations of postcolonial identity to culturally-def ined economic preferences. The North American and Latin American partners of Asia-Pacific regionalism tend to favour a panPacific regionalism that opens up free trade opportunities regardless of the unequal development statuses of the participating states. In the arena of both military security and non-traditional security issues, the cacophony of diplomacies is even more evident. The romance of the nation-state, for instance in the Malaysian, Filipino, Thai and Indonesian cases, continues to shape non-negotiable Westphalian understandings of sovereignty that play well amongst domestic political constituencies. Even supposedly ‘hyper-globalized’ Singapore is plagued by citizen-led questioning of the socio-economic impact of liberal immigration policies towards foreign talent, while on the other hand, the justification of the role of its highly modernized armed forces tilts towards realist arguments. In this light, this chapter argues that disputes over the formation of, consolidation of, or empathy towards common values are a significant

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obstacle to the fulfilment of the potential of diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region. The existing plurality of diplomacies suggests that dissension is the order of the day, vindicating the defection of nationalist politics from regionalist projects. Values are involved in the sense that they serve as loud indicators of standards of behaviour that imply baselines from which nation-states and their representatives feel their way in negotiations towards ‘community’ with other nation-states and non-state actors. In taking this tack, this chapter is not simply a futile exercise in wishful anti-realist polemics. It endeavours to explain why a sustainable Asia-Pacific security community is simply not in sight despite a proliferation of ‘overlapping security arrangements’ across the pan-region. As Donald Emmerson (2005) has argued, an Asia-Pacific security community centred, for instance, upon ASEAN can be pluralistic in tolerating rival understandings of security, amounting to an overlapping residue of intramural civility that disavows the resort to war, but, going forward, a substantive ASEAN peace ought to be also based upon genuine conversion to deep value-driven consensus. Conceptually, diplomacy, as Ernest Satow, Harold Nicolson and Brian White have articulated it, is widely understood as a communicational process where the application of tact and intelligence strive to ensure that conflicts and other relational issues between states are resolved short of war (Satow 1957; Nicolson 1969; White 2006). In this process, values are necessarily applied and enforced if amity is to be achieved either prior to, during or consequent to negotiation. The annals of both ancient and modern diplomacy illustrate this fact (Nicolson 1969: chs 1-4). The ancient Greeks dealt differently between their civilizational compatriots and the ‘barbarian/outsider’. This is not to assert that the Greeks did not make war upon their compatriots, but if one examines the account of Thucydides in relation to the Peloponnesian War, even warring compatriots shared a common diplomatic parlance. Likewise, Germany’s redoubtable Chancellor Otto von Bismarck found it useful to navigate the treacherous networks of the antebellum European treaty system to maximize his growing empire’s political space in the name of stabilizing imperial competition overseas and consolidating the gains of empire within Central Europe. In World War Two, Britain and the United States saw it fit to establish the Atlantic Charter as the basis for erecting a just post-war international order. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted subsequently to utilize the Charter to chart the peace through summits with Joseph Stalin and Chiang Kai Shek. Consequently, when the United Nations was signed into existence at Bretton Woods, all its states’ signatories had to solemnly declare their tacit adherence to liberal precepts for conducting

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diplomacy in a post-war world of exponentially multiplying nation-states. By the 1950s, and certainly through to the 1970s, a ‘Third World revolt’ was identified by many observers to have been set in motion by latecomers to the worldwide system of Western-derived diplomacy centred upon that veritable liberal institution called the UN. Not surprisingly, the eminent British International Relations theorist Martin Wight, in his essay ‘Western Values in International Relations’, attributed the mainstays of diplomatic practice to intellectual sources of statesmanship in continental Europe, Britain and North America (Wight 1966). In today’s post-Cold War terms, one sees a continuation of the struggle to shape world standards of diplomatic values in the calculated intransigence of the People’s Republic of China, Iran, North Korea and many others in the Middle East to operationalizing the principle of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ crafted by a panel of Australian, British, African and Indian statesmen, following the late 20th century’s recurrences of genocidal civil war in former Yugoslavia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. In the Asia-Pacific, these struggles have manifested in value dissension during each and every attempt at pursuing security regionalism. Oftentimes, regional security arrangements are either quasi-institutionalized, or fully institutionalized with weak executive mandates. Furthermore, the utilization of catch-all discourses such as ‘regional security architecture’, the ‘ASEAN Way’ and ‘cooperative security’ by diplomats and politicians in the region have both served to obscure as well as highlight the fragility of consensus over whether any diplomatic community can translate into a thick version of a security community in the manner defined by Karl Deutsch. This chapter intends to argue the case for value dissension in AsiaPacific regionalism as follows. Firstly, the existing literature on security regionalism in the Asia-Pacific will be surveyed and argued to have danced around the ‘silences’ in substantive security community-building simply because the gulf in diplomatic values among Asian states, and between Asian and Western states in the Pacific Rim, remains unbridgeable. Secondly, the case studies of two ‘informal diplomacy’ channels will be examined to tease out the nature of value dissension. This is a difficult scholarly task for which this is merely a preliminary probe, since most diplomats involved rarely publicly document their contribution to value dissension. There is no point implementing a case study of ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum or the East Asia Summit, for these comprise formal state representatives who will maintain official opacity both inside and outside the respective forums, since these participants are keenly aware of their highly-charged statuses as ‘Track 1’ personae.

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I will specif ically be scrutinizing the sub-Track 1 channels: (1) the renowned CSCAP (Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific) process (Track 2) and (2) the less-publicised Southeast Asia Regional Security Forum (Track 1.5) through participant observer methodology because these involve ‘virtually interviewing’ the diplomatic representatives through less guarded moments where the truth of their convictions often reveal themselves. By contrast, formal interviews trigger the erection of guardedness in commenting upon diplomatic intercourse that had taken place essentially ‘behind closed doors’, that is, by following the Chatham House Rule. This chapter will conclude by suggesting that value disputes will continue to prove to be inimical to the building of a substantive Asia-Pacific community until or unless a neoliberal value consensus can be achieved in the highest leadership echelons of nation-states participating in Asia-Pacific regionalism. Meanwhile, deeper intellectual investigations of silences need to be extended in the direction of cultural gaps and normative deficits.

Analysing Asia-Pacific Security Regionalism: Capturing Silences and Doubletalk The starting point of explaining regionalism in the Asia-Pacific is also its lightning rod: ASEAN. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is often lauded by both its official adherents and its academic supporters alike for having pioneered the norm of foreswearing the use of force to resolve intra-state disputes. Its record has been rather exemplary if one rules out the occasional outbreak of border skirmishes and modest displays of gunboat diplomacy in the vicinity of maritime disputes. But on the score of non-traditional security of the range of economic contagion to pandemic preparedness and haze pollution, ASEAN has achieved little more than legitimizing selective national policy remedies and facilitating external assistance in response to crises. ASEAN’s own economic integration efforts in the form of the ASEAN Free Trade Area have evolved at a snail’s pace and have been punctuated with all manners of exceptions for the slower economies. ASEAN’s wider regional institutional progenies of the likes of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the East Asia Summit (EAS), the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus (ADMM Plus), as well as its attempt to steer the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings, have derived seemingly verbose discourse regarding issues such as ‘comfort levels’ and ‘gradualism’ to mask fractious negotiations and thin consensus on deepening confidence-building measures across the region.

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There is a strong cluster of scholarship that criticizes ASEAN for the inconsistency in operationalizing its principles and flagrantly ‘making process, not progress’ (Jones & Smith 2007). This is perfectly defensible on the bases of judging ASEAN and its associated forums on the undeclared bases of a yardstick of liberal consistency. ASEAN is, for instance, hypocritical in criticizing Myanmar’s treatment of domestic dissidents while keeping silent on abuses of the politico-legal processes in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Furthermore, the vaunted consensus-building procedure of the ASEAN Way is amorphous enough to frequently get invoked by its member states to terminate public discussion of acrimony over various issues. After four decades, ASEAN appears no closer to resolving territorial disputes among its founding members. These are criticisms that are valid if a straightforward test of internally principled consistency were applied. Moreover, to expect a postcolonial experiment in institution-building to imitate the European Union (EU) process requires an open assumption that the EU is indeed a veritable ideal of a security community elsewhere in the world. Making process may not be, after all, a bad achievement if the peace holds and generates some degree of ‘dependable expectations’ among elites and non-elites alike that this has become a psychologically inviolable norm. At the other extreme, scholars such as Acharya (2001) and Katsumata (2006) champion the notion that ASEAN’s nebulous leadership in spearheading a form of lowest common denominator regionalism is part and parcel of an incremental building block approach towards a security community. This is based on one paramount success of ASEAN in preventing open war between its members. This ASEAN achievement appears to have been cloned into the ARF and EAS as well. Acharya has in fact applied Karl Deutsch in earnest to analyse the ASEAN peace as the one, constructed sufficiently in the minds of policy-makers, that will endure over time. Katsumata has in turn contributed to the colourful imagery of ASEAN being a norm brewery that binds and reinforces the tendency towards peaceful accommodation in the region. But one has to ask whether the ASEAN Way, or the peace process of ASEAN in its generic term, has socialized the non-ASEAN members of the Asia-Pacific region into its norms of shelving disputes and talking delicately amongst them. The verdict is still out (Sharpe 2003; Terada 2003; Ba 2009). See Seng Tan (2005) calls attention to the relentless tussle between a statist discourse bent on keeping an ASEAN-driven statist conspiracy of silence on contentious bilateral disputes in place, while allowing non-official diplomacies in the form of Track 2 and Track 3 (NGO and civil society) processes to metaphorically blow off steam for their official counterparts. Likewise,

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all of the extant scholarship on Track 2 and Track 3 diplomacies hints at the multiple proverbial elephants in the negotiating room, which only nonofficial representatives dare to partially sketch. Subsequently, they are forced to retreat in order to either ‘save face’ for their statist counterparts to resume formal parleys, or worse, these discursive confrontations get buried through official non-acknowledgement, and consequently be neglected by the Asian and world mass media. Other scholarship has merely skirted ASEAN’s efficacy as a pan-regional peace builder by treating the question of its socializing influence as a matter of forming a nascent sociological community (Ba 2009) or amending orthodox balancing behaviour through a game of hedging under the label of ‘omni-enmeshment’ of great powers (Goh 2007-2008). These scholarly attempts at reading ASEAN and its associated Asian security ventures are commendable and go a long way towards building a corpus of knowledge about how ASEAN operates to keep the peace. But the silences are also deafening. Why, for instance, is the organization making process, rather than progress? Why does it treat form, a.k.a. the ASEAN Way, as the equivalent of substance in defusing public contention? And just as importantly, if states and their representatives cannot speak either candidly in conference rooms or publicly to the media on contentious issues, are non-official diplomacies any more efficacious in producing breakthroughs towards peaceful resolution of disputes? This is where existing scholarship falls short in not addressing the value question. Values, in the fullest understanding of any regionalism, underpin the concretization of security as more than just avoiding the use of force.

The Nub of Track 2 Diplomacies: Noble Intentions and the Haze of Sifting through Disagreements The story of Track 2 diplomacies begins with personalities: Jusuf Wanandi of Indonesia, Tan Sri Dr Noordin Sopiee of Malaysia, and Donald Emmerson of the US. All three were prominently committed to strengthening the growth and vision of ASEAN after two decades of its existence. Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the US committed to President Richard Nixon’s Guam Doctrine of minimizing American ground forces’ involvement in the Asian theatre of the Cold War. In response, Wanandi’s think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), initiated contact with various levels of American academic and policy circles to discern the future of American commitment to Southeast and East Asia, while also keeping

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American attention engaged in the region (Wanandi 2006b). The CSIS fronted for ASEAN scholars and rapidly encouraged Chinese and Japanese scholars to join the emerging dialogue with the US. By the mid-1980s, momentum from conferencing and workshops among academics, together with joint publications from these meetings, had progressed to the point where Professor Donald Emmerson, a noted scholar of Southeast Asian security affairs, had suggested the idea of ‘cooperation and coordination amongst ASEAN think-tanks’ (Wanandi 2006b: 32). By 1988, an ‘ASEAN-ISIS Charter’ was adopted, thereby formalizing a foundational layer of non-official diplomacy under the name ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies. By then, other US scholars led by Robert Scalapino suggested that ASEAN-ISIS should also engage with other likeminded think tanks in Japan (the Japan Institute of International Affairs), the East Asian Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, US, and the Korean initiative led by former foreign minister Han Sung Joo. Tan Sri Noordin Sopiee consequently took the initiative to strengthen ASEAN’s outreach to the wider Asia-Pacific nation-states by mooting the idea of the Asia-Pacific Roundtable (APR) for Confidence-Building which was to be hosted by Noordin’s Malaysian unit of ASEAN-ISIS, simply named ISIS-Malaysia. In this way, Noordin, like Wanandi, sought to balance the primacy of national interest championed by the respective heads of governments and foreign ministers with the fledgling interest in fostering regional diplomatic community (Wanandi 2006a). By 1988-1992, the end of the Cold War imparted ever increasing momentum towards multiplying the congeries of quasi-diplomatic networking into the security and economic issue areas within an interdependent Pacific Rim. ‘Track 1’ diplomacy, involving the formal representatives of governments could, it was widely argued by ASEAN-ISIS and its friends, be served by the research-oriented and confidence-building informal network called ‘Track 2’. By comprising a mix of formal and informal governmental representatives, plus academics, former bureaucrats and interested intellectuals, Track 2 could serve variously as a sounding board or early warning system for common cooperative endeavours within ASEAN and across the Asia-Pacific. The ASEAN-ISIS meeting in Jakarta in 1991 produced a ‘visionary document’ (A Time for Initiative – Proposals for the Consideration of the Fourth Summit) that was surfaced to the respective ASEAN governments with the advice to initiate an Asia-Pacific political dialogue, to establish a new cooperative regional order in Southeast Asia, to strengthen ASEAN community and to enhance intra-ASEAN economic cooperation (Soesastro, Joewono & Hernandez 2006: 8). Many Track 2 participants date

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the start of the process to this document. Consequently, a year later, in 1992, ASEAN-ISIS and other Asia-Pacific think tanks representing initially ten states, signed an agreement establishing one of the most geographically comprehensive Track 2 projects – the CSCAP. Imitators of ASEAN-ISIS, APR and CSCAP proliferated throughout the 1990s. This preliminary study of the value dissonance reflected in these diplomacies will sample CSCAP and the Philippine-organized Southeast Asia Regional Security Forum (SEARSF) as representative cases. Much of the literature produced by the Track 2 institutions tend to be either outright celebratory, descriptive of their workings or serve as exercises in restating politically correct positions. Dissent is always hinted at but mostly buried ‘between the lines’ (Cossa 1995; Soesastro, Joewono & Hernandez 2006). In this regard, this chapter believes that the initial stab at researching value dissonance in Track 2 is to perform discourse analysis in the wake of pioneering research by See Seng Tan (2005; 2007) on the subject. Although Tan adopts a postmodern frame of discourse analysis to make the case that war and peace in the Asia-Pacific is constructed through the concepts and exchanges of Track 2 participants, this chapter differs by preferring to read messages dispatched, both on and off-the-record, as a phenomenon to be elucidated on their own account. Therefore, this approach would require the author’s extensive use of participant observation since more than 90 per cent of the participants were reluctant to be interviewed regarding what they said or conversations that transpired during the conference. Most preferred to adhere to the redoubtable Chatham House Rules, meaning that what they uttered at Track 2 sessions ought to remain behind closed doors, and which could be disowned at will if discussed in public. This author does not make any claims to fulfilling rigorous social scientific objectivity. This chapter merely intends to read a political problem from the available evidence presented by the discursive behaviour of Track 2 participants. This sort of reading will often require some belief in the self-asserted accuracy of participant observations made by the author in his capacity as a non-speaking observer attending these ‘closed door’ sessions in an organizational capacity. The nature of the Chatham House Rules also requires that specific spokespersons during the study groups and main sessions cannot be identified with their comments; hence these attributions will be made collectively in forms such as CSCAP Australia, for example. In the case of the embryonic SEARSF, recourse will be made to the labels of the ‘Australian representative/presenter’, the ‘Chinese representative/presenter’ and the like. Existing research on CSCAP has adopted the method of rendering most sources anonymous in order that they can be

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reported (Simon 2002; Capie 2010). For Sheldon Simon and David Capie, it is notable that the interviewees willing to be openly attributed steered clear of commenting directly on the proceedings of the Track 2 sessions. This author will therefore offer readings based mostly on his personal notes of these sessions, supplemented and counter-checked, where possible, by the available conference documentation and randomly granted interview text. Such is the complicated task of reading value dissonance manifested through diplomatic silences, cultural gaps and normative deficits.

CSCAP General Conference & Workshop on Responsibility to Protect, November 2009 The seventh CSCAP General Conference took place in Jakarta in November 2009. The first was the study group meeting on the principle of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P). The others were the consecutive main sessions on ‘Regional Security Architecture’ and ‘Naval Build-up in the Asia-Pacific’. Both sessions’ exchanges will be recounted in their respective turns, following which, their implications for diplomatic value dissonance will be analyzed. Positioning for the Responsibility to Protect1 The R2P issue had originated in the wake of genocides perpetrated in the Second World War, but had since been raised in sharp relief by the events in former Yugoslavia, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Timor throughout the 1990s. In the late 1990s, a group of former foreign ministers and eminent persons associated with the UN humanitarian relief programmes convened themselves as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, producing a report elaborating the R2P as follows: Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The 1 The account given of the positions expressed in this section resonated with the views recorded in the subsequent round of Track 2 consultations on R2P some f ive months later (RSIS-NTS 2010).

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international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability. (Quoted in CSCAP 2009a)

In short, R2P joins the issues of humanitarian intervention and violation of national sovereignty. For CSCAP, the endorsement of R2P by the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document added urgency to the discussions in the region. The Chair of the study group, who hailed from CSCAP Canada, started by saying that while R2P remained in the refining stage, its present statement contained a cognitive role for regional organizations. He called on CSCAP members to identify participants for the dialogue on R2P, as well as to identify succinct issues for discussion. CSCAP Singapore indicated that while the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies had been established at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, research had been relying heavily upon theoretical explorations of the concept, coupled with a widespread sense that the concept was of little relevance to Asia. CSCAP China reacted by commenting that there was no consensus among Chinese academics on what R2P could mean in operational terms. CSCAP USA, however, was more upbeat about the R2P concept paper (CSCAP R2P Draft 2009, essentially a summary of the R2P documents from the UN to date) and ventured to ask all concerned how the ASEAN Regional Forum might receive the deliberations over the concept, and how R2P might link to the conceptually legitimized ASEAN Human Rights Commission that had been provided for in the ratified ASEAN Charter. CSCAP Philippines added strong support for R2P, praising it as a good principle and observing that its implementation should pre-empt its critics. Moreover, the urgent task lay in building constituencies of support in favour of R2P. R2P’s stakeholders had to be identified. CSCAP ought to employ constructive and empowering language in embracing R2P. CSCAP Philippines revealed that Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister associated with drafting R2P, was a fellow delegate and advocate on the Global Agenda for Protection of Human Rights, which was an academic body acting as an adjunct to the World Economic Forum. CSCAP Indonesia opined that a pragmatic path was the only way forward, that is, to identify interested persons and prepare papers prior to drafting a memorandum for the ASEAN Regional Forum. A book on R2P for Asia might also be considered. CSCAP Philippines and CSCAP Singapore concurred on the importance of pragmatic steps forward, paying attention to putting together a ‘coalition of the willing’ to push the matter. CSCAPs Canada,

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Indonesia and the USA suggested that going forward was a mere procedural issue and that non-delegation experts ought to be invited to consult while keeping national delegations in the loop. CSCAP India suggested that the members had to find a way of respecting the dissenting minority on R2P; he suggested applying an 80 per cent majority rule, but warned that any ‘coalition of the willing’ should not be an excuse for the hegemony of the majority. CSCAP USA observed that there was a recurring problem of irregularly attending CSCAP members throwing a spanner in the works at the eleventh or thirteenth hour of a CSCAP Study Group Report and this was a fate that should be avoided for R2P. CSCAPs Canada, USA and New Zealand signalled immense optimism for deliberating R2P and suggested getting both official and NGO input to influence Track 1 venues such as ASEAN. CSCAP New Zealand ventured that the International Committee of the Red Cross ought to participate in the Study Group from the start. CSCAP Canada warned that deliberations should avoid reopening issues settled by the 2005 and 2009 reports on R2P. Many CSCAP members demurred loudly at such a suggestion, compelling CSCAP Canada to backtrack and admit that continuing ambiguities in R2P could be addressed ‘post-2005’. Main Sessions on ‘Regional Security Architecture’ and ‘Naval Build-up in the Asia-Pacific’ The November 2009 CSCAP General Conference took place against the backdrop of simmering Sino-Japanese, Sino-US and Sino-Indian tensions, as well as a flurry of ‘new regionalism’ proposals from the newly installed governments of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama in Japan, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Australia. Hatoyama suggested evolving existing arrangements towards an EU-type regional community, whereas Rudd’s ‘Asia-Pacific Community’ included all great and medium powers in the Asia-Pacific while pointedly excluding ASEAN members, with the sole exception of Indonesia. The panel discussion titled ‘Regional Security Architecture’ featured speakers from Japan, Singapore, India, China, Australia and the US (CSCAP 2009b). CSCAP Japan spoke first. He traced the bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral security arrangements in the Asia-Pacific, articulating its existing layered complexity and overlaps. He emphatically echoed US foreign policy positions, such as the centrality of managing the US-Japan security partnership, as well as pushing democratization as a plank of Japanese and American foreign policies in the region. CSCAP Singapore described the current messy architecture as appropriate for a messy region.

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He cautioned that it was important not to neglect the interests of the smaller states in the region. A great power-centred regional order is not necessarily the most efficacious. Diplomatic initiatives ought to focus upon the infrastructure of inclusion, rather than the superstructure of summitry. CSCAP India’s presentation largely echoed the Singaporean position, warning of the dangers of omission and overprivileging the leadership roles of great powers. CSCAP China echoed the line of openness and inclusiveness for regionalism. She emphatically dismissed the association of rising powers with military and economic threats to the status quo. The existing regional security architecture does not equate well with the idea of community. The former was far more tolerant towards the diversity of the interests of its member states. While the existing regional security architecture is not in an ideal shape, it is simply the best arrangement possible under current circumstances for reconciling diverse interests. It is best to avoid dealing in the political language of describing a power shift, that is, between rising and declining great powers. CSCAP Australia reiterated the Rudd government’s line on creating a consultative mechanism comprising the Asian middle and great powers. He tried assuaging concerns from the smaller states by arguing that his government’s proposal could contain ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ parties in dialogue with each other on a case-by-case basis. A lot of the new architectures need to be instituted in terms of military confidencebuilding measures in relation to incidents at sea and airspace use. CSCAP USA took the view that regional multilateral arrangements must reflect the fundamental roles played by American economic and security ties to Asia, along with the foundations laid by the various American alliances with states in the region. Moreover, the USA supported ASEAN’s goal of an open and inclusive regionalism. Multilateralism ought to be effective, pragmatic and solution-oriented, and ultimately responsive to the region’s economic and security needs. In the question-and-answer session that followed the panel on regional security architecture, an Indonesian presidential spokesperson identified himself as such and proceeded to state that two broad cultures coexisted in Asia-Pacific regionalism. Firstly, there was balancing and alliance-building. Secondly, there were the nebulous features of ‘community’ and ‘strategic partnerships’. CSCAP Australia reacted to CSCAP Singapore and others who argued for inclusiveness towards small and weak states in the Asia-Pacific. He wondered aloud why anyone would resign themselves to a messy region with messy security arrangements. The purpose of regionalism was to generate order, or at the very least, mitigate the messiness. CSCAP Japan insisted that the anchor of America’s security alliances would remain vital

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in sustaining peace for the indefinite future. CSCAP Singapore suggested that it was ultimately likely that all existing security preferences would continue along the diplomatic mode of path dependence since there was no visible consensus on jettisoning existing arrangements. CSCAP China opined that the messiness of regionalism depended upon the use that was made of the regional security architecture by its users. She warned that certain states could utilize human rights causes as a vehicle for interfering in others’ domestic affairs. She noted that the fact that frank exchange existing within the general conference was a form of self-evident confidence-building. The consecutive main session titled ‘Naval Build-up in the Asia-Pacific’ was equally charged. CSCAP Australia warned that naval acquisitions had registered a steady trend since the 1980s, despite a partial dip during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998. South Korea was a typical case of steady acquisition and re-acceleration punctuated by the Asian Financial Crisis. Military expenditures are hardly transparent across the entire region, rendering the situation alarming. He went on to note that China remained the second largest military spender after the USA, while Japan had fallen from number two, with South Korea positioned at eleventh spot. But yet, he could not find evidence of overt action-reaction linkages that might indicate that an arms race was in progress. Interestingly, aircraft carriers were universally dubbed in Asia as defensive ships. If one examines the situation in Northeast Asia, the potential signatures of action-reaction dynamics would be somewhat more discernible, even if the protagonists involved would neither confirm nor deny them. Southeast Asian naval acquisitions, while robust, were nowhere approaching the scale of trends in Northeast Asia. CSCAP Japan pronounced that the increasing regularity of Chinese naval manoeuvres was already a cause for alarm. Submarine activity was one salient trend in Northeast Asian seas. Chinese strategies were obviously filling a security vacuum and the Chinese were actively monitoring every major naval power’s activities. A tense maritime atmosphere had been precipitated single-handedly by Chinese naval activities. CSCAP Japan made these points with a smartly packaged PowerPoint presentation that contained snapshots of the Chinese naval base at Qingdao and Chinese submarines in open sea, juxtaposed with colourful maps documenting incidents involving collisions or other confrontations with Chinese air and naval units in Northeast Asian waters. This visual text was clearly intended to supplement the typological text. CSCAP India, in turn, called attention to the Indian Ocean region where naval rivalry between great powers was constantly being complicated by ongoing land border disputes, piracy and

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concerns raised by arms acquisitions. CSCAP China’s turn in the panel presentation provided it with an opportunity to respond by making the argument that arms modernization programs do not necessarily translate into threat profiles. CSCAP China referred to the fact that India’s navy had already amassed considerable experience in operating aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean. CSCAP Singapore’s presentation rounded off the panel by arguing that confidence-building measures in Southeast Asian waters were urgently needed and imperative given the extent of currently overlapping territorial claims facilitated by the UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). The question-and-answer session that followed revealed a lively exchange over the nature of dual-use weapons technologies. All who participated were concerned with recognizing an arms race that might be occurring under innocuous labels. CSCAP India was especially concerned about arms-racing by stealth. CSCAP China was quick to emphasize that China was already practising confidence-building through the intensified pattern of Sino-US naval visits. He also wished that China could avoid a replay of the scenario of a Japanese invasion from the sea which had occurred during the Pacific War of 1937-1945. He asserted that the Chinese people were historically peaceful and would never initiate aggression. He also warned that the condition of absolute and perfect military transparency could never be attained. China had actually attempted some transparency of its own by publishing a number of defence white papers. CSCAP China gave no reply, however, to an academic question asking whether initiatives had been taken in regard to Sino-Japanese naval confidence-building. There was also a brief exchange between several members of the audience over the need to step up the tempo of naval confidence-building between Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, considering the fact that both still maintained overlapping territorial claims. Analysis of the CSCAP Case It is quite evident from the above-mentioned exchanges at CSCAP’s seventh general conference that a less-than-desirable general pattern of Asia-Pacific diplomacy has been unmasked. Silences abound over the substantive direction of Asia-Pacific security regionalism. Firstly, there is a palpable sense that there is dissension, even fear, over whether great powers should direct the shape of security regionalism to the possible detriment of the interests of small and weak states. Even among the great powers of China, Japan, India and the USA, there is unease over allowing

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a subset to completely dictate the pace. The outcome is a default ‘silence’ hidden amongst praises for the virtues of the present pattern of overlapping security regionalism known under the catch-all phrase ‘regional security architecture’, where ASEAN drives a form of lowest common denominator security relationship based upon intensifying familiarity through overlapping memberships and frequent interactions over current issues in the ARF, the various bilateral ASEAN-great power dialogues, the EAS and the like. The discomfort over the R2P principle also highlighted another silence: over the fate of national sovereignty and statist-framed national identity under an interconnected globalizing condition. Most Asian states have enjoyed statehood, and for some, an existential nationhood, for little more than six decades, whereas the more developed members such as Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Japan seem to have adapted to the logic of an interconnected world after almost a century’s worth of experience in nation- and state-building. In fact, the developed states of the Asia-Pacific may prefer not to associate themselves too closely with such discourse, given the increasing associations between their domestic civil societies and fledgling notions of a global civil society and democratization. One might link this with the psychic shift in security afforded their publics by the post-war settlements at Bretton Woods, the treatment of wartime genocidal actors in the Nuremburg Trials and the entire spirit of the United Nations. Most of Asia is still continuing to appraise the value of nation and state as vehicles of modernization and, equally, of mobilizing pride. In many cases, celebrating nation and state seems normatively desirable. China’s growth trajectory in a post-Maoist era, and some might argue in a post-Deng era, requires entrenching nation and state as psychic unifiers for material and spiritual progress. Perhaps, unlike most of the developed states, Asian ones do not uniformly regard the Pacific War as a repository of evil precedents to be avoided in the present and future shape of security regionalism. Some, for instance, like Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and to a limited extent the two Koreas, date their nationalist awakening from the neo-colonial tumult that was the Pacific War. Great power positions also reveal silences among their ranks, in relation to their inability to find common ground on building confidence among themselves and therefore, preferring to rally the others to embrace the strategic ambiguities of the present messiness of regionalism. The cultural gaps are evident in the manner in which many Asian representatives preferred to put forth their positions in obtuse language and passive tones, whereas the Americans and Australians, for instance,

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were more than willing to state their positions out of pure conviction or aspiration towards stark political clarity. The relative American disinterest in the circumlocutory proceedings of CSCAP was quite evident throughout the conference, with the Americans either pushing positions of democratization and realist alliance systems in the face of ambiguity, or absenting themselves altogether from the majority of themed panels. The Japanese seem to be the exception among the Asians in appearing willing to confront the Chinese in brusque tones. They may well have learnt their style of graphically-assisted confrontational presentation from their American ally. Such a show-and-tell format has been the staple of many a Cold War-era American confrontation with the erstwhile Soviet Union and its satellites. But, on another plane, one might argue that the Japanese were also atypical among the Asians, having adapted many Western ways of modernization much earlier and more successfully than, say, the ASEAN states, China and India. Necessarily, this is a conjecture based on this chapter’s limited case studies, but this is an interesting angle raised by clear implication in the diplomatic histrionics and subtleties of the CSCAP process. Finally, there can be no doubt that the Asia-Pacific security regionalism process suffers a normative deficit. This is more than evident in the dynamics of the session on R2P. The sceptics did not dismiss the principle entirely but preferred to obscure their unease by calling for further study or suggesting a pragmatic way forward by agreeing to establishing a ‘coalition of the willing’ to undertake the bureaucratic preparations needed to facilitate further meetings on the subject. This procedure of making haste slowly masks the normative dissension behind the regional security enterprise. The ‘coalition of the willing’ comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines and the USA appears eager to lead the reluctance onto a more moral ground, but they are clearly encountering stiff opposition. The deficit of common values was even more evident when regional security architecture and naval confidence-building were discussed. The great powers were clearly stepping back from any tangible sense of a collective security approach, preferring to simply state their irreconcilable positions either in the clear or through indirect tones. By default, the ASEAN-associated mode of building comfort gradually, just by having CSCAP-type Track 2 diplomacy in operation, treats the operational form by itself as progress. This pragmatic moral vacuity has not been lost on China, which frequently appears to utilize the moral incrementalism offered by ASEAN’s mode of fostering lowest common denominator channels of dialogue as diplomatic cover.

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Southeast Asia Regional Security Forum (SEARSF), June 2010 The Southeast Asian Regional Security Forum 2010 was convened jointly by the Philippine Department of National Defence and the National Defence College of the Philippines under the direction set out by the ASEAN Regional Forum’s Inter-Sessional Support Group on Confidence-Building Measures. This support group had initiated a regular series of meetings under the label Meetings of the ARF Heads of Defence Universities, Colleges and Institutions for a total of eleven occasions to date. Their mission was to foster international cordiality in the Asia-Pacific by sharing ‘best practices and information among defence educational institutions towards capabilitybuilding’ (Manila TOR 2010: 1). The Philippines had decided that hosting the SEARSF would be a significant contribution in that regard. The author was informed that this event ought to be regarded as Track 1.5, which signalled that this merited a higher political standing than Track 2, while still being positioned as quasi-official in relation to meetings of foreign ministers and heads of governments. The conference followed almost the same format as CSCAP by featuring thematic panels and most of the representatives exhibited clear affiliations with their respective national defence establishments. Academics that were lined up for presentation mostly headed up research units in defence universities, or in the case of the Australian representative, enjoyed a joint affiliation with both the University of New South Wales and the Australian Defence Force Academy. In short, the SEARSF witnessed Asia-Pacific informal diplomacy conventions adhered to in full. For reasons of space, I shall recount the exchanges made in two representative panels, Panel 1 – Northeast Asia in the Context of Southeast Asian Security, and Panel 3 – Significance of ASEAN to Regional Cooperation, followed by a short section of analysis. The remaining panels dealing with the impact of South Asia, the utility of ASEAN, the US role, and the role of regional powers within the region, reprised most of the tenor of the exchanges in Panel 1. In keeping with the Chatham House Rules format of the SEARSF, the speakers shall be referred to cryptically in the format of the ‘Australian representative’, the ‘Vietnamese representative’ etc. SEARSF 2010 Panel 1 – Northeast Asia in the Context of Southeast Asian Security This section comprised three presenters respectively from Australia, the USA and Vietnam. The Australian representative spoke in part on the threat posed by rising Chinese power. He connected the alarming dots

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between Chinese support for recalcitrant regimes in North Korea and Myanmar, through to Chinese claims on Taiwan, and Beijing’s worrying posture towards the South China Sea island disputes. He went on to note that from Sun Tze to Mao Zedong, the Chinese have clearly possessed a strategic posture of deception, notwithstanding Beijing’s utterances of aspirations towards a ‘harmonious world’. In short, reassurances were needed to mediate the gap between Beijing’s words and deeds. Logically, Beijing stood to benefit from stability in the region. The Australian presentation ended by indicating that the US was generally welcomed by all Asia-Pacific states as a benign presence and it was suggested that China could become more of a partner in the region by practising more transparency in its military prof ile and diplomatic moves. Moreover, comprehensive security ought to be actualized by involving all great powers and regional states in dialogues, and while Australia’s Asia-Pacific Community proposal was overshadowed by ASEAN’s insistence on being in the driving seat of regionalism, it was time to move forward (SEARSF Australian Paper 2010). The American presentation focused squarely on the subject of assessing military transparency in the Asia-Pacific. It took the line that transparency was all about being able to assess a nation-state’s stated policy intentions against its military capabilities. In that regard, it was worthwhile comparing defence white papers in the Asia-Pacific against seven categories of transparency ranging from the security environment and national security goals to defence management and international activity of the respective national armed forces. What emerged from this comparison was the fact that Japan led the group in transparency, followed closely by Taiwan, with South Korea in third place. This left China and ASEAN in the middling category of having made some progress towards transparency, but not attaining its full measure. The remainder of the presentation featured scrutiny of China whereby it was suggested that Chinese transparency ought to be assessed across time, and among ‘peers’ such as Japan and South Korea, rather than among ASEAN states. The American representative assessed that while the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had improved on overall transparency by publishing documents and other statements concerning intentions and budget, there was still too little transparency concerning advanced capabilities such as anti-satellite testing, nuclear modernization and the aircraft carrier programme. The American representative concluded by praising Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia for making great strides in pushing their own national standards of military transparency (SEARSF American Paper 2010).

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In turn, the Vietnamese representative painted a fairly alarming picture of the Northeast Asian sub-region as being somewhat out of kilter with the dominant trend of peace and cooperation among states across the AsiaPacific. He noted that both Northeast and Southeast Asia constituted a reciprocal and interactive relationship which could benefit both sub-regions in interdependent development. Northeast Asia possessed strengths in capital and high technology while Southeast Asia complemented these with its labour force, markets and agricultural produce. Moreover, Southeast Asia sat astride important sea lanes of communication which Northeast Asian trade and energy supplies travelled through as well – the Straits of Malacca, Lombok, and Sunda, along with the South China and Philippine Seas. It was also a signal of immense cooperative possibilities when Northeast and Southeast Asian states forged a financial currency swap arrangement in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. The Vietnamese representative went on to note that military confrontations were still live in Northeast Asia, given the evidence of ongoing arms dynamics; sovereignty issues arising over island claims; and the sinking of the Cheonan in 2010. In closing, he suggested that Northeast Asia ought to engage in Southeast Asia’s interlocking pattern of enhancing bilateral and multilateral comprehensive security. Disputes should be resolved on the basis of international law and peaceful negotiation across multiple forums. The Vietnamese presentation hailed the positive potential behind the Six-Party Talks on security on the Korean Peninsula. He concluded by noting that Vietnam had hosted nine out of fifteen meetings and conferences within the ASEAN and ARF frameworks and was looking forward to hosting the inaugural ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Plus in October 2010, involving defence ministers from the ten ASEAN states and their eight dialogue partners from Australia, China, India, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia and the USA (SEARSF Vietnamese Paper 2010). Questions from the floor attempted to redirect attention towards ASEAN’s role in the wider Asia-Pacific security arrangement. A Singaporean representative queried the American presenter in this regard by asking whether defence white papers were the best indicator of political transparency. There were in fact other ways and means of projecting it through other forums. The American presenter agreed that defence white papers were only a start on the road towards a more transparent security arrangement, but a good start, nonetheless. A second Singaporean representative wondered aloud whether the prolonged crisis on the Korean Peninsula might be diverting attention from Southeast Asia’s achievements in mitigating conflict. The American representative added that in the USA, it was unfortunately quite true that

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the Afghanistan insurgency was diverting significant attention away from Southeast Asia. The Chinese representative spoke up in defence of China’s projected defence white paper, suggesting that everyone in the audience should understand that transparency could only be understood in relative terms. The Australian representative suggested that transparency should not be swept aside as a matter of relativity; it should be about whether a country’s military capability was correlated with its strategic goals. The Chinese representative reacted by reiterating that China’s strategic goals were clear; it was up to countries in the Asia-Pacific to treat them as credible or not. The Myanmar representative countered the Australian interpretation by stating that his country will never be a security threat to the region, noting that his government had behaved cooperatively towards both the UN and ASEAN.2 SEARSF 2010 Panel 3 – Significance of ASEAN to Regional Cooperation This panel featured a paper presented by the Chinese, South Korean and New Zealand representatives. The Chinese presentation emphasized the theme of ‘small countries lead, big powers participate’ as the modus operandi of ASEAN-led regionalism. ASEAN was an indispensable driver of East Asian regionalism for three reasons. Firstly, it enjoyed the historical position of being the initiator and facilitator of cooperation among great powers and weak states in the area. In the absence of stronger and more credible leadership visions from elsewhere, ASEAN set the pace. She openly acknowledged that rivalries between Japan, China and the USA inhibited their ability to forge regional community and that they were content to engage with ASEAN’s vision of inclusive community-building. ASEAN therefore served as the innermost circle of regionalism with the ASEAN Plus One, ASEAN Plus Three, the East Asia Summit, and so forth, in the outermost circles. Secondly, she pointed out that consequently, ASEAN has served a useful function in integrating the great powers. The ASEAN Regional Forum was singled out as the only genuine regional security arrangement in the Asia-Pacific, socializing China and engaging the USA in the region. Thirdly, the ASEAN Way has emerged as the standard of regional cooperation with its privileging of non-interference in the domestic realm, diplomatic consensus-building and informality. The Chinese presenter noted that ASEAN’s leadership position might not persist forever if it does not improve its overall levels of cohesion and intramural confidence-building. Furthermore, the ASEAN Regional 2 The account in this section was backed up by the notes produced for the concluding session of the Forum (SEARSF Wrap-up 2010).

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Forum and other institutions in the outermost ring of regionalism still suffer from overstretch in their agendas, along with structural limitations such as the unresolved rivalries among the great powers. ASEAN is, after all, a club of small and medium-sized countries. Additionally, China, Japan and South Korea have, in recent years, attempted to forge their own sub-regional trilateral cooperation mechanism involving summit-level meetings among their leaders. This might challenge the ASEAN Regional Forum’s relative marginalization of Northeast Asian security issues. Nonetheless, ASEAN can revel in its position as the fulcrum of Asia-Pacific regionalism, but in the future, this will be increasingly dependent upon ASEAN demonstrating its own credibility in fleshing out its own ambition to become a substantive community according to the vision outlined in the fully ratified ASEAN Charter (SEARSF Chinese Paper 2010). The South Korean presenter3 concurred mostly with his Chinese counterpart on ASEAN’s utility to the wider Asia-Pacific region. ASEAN was the innermost ring among multiple concentric circles of cooperation. For him, ASEAN-South Korean ties were cemented by the shared experience of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. This precipitated the formation of the ASEAN Plus Three and ASEAN Plus One meetings with Seoul. In recognition of shared developmental community with ASEAN, Seoul had since contributed some US$42 million to a special cooperation fund to seed projects. South Korea was also grateful that ASEAN had allowed North Korea to participate in its regionalism projects since this would mitigate Pyongyang’s sense of diplomatic isolation. The South Korean presentation nonetheless noted that ASEAN exhibited weaknesses in decision-making and implementation of principles of human rights and democracy. Meanwhile, it could not be denied that by working together, ASEAN and South Korea could exercise benevolent leadership in the region (SEARSF Wrap-up 2010). The New Zealand presentation also echoed the Chinese lead in positively appraising ASEAN as a remarkable non-military alliance regional organization devoted to accelerating economic growth, fostering social progress and cultural development. ASEAN was also a significant player through its profile as a grouping of ‘smaller non-threatening countries’ working together for peaceful purposes. Nevertheless, the New Zealand presenter questioned whether the ASEAN Way was a good diplomatic model to fol3 This speaker did not present any semblance of a paper to the Forum. The Forum organizers did not enforce their expectations upon him, even at the end of the proceedings. This summary depended almost exclusively on the author’s onsite notes, aside from a few points noted in the closing document found at SEARSF Wrap-up 2010.

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low. The ASEAN Way overindulged in process at the expense of progress; moreover, respecting the niceties of non-intervention into each member state’s internal affairs often reduced the organization to a ‘talkfest’. Perhaps there was a cultural code to ASEAN’s procedures which external powers could never fully appreciate. New Zealand was worried about the structural limitations of the ASEAN Regional Forum. Its broadness of membership and emphasis on reaching consensus inhibited practical conflict resolution. There were also many sensitive and explosive security issues that were frequently being excluded from the agenda. On its part, New Zealand had been proud to associate itself with the sponsorship of initiatives on preventive diplomacy and maritime security. In fact, New Zealand had cooperated with Indonesia on an ARF Experts and Eminent Persons meeting to review a Track 2 proposal on preventive diplomacy. That said, New Zealand remained committed to the ARF and its overlapping kin organization, the East Asia Summit. In his closing remarks, the New Zealander declared that ASEAN remained extremely important to institution-building in the Asia-Pacific region and that ASEAN-derived forums served as an important dialogue avenue for ‘non-Asians’ trying to understand and partner Asians in building security across the Asia-Pacific area (SEARSF New Zealand Paper 2010). Analysis of SEARSF There were apparently serious ideological divides between the Australians and Americans on the one hand and the Chinese on the other. There was also a pronounced gulf between an ASEAN-centred perspective on the regional security architecture and a generic liberal-influenced Western one. The American and Australian delegations minced no words concerning the China threat, not only during Panel 1, but throughout the entire duration of the Forum. There was also scant collective and informal interaction between the respective delegations from China, Australia and the USA. In fact, a similar pattern was reflected in the way the Americans and Australians were socially distanced from the Southeast Asian delegations. The latter seemed to understand that open-ended dialogue, or non-specific dialogue, was the only way to connect Myanmar to Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Cambodia and Brunei. Whereas the Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Bruneian and Cambodian representatives stayed mostly silent throughout the Forum’s proceedings, the Singaporeans were always keen to speak up for ASEAN’s centrality in driving a lowest common denominator security climate. The Chinese emerged as a self-declared friend of Southeast Asian representatives, preferring to

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embrace the stalling tactic of shrouding uncomfortable issues in relativity and obscurity. After all, the ASEAN Way is rather emblematic of perfecting diplomatic silences as a modus operandi of mitigating conflict among states. The cultural gap was also palpable, even if it was not explicitly addressed on the panel agendas. Chea Veasna, who was willing to be interviewed openly after the Forum, and to be identified as the Assistant to the Cabinet of the Deputy Prime Minister of Cambodia, argued that the purpose of such Track 1.5 meetings was to generate plurality in and of itself. In response to the question: ‘Should regionalism and great power responsibilities involve discussions of values by diplomatic or military representatives?’, Chea responded that ‘There should be more representatives from other institutions so that we can have more ideas related to broader issues and conflict resolutions’ (Chea 2010). Throughout the Forum, Chea kept reiterating to me that his principal concern was to ameliorate cross-border tensions between Cambodia and Thailand, indicating a discordant sub-dynamic at work within the so-called ‘ASEAN camp’. He said to me at every opportunity that the Thais were polite and correct, but kept a cool distance from his delegation (Chea 2010). Another interviewee willing to be quoted was the New Zealand Defence Attaché to Indonesia, Timor-Leste and the Philippines, who was present throughout the proceedings. In response to the same question posed to the Cambodians, he responded that: My take on [the above question] is that these are national values and respective national ethos. I would argue that to gain greater understanding of our colleagues and associates we should attempt to define and then explain our individual understanding of our respective values. For example, in the NZ Army we have clearly defined values of courage, commitment, comradeship and integrity, we then define our understanding of each of these. I believe that this makes us easier to understand as a group, therefore when we discuss any issues you know how [and] what drives us. (Hill 2010)

Certainly these two comments reinforce the probability that diplomatic silences and social distancing are symptomatic of multiple, cross-cutting cultural gaps in Asia-Pacific diplomacy. Finally, the tenor of the presentations, read in tandem with the diplomatic silences, imply that there is a normative deficit in the way Asia-Pacific diplomacy is currently being conducted. The Panel 3 presentations accentuate this point. The fact that the Chinese and South Korean representatives admit that a club of smaller and weaker states legitimately steer regionalism

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in the absence of political and ideological cohesion among the great powers makes a significant statement about the trough that Asia-Pacific regionalism lies in. The community that exists is thin in the absence of stronger normative foundations.

Conclusion: Why Is There No Common Diplomatic Frequency across the Asia-Pacific? In the preceding pages, an attempt to case study a set each of Track 2 and Track 1.5 diplomacies has revealed general value dissonance along with pockets of diplomatic civility. These informal track diplomacies were studied for their value in revealing the diplomatic veins that are simply hidden from sight in formal conferencing between government officials in Track 1 settings. The Asia-Pacific is clearly far from manifesting a Deutschean model on security community (Ball & Kwa 2010). Instead, the dearth of substantive international civility is masked by diplomatic silences, cultural gaps in communication and normative def icits in communication. These have been highlighted in genial language as well as indirect insinuations of disagreement. Academic discourse in these informal track diplomacies is being deployed as a convenient mask for inadequate overlapping political will, and worse, the absence of common values with which to erect a substantive regional community. The value rift is starkest between the ‘Western powers’ and Asian states. Secondarily, there are also rifts between the Chinese on the one hand, and the Japanese and Indians on the other. There are also rifts between Northeast and Southeast Asia, which are relatively minor compared to that between the ‘Western powers’ and the rest. These results, which are derived from participant observation, seem to conf irm that a Huntingtonian value dissension across the Pacific Ocean, while not incorrect, is inadequate in explaining why there is no common diplomatic frequency across the Asia-Pacific. The contiguous states inhabiting the Pacific Rim, through to South Asia, are also at a loss in reaching a common value consensus for advancing diplomatic regionalism. There are, in the meantime, small but tangible pockets of common values, such as avoiding overt conflict and masking unresolved issues through polite ambiguous language that leaves indefinite future space for conflict mitigation. It is therefore likely that projects concerning Asia-Pacif ic regionalism will be conf ined to operating at the value frequency of the lowest common denominator amongst participating states.

3

East Asian Governance Human Security, Development, and Exceptionalism1 Brendan Howe

Introduction According to a report by the Commission on Global Governance, ‘Governance is the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs’ (1995: 2). It is an ongoing and evolutionary process which looks to reconcile conflicting interests in order to protect the weak from unjust exploitation through the rule of law, and introduce security for all. Governance is also a process through which collective goods are generated so that all are better off than they would be acting individually. Thus governance implies a concern by those who govern with both the human security and development of those who are governed. In many cases, East Asian countries have prioritized economic development over social or political development. While this econophoria (whereby the solution of all society’s ills is sought through economic development) has contributed to remarkable patterns of economic growth, it has also seen the rise in importance of challenges to human security in both absolute and relative terms (Buzan & Segal 1998: 107). In 2008 controversies over national and international responses to the devastating cyclone in Burma/Myanmar and Chinese rule in Tibet, as well as severe civil unrest in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, gave an immediacy and urgency to the debate on the clash between state prerogatives, human rights and the duties of the international community. The year 2009 saw an ongoing focus on transnational human security issues in the region, with criticism of Chinese repatriation of North Korean refugees and Thai repatriation of ethnic Hmong from Laos. Many victims of the cyclone in Myanmar and also the earthquake which devastated parts of China’s Sichuan Province in the same month, found themselves victimized a second time by the insufficient responses of regimes that seemed unable or unwilling to provide for them (BBC 2009a). The year 2010 saw a resurgent spectre of famine in North Korea, and the spillover of human insecurity

1

Research supported by the Global Top 5 Grant 201X of Ewha Womans University.

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in that country into the international arena.2 Meanwhile, members of the international community are increasingly asserting a right to intervene to protect the human security of individuals against the prerogatives of states. This chapter examines the close and complex relationship between human security and development in East Asia, addressing the responsibilities of regional governments to provide for both sets of human needs and entitlements, and also raises the question of what can be done if national administrations fail in their duties. Traditionally the region has been seen as a zone of non-intervention where state prerogatives, as the definitive embodiment of political community and shared values, are seen to trump individual human rights. Yet while the constitutive documents of Asian international organizations and codified positive international law continue to reflect a non-interventionary position which accords well with what is often described as ‘Asian values’, this stance has come under increasing pressure from the customary elements of international law embodied in the customs and usages of civilized nations, and the works of jurists and commentators, culminating in acknowledgement of a responsibility to protect. Yet given that non-violent threats to lives and livelihoods endanger more human beings in Asia than war, terrorism and ethnic cleansing combined, the extent to which the regional community has a ‘responsibility to provide’ is also addressed. Thus this chapter considers the philosophical underpinnings for and future of exceptionalism in East Asia in the face of solidarist claims and pressures from internal and external constituencies. The findings are that while there are differing normative traditions between East and West, at least regarding the policy implications of governance norms, nevertheless there is an overlapping consensus on the protection of certain human entitlement rights, and the prevention of the grossest violations even at the expense of state-centric political sovereignty and territorial integrity. State constitutions and the constitutive documents of regional organizations may continue to reflect a communitarian interpretation of governance and reject external interference; nevertheless, in the contemporary international climate no state remains a normative island, and no authoritarian regime is immune to the demands of internal and external constituencies. We may not have reached a true normative environment of universal human rights, but a strong case can be made for practices which ‘shock the conscience of the world’ (Geneva Convention IV: 1a), amounting to universal human wrongs. 2

See Howe (2010) for an extensive discussion on this issue.

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Human Security, Development and Governance3 Human Security The concept of security in international affairs was originally developed to deal with conflict between states. It is conventionally defined as the protection of ‘the territorial integrity, stability, and vital interests of states through the use of political, legal, or military instruments at the state or international level’ (King & Murray 2001: 588). This so-called ‘traditional’ notion of security is related more to states than to people, and is often used interchangeably with national security, which is defined as the promotion of ‘rights ascribed to nations rather than to individuals, sub-national groups or mankind as a whole, and which subordinates other interests to those of the nation’ (Wolfers 1952: 481). In general the field relates to the investigation of the causes of war. Conflict is seen as inevitable, but cooperation (however limited) is always a possibility. Indeed, conflict need not always be seen as negative – it is one of the paths to maturity in both individuals and societies, and is often necessary for social change. It is the worst manifestation of conflict, major interstate wars, that preoccupies the thinking of traditional security theorists and practitioners. The major concerns have revolved around the concepts of military capabilities, the distribution and balance of power in the international system, and policy prescription in terms of the strategic implications of these considerations. Security itself is, however, an essentially contested concept. Definitions range from the traditional state-centric one of a relative freedom from war, coupled with a relatively high expectation that defeat will not be a consequence of any war that should occur; through the systemic implying both coercive means to check an aggressor and all manner of persuasion, bolstered by the prospect of mutually shared benefits, to transform hostility into cooperation; to the consideration of insecurity or vulnerabilities – both internal and external – that threaten or have the potential to bring down or weaken state structures (Collins 2007: 3). New thinking on security has gradually come to the fore in the field, with input from academics and also from practitioners in international organizations and states. Critical and postmodern perspectives have tended to conceive of security as emancipation or the freedom to carry 3 For a detailed elaboration on the relationship between human security and development, see Holliday & Howe (2011).

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out what one would freely choose to do. The constructivists of the Copenhagen School introduced the concept of securitization, examining how certain issues are transformed into matters of national security by those acting on behalf of a state. In the early 1980s Japan adopted a ‘sogo anzen hosho [comprehensive security]’ policy under the direction of Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. 4 Comprehensive security not only looked beyond the traditional security elements of individual self-defence by focusing on regional and global security arrangements, but also stressed the need to take into account other aspects vital to national stability such as food, energy, environment, communication and social security (see Akaha 1991; Radke & Feddema 2000). An explicitly inclusive approach that emphasized multilateralism can be traced to Japanese thinking on security as far back as the 1950s. Non-traditional security issues are now high on the agenda in other parts of the world and are often termed ‘new security challenges’ and include a focus on non-military rather than military threats, transnational rather than national threats, and multilateral or collective rather than self-help security solutions (see Acharya 2002a; Wæver 1995). In fact, in light of these international developments, Japan’s security policy can be seen as increasingly normal (Olsen 2004). But Japan has also been instrumental in pushing forward the next step in the evolution of security conceptualization, providing many of the policy initiatives and much of the impetus for the development of the human security discourse, and acting as the largest contributor to the human security related practices and institutions of the UN. The concept of human security is in fact rooted in the ideals of the UN, which was founded on the principle that it would always give equal weight to all territories and people. In 1945, the US Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius Jr., suggested that there were two major components of human security: freedom from fear and freedom from want, which he argued that both should be given equal weight (UNDP 1994: 4). Human security is an emerging multidisciplinary paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities at the level of individual human beings. It incorporates methodologies and analysis from a number of research f ields, including Strategic and Security Studies, Development Studies, Human Rights, International Relations and the study of international 4 Following the recommendations of a group commissioned by his predecessor, Masayoshi Ohira, from the National Institute for the Advancement of Research commissioned to study change in the international environment and Japan’s response.

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organizations. It exists at the point where these disciplines converge on the concept of protection. The Commission on Human Security (CHS) in its f inal report, Human Security Now, def ines human security in the following way: Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms – freedoms that are the essence of life. It means protecting people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations. It means using processes that build on people’s strengths and aspirations. It means creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity. (CHS 2003: 4)

During the Cold War, with the looming shadow of a nuclear holocaust, the focus was on the freedom from fear, rather than freedom from want. Yet as intra-state conflicts or conflicts involving non-state actors have sharply increased since the end of the Cold War, the international community has been struggling to respond effectively. The complexity of the many perils threatening people’s daily lives tended to involve transnational dimensions and moved beyond national security. Such threats ranged from poverty, unemployment and drugs, to terrorism, environmental degradation and social disintegration (UNDP 1994: 11). The changing understanding of security was also driven by many developing countries that were sensitive to any threats to their already fragile national identity after their recent independence (UNDP 1994: 22). In some cases, protection of national identity came at the expense of ignoring the concerns of citizens who sought security in their daily lives. For these common citizens, security meant ‘protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards’, the very things that would grant their daily survival (UNDP 1994: 22). The international community also began to see security threats not only between, but also within states, and focus on people in addition to states.5 This posed a challenge to the existing concept of security, which was exclusively concerned with territorial integrity and national sovereignty. It is in this context that the term

5 According to the WHO’s World Report on Violence and Health, only 7 out of 110 conflicts recorded between 1989 and 2000 were between states; the rest were civil wars (WHO 2002: 218).

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human security was born to shed light on the significance of security at the level of individuals. Non-traditional security issues have the potential to become traditional security threats, and issues of human security can morph into pressing concerns for state survival or regional and global peace and security. Thus it may be in the enlightened self-interest of states and statesmen as well as the international community to pay attention to non-traditional and human security concerns. Once the vicious cycle between national and human insecurity is recognized, therefore, it becomes at least plausible that one way to address human insecurity is to help the target state ameliorate its national security concerns, and vice versa, with the amelioration of human security concerns helping a target state feel less threatened. To seek freedom from fear is to provide for national security. Thus in terms of the good governance concept of reconciling conflicting interests and providing security for all, Asian states and the international community need to address not only state-centric traditional security concerns but also non-traditional and human security developments. Therefore, not only is there growing consensus that addressing human security concerns is morally the right thing to do, it may also be strategically the right thing to do in terms of narrowly defined national interest. The relationship between the different components of security described above is represented in Table 3.1. The table also highlights traditional and non-traditional approaches to the second aspect of global governance, the generation of collective goods.

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Table 3.1 Theoretical and practical elements of global governance

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE RECONCILE CONFLICTING INTERESTS/PROTECT GENERATE COLLECTIVE GOOD/ INTERESTS AGAINST OTHERS FACILITATE COOPERATION Traditional State-Centric Security Defence, Deterrence, Arms-Racing, Balance of Power, Security Dilemma, Conflict Management, Conflict Resolution

Non-Traditional Human Security Security/New Challenges

Human Development

Traditional Development/ IPE

State-centric RecipientResponsibilNatural Development, focused, ity to Protect, Disasters, Disease, Global Freedom from Human-centric, IGOs (UN, WTO, IMF, World Fear, Genocide Participatory, Warming, Bank, etc.), Aid. New Prevention, Pollution, Foreign Direct Donors and Humanitarian Terrorism, Investment, Intervention, Actors, PartnerTransFree Trade, ships, NonExplosive national Crime, Hierarchical, Traditional ODA Remnants of Resources NGOs, HDI War (ERW), Peacekeeping Responsibility to Provide Shelter, Food, Water, Meaningful Occupation, Stability, Life Expectancy, Infant Mortality, Maternal Mortality, Education, Health, Conflict Transformation, Freedom from Want.

Collective Goods International contributions to the generation of collective goods have traditionally taken place through the auspices of the agencies of neoliberal international political economics and development. On the one hand, free trade through the breaking down of tariff and non-tariff barriers is supposed to promote collective goods through win-win and trickle-down economic models. On the other, poverty, hunger and other manifestations of underdevelopment were to be tackled through modernization, industrialization, and the exploitation and domination of the natural operating environment, in part supported internationally through official development assistance (ODA), foreign direct investment (FDI) loans, and technology transfer. Far from being a universal win-win, however, unfettered free trade always generates some losers in the global marketplace, and the forces of development themselves can actually undermine both the human security and well-being of the most vulnerable.

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For example, resettlement policies in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) aimed at moving rural communities closer to existing health facilities, economic markets and public infrastructure have in many cases instead decreased land availability and led to increased food shortages. Migration can exacerbate already tenuous livelihood situations in the original upland or highland villages and increase exposure to human security threats such as new diseases, traff icking and exploitation (UNDP-GOL 2006: 44). Displacement to lower land areas and deforestation can diminish the amount of non-timber forest products, hunting and f ishing available, thereby decreasing the nutritional intake and threatening the human security of displaced persons. Likewise drug addiction and traff icking patterns are changing as the country develops. Amphetamine-type stimulants and intravenous drugs are increasingly used among the Lao population, in particular by the youth. The increased openness of the country to trade and communication networks has exposed it to easier transit and increasing trafficking from neighbouring Thailand, Myanmar and China. Development and resettlement have contributed to urbanization and young people living in urban and border areas are the most vulnerable to fall into the consumption of such drugs (in contrast to opium addiction) (Laugen 2004). Rising urban unemployment exacerbates the human security threat to the youth of Lao PDR. Table 3.1 therefore further highlights the complex relationship between traditional and non-traditional development models. As can also be seen from this table, there is, furthermore, an intimate relationship between the reconciliation of conflicting interests/security and the provision of collective goods. This is particularly the case at the level of the individual human being, where global obligations/responsibilities coalesce around the entitlement rights of freedom from fear and freedom from want. In both theory and practice, the closest relationship exists between human security as the protection of persons, and human development as the meeting of basic human needs. Human security and human development are both people-centred and challenge the orthodox approaches to security and development, state security and liberal economic growth. Both stress that people are to be seen as ultimate ends but never as means, and both treat humans as agents who should be empowered to participate in the process of their own needsatisfaction. Both perspectives are multidimensional, and address people’s dignity as well as their material and physical concerns. And as will be developed further in this chapter, both can be seen as imposing governance

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duties on national governments, and potential obligations to intervene on the wider global community when national governments fail in their governance duties. In terms of human rights, therefore, human security and development may be considered aspects of international entitlement rights. These are understood to be what states and the wider international community should provide for the citizens of the world, as each individual has certain rights and entitlements by virtue of being a human being. In other words, the key questions are ‘What are our basic entitlements?’ and ‘What are the duties imposed on others?’ On the positive side of the relationship, human security and development can be seen as mutually reinforcing. A peaceful environment frees individuals and governments to move from a focus on mere survival to a position where they can consider improvement of their situation. Likewise, as a society develops, it is able to afford more (hospitals, schools, welfare networks, etc.) and thus build up the human security of the general populace. On the negative side, as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed in his 2005 report In Larger Freedom, ‘we will not enjoy security without development, development without security, and neither without respect for human rights. Unless all these causes are advanced, none will succeed’. Conflict retards development and underdevelopment can lead to conflict. Indeed, the prevalence of warfare around the globe has resulted in post-conflict development becoming ‘the norm rather than the exception’ (Junne & Verkoren 2005: 318). The negative reinforcement of insecurity and underdevelopment can continue long after the official cessation of hostilities. The question then arises as to the duties imposed on the international community when the leaders of a community fail in their responsibility to protect the human security and basic human needs of their citizens. A reinterpretation of the concept of states’ rights as privileges granted to them in trust by their citizens has allowed the international community to consider the violation of states’ legal rights of political sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yet East Asian states have clung steadfastly to their prerogatives and to the international norm of non-intervention. For Chu Shulong, ‘East Asia is one of few areas in the world where most countries strongly defend traditional concepts of national sovereignty and firmly resist foreign intervention in the internal affairs of independent states’ (2001). The next section considers the case for Asian exceptionalism in the field of international governance.

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Asian Values and Governance Exceptionalism Although perhaps no other region on earth is as culturally and socio-economically diverse, opposition to Western liberal or universal cosmopolitan values emanating from East Asia has tended to be identified collectively as the challenge of ‘Asian values’ (Khong 1997). Henry Nau notes that the lack of full protection for civil liberties in Asia ‘reflects the significantly different traditions regarding the relationship of the individual to society. Nowhere in Asia is there a celebration of political individualism as we know it in the West, either in political thought or in historical events such as the Reformation or Enlightenment’ (2002: 163). Furthermore, he claims that authority patterns ‘infuse all social relationships – in the family (Confucianism), in religion (Buddhism and Islam), and in the state (Shintoism)’ (2002: 164). The Asian challenge to solidarism can be seen in cultural, economic and political terms. Culturally, it asserts that the Western liberal or universalist approach ignores the specific cultural traditions and historical circumstances of Asian societies, whose interpretations of human rights are different from those in the West. Economically, it maintains that the priority of developing Asian societies has to be the eradication of poverty. Politically it calls into question the motives of the West, accusing it of using human rights merely as an instrument for advancing Western economic or security interests – ‘power politics in disguise’ and a shallow pretence for the use of force against regimes which stand up to Western neo-imperialism. Essentially, the Asian values debate poses a communitarian epistemological challenge to liberal individualism and solidarism. Communitarians address the necessity of attending to the demands of community alongside (or prior to) liberty and equality. In other words, we must pay attention to the shared practices and values within each society which constitute a distinct understanding of the common good, its generation and its distribution, but also, society or community is itself a collective good which must at the very least be weighed against other rights. There are human rights, but due to the problem of the particularism of history, culture and membership, the political community to which individuals belong is the best agency for their defence (Walzer 1983: 5). For Michael Walzer, the political community (qua state) is the closest we can come to a world of common meanings as it is where language, history and culture come most closely together to produce a collective consciousness (1985: 218). A broad resistance to encroachment upon state prerogatives

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does seem to be reflected in the day-to-day diplomacy of the East Asian region. In December 1990, when the UN decided to convene a World Conference on Human rights, several Asian states questioned the applicability of universal human rights in different cultural, economic and social settings. The Asian regional preparatory meeting which took place in Bangkok in 1993 provided an opportunity for Asian governments to put forward their definition of human rights. The Bangkok Declaration, signed by over forty Asian governments, did not reject universal human rights, but suggested that universality should be considered ‘in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds’ (Article 8). The Asian states also sought to link development issues with human rights questions and emphasize the importance of non-interference (Articles 4-6 and 17-19). Indeed, for Kenneth Christie and Denny Roy, ‘development has assumed cult-like status’ in East Asia (2001: 5). The constitutive documents of regional organizations also appear to reflect a state-centric focus on governance. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) adheres to the ‘ASEAN Way’, by which is meant: a. Mutual respect for the independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity and national identity of all nations; b. The right of every State to lead its national existence free from external interference, subversion or coercion; c. Non-interference in the internal affairs of one another. (ASEAN Secretariat 1976)

Likewise, the only formal security treaty organization among states in Northeast Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), has promoted the ‘Shanghai Spirit’ based on ‘mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for multicivilizations, striving for common development’, and, according to the 2001 Declaration on the Establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Members will ‘mutually respect independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, not interfere in each other’s internal affairs’. East Asian regimes wishing, however, to perpetuate a model of regional exceptionalism with regard to governance norms and practices face challenges from wider international communities, and from their own internal constituencies. The next two sub-sections address these pressures for universal governance conformity.

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International Pressures A prohibition against intervention has deep roots in International Law. In fact, positive law has been overwhelmingly supportive of state sovereignty and rejecting of a right to intervene in the affairs of sovereign states. Violence has only been endorsed as a way of preventing greater violence or in cases of self-defence. Thus each state, according to positive law, has a duty of non-intervention into the affairs of other states, and Asian states espousing non-intervention and the constitutive documents of regional organizations could be seen to be broadly in line with such global rules. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways in which, at the very least, the normative legitimacy of the non-intervention position can be challenged, and perhaps even its legality. First, if violence is in fact endorsed in as much as it prevents greater violence and produces a situation more conducive to peace and security, given the reformulation of the security paradigm above, it may be that at least under some circumstances, humanitarian intervention may turn out to be a legitimate way to reduce violence at least at the level of human security. Second, international treaties constitute only one of the sets of rules which constrain and enable states and statesmen in their day-to-day diplomacy and policy formulation. Customary international law provides a further source of such rules. In fact, Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, a codified piece of international legislation generally acknowledged as definitive, recognizes that the Court shall apply International Law as derived from: –– international conventions, whether general or particular, establishing rules expressly recognized by the contesting states; –– international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law; –– the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations; –– subject to the provisions of Article 59, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations, as subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law. This means that in addition to international treaties, other international conventions expressly recognized by contesting states (such as UN General Assembly resolutions), international customary law, general principles, and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists must also be recognized as valid, although subsidiary, sources of international law. This holds important implications for our analysis. If states generally act as if, and leading publicists recognize that, sovereignty is not inviolate, then indeed, an international legal justification of military action in violation of

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sovereignty is available. If sovereignty can be challenged, and if there are certain things that states may not do to their citizens, then the normative value attached to non-intervention must be weighed against that attached to other commonly held values that are being violated in order to judge the legitimacy of intervention. Even if we refrain from addressing such norms under the rubric of legality, it is clear that in recent years members of the international community of states, and the chief spokespersons for this community have spoken and acted as if there are such normative constraints – perhaps rules governing the legitimacy of state action or inaction. For Jack Donnelly there is a ‘remarkable international normative consensus on the list of rights’ found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (quoted in Dunne & Wheeler 1999: 7). And according to Dunne and Wheeler, ‘[w]hat further strengthens Donnelly’s claim that there is a normative consensus underlying the human rights regime is the fact that in the daily round of diplomacy [i.e. international custom], state leaders justify their human rights policies in terms of these standards’ (1999: 7). For example, the central mission of UNESCO might be ‘peace’, but this is to be founded on the ‘intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind’ based on ‘shared values’ rather than regional particularism or exceptionalism. In the aftermath of the 1990-1991 Gulf War, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali noted in his Agenda for Peace that the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty has passed and that it is ‘the task of leaders of States today to understand this and to find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world’ (1995). That is to say, no state is immune to the demands and rights of its internal and external constituencies, and the UN, as the embodiment of the international community, will not tolerate the hindrance of its ‘great objectives’ of peace and security, justice and human rights and ‘social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom’ (Boutros-Ghali 1995). In December 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) released a report entitled The Responsibility to Protect. In the intervening years this new paradigm has gained momentum and garnered international recognition. While states remain primarily responsible for the protection of their citizens, this perspective is also closely associated with the international duty to provide ‘safe havens’ ensuring freedom from fear. In response to this international normative shift, at the High-Level Plenary Meeting for the 2005 World Summit, the world’s leaders at the General Assembly agreed on a ‘responsibility to protect’ which included a ‘clear and unambiguous acceptance by all governments of the

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collective international responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (UN General Assembly 2005). Resolution 1674, adopted by the United Nations Security Council on April 28, 2006, ‘[r]eaffirm[ed] the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ and commits the Security Council to action to protect civilians in armed conflict (UN Security Council 2006). This resolution was adopted unanimously, including by the Asian members. Both of these documents amount to international conventions expressly recognized by contesting states. In both policy debate and the academic literature, however, freedom from want is becoming more important in both absolute and relative terms than freedom from fear. The rationale for focusing on freedom from need as central to human security is that hunger, disease and natural disasters between them kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined (CHS 2003; Human Security Research Group 2009). Furthermore, war-related deaths have been declining, and the international community is both more likely to be informed of internal acts of aggression, and more likely to act against them than in previous decades. It is for this reason that the most assertive champions of human security are beginning to call for ‘aid invasions’ in cases when states cause massive infringements on the human security of their citizens through deliberate action, incompetence, obstruction or neglect. If the goal of humanitarian intervention is to minimize human suffering, then ‘aid invasions’ may be more justifiable than those merely enforcing a responsibility to protect. International pressures have also coalesced within the region. In July 1998, then-Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan of Thailand proposed that ASEAN adopt a policy of flexible engagement, which involved discussions of fellow members’ domestic policies. As he noted on 6 May 2008 (by this time ASEAN Secretary-General), in a speech supportive of the concepts and critical of attachments to state sovereignty in the region, although flexible engagement was rejected, ultimately the new ASEAN political and security community which came to the fore, was ‘much more intrusive, much more aggressive, much more alien to the ASEAN mental perception than my initial idea in 1998 about flexible engagement’. In this later speech Pitsuwan explicitly linked human security, the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention, emphasizing how the world has changed and that ASEAN and indeed the Asia-Pacif ic can do no less.

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In addition to Thailand’s representatives, statesmen and spokespersons from Malaysia and even China have become critical of aspects of Myanmar’s governance. The May 2009 Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Hanoi, Vietnam, was dominated by questions regarding an international response to the continued persecution of Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi by the military junta. Interestingly, criticism of the regime came not only from the Western liberal individualistic states of Europe, but also from Myanmar’s fellow ASEAN members. In the week leading up to the meeting, ASEAN released a statement expressing ‘grave concern’ over her treatment, which attracted an old-school Asian values response from the military regime that Thailand (the current chair of ASEAN) was interfering in Myanmar’s internal affairs by releasing the organization’s critical message (BBC 2009b). East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta and the Burma Lawyers’ Council have announced they are ready to go to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to charge Senior General Than Shwe with human rights abuses and violations of international law in Burma.

Internal Constituencies Authoritarian Asian states face a number of internal normative challenges when attempting to justify policies that negatively impact human rights. First, while it may be possible to talk of pluralistic principles of justice and distribution based on historically- and culturally-generated divergent understandings of social goods, these understandings of social goods may historically and culturally have been generated in the interests of only a small and distinct section of the community. Civil society groups in many Asian countries are increasingly vociferous in condemning such unjust privilege and prioritization, whether with regard to caste (India and other South Asian societies), ethnicity (Malaysia), religion (Philippines), age/ generation (South Korea) or gender. Second, with democratization of the media, it has become harder for governments to perpetrate, cover up or turn a blind eye to inhumane practices within their jurisdictions or within those of fellow Asian states. Thus, when Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in 1997 queried the applicability of the central tenet of cosmopolitan norms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by pointing out that many Asian states were not able to participate in its drafting as they were under the boot of colonial oppression at the time, he was forced to back down by public demonstrations of support for the document.

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David Shambaugh has identif ied international relations in Asia as increasingly a two-level game, whereby societies of the region are interconnected to an unprecedented degree (2008: 3). ‘New Preachers’ – NGOs and civil society community activists – have sprouted in many countries in the region to uphold humanitarian causes, and to pressure governments and corporations (Chanda 2008: 307). These activists have also linked with international bodies and fellow activists in other countries for coordination and support. Thus the authoritarian state’s efforts to maintain its power are challenged by the mutually reinforcing trends of the constant diffusion of information and the rise of civil society activism (Chanda 2008: 308-309). In Burma, dissidents and monks have not only taken to the streets to campaign for freedom from fear and freedom from hunger, but have also been able to broadcast images of the brutality of the Myanmar military junta regime both within the country and to the wider international audience, creating further internal and external pressures on the government for reform. China is perhaps seen as the greatest champion of Asian values and bulwark against solidarist interventionary policies, as it has the resources to stand up to Western or universalist critique without fear of intervention. Even the People’s Republic, however, is showing signs of normative shift. The larger hope for the region is that as China continues its phenomenal economic progress, a natural and inevitable by-product will be the emergence of a true Chinese civil society that in turn will press for political liberalization. Zbigniew Brzezinski claims: ‘It is impossible to envision a long-term process of increasing economic pluralism without the appearance of civil society in China that eventually begins to assert its political aspiration’ (in Nau 2002: 165). China already faces more than 90,000 protests annually as a result of endemic corruption and ongoing crises in public health and the environment (Economy 2008). China has to perform a delicate balancing act between expanding its economy to avoid domestic unrest and responding to calls, mainly from the West, for the country to act as a ‘responsible stakeholder’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2009). Even if the majority of the Asian population supports the prioritization of collective goods over individual rights within the epistemological framework of their community-generated normative understanding, in all such societies responsibility is a two-way street. While individuals are perceived as having duties towards the community rather than rights against it, nevertheless the collective state, or its representatives, likewise has a duty towards the citizens to look after their collective goods.

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Conclusion Asian exceptionalism in the field of governance survives in the constitutive documents of regional international organizations, and in many of the foreign policy priorities of Asian states. They are also to be found forming the epistemological foundations of communitarian societies. They do not, however, permit Asian governments to violate the rights of their citizens with impunity. Indeed, those authorities which hide behind claims of ‘Asian Values’ to justify such abuses are facing an increasing challenge from internal and external communities and from the changing nature of international law and norms, which may even lead to militarized humanitarian intervention. There is something like a global overlapping consensus emerging on governance regarding the need simultaneously to support the concepts of individual human rights, the universal responsibility to protect and a lingering respect for state sovereignty and primacy. It may be possible to accept the claims of exceptionalists, communitarians and relativists that we are historically and culturally situated, and that indeed in Asia these forces are particularly strong, yet nevertheless identify certain universal duties in terms of providing safe havens of freedom from fear and freedom from want. There are universal entitlement rights common to and inherent in all forms of governance. This is not because of the universal acceptance of Western liberal individualist traditions, but rather because all normative traditions, including those in Asia, accept that there are certain practices or operational circumstances which ‘shock the conscience of humankind’ and should be stopped, regardless of whether the national authorities give their consent, and that there exists a concurrent obligation on those in positions of authority to protect and provide for those for whom they are responsible. Regional foreign policies have certainly been transformed by this international normative shift. On 14 September 2009 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution A/63/L80 Rev.1 entitled ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ which had been co-sponsored by 67 member states, including a number of states from the Asia-Pacific region. Only seven states sought to play down the importance of the document, stressing that in their opinion the resolution was strictly procedural, and none of these came from the Asia-Pacific region (Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect 2009). In the wake of North Korea’s second nuclear test in May 2009 the People’s Republic of China showed a willingness to get tough with friends and neighbours by siding with Russia and the Western permanent members of the UN Security Council in condemning North Korea’s actions. There are grounds

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for believing that China may change its resistance to foreign interference in Myanmar either due to a belief that the junta, like North Korea’s regime, has overstepped even the minimal standards of acceptable behaviour expected of Beijing’s allies, or because Beijing would prefer to focus the expenditure of political capital on defending those regimes of more obvious and immediate material benefit, such as Sudan. Although certainly not an ardent supporter of potential intervention, China is not the steadfast opponent of principles like the Responsibility to Protect that is often portrayed. In fact, in its role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China has twice endorsed the principle specifically – at the 2005 World Summit and in the reaffirming Security Council Resolution 1674 (Bellamy & Davies 2009: 556). With regard to Myanmar, it has provided diplomatic support for the use of the Secretary-General’s good offices, and remains open to the idea of ASEAN playing a leading role in addressing Myanmar (Bellamy & Davies 2009: 557). Despite expressing concern regarding the use of NATO aircraft to provide safe havens for civilians in Libya during the 2011 uprising against a regime committing atrocities against its own people, China refrained from using its veto. A ‘rising Asia’, however, also has considerable capacity and opportunity to influence the evolution of global governance and the provision of freedom from fear and freedom from want. The evolution of the R2P doctrine itself is reflective of increased engagement between Asian states and the wider international community. The initial ICISS report was very permissive of humanitarian intervention and East Asia was under-represented on the panel that drafted the document. The World Summit Document, being a General Assembly resolution, has more legal ‘weight’, not the least due to the near universal representation at the General Assembly, but it was more restrictive in terms of the use of force. Indeed, it appears to reaffirm the traditional pre-eminence of the Security Council and the restrictions imposed on UN and other international actions by international law. Security Council Resolution 1674 takes a similarly restrictive line. As such, the whole paradigm has been made more palatable to Asian states. This might serve to explain Vietnam’s dramatic shift ‘from a position close to opposition to R2P in 2004-2005 to one of relatively positive R2P engagement’ at the World Summit and for Resolution 1674 (Bellamy & Davies 2009: 561). All three Northeast Asian donors, Japan, China and South Korea, have been criticized for the nature of their international assistance. Foreign aid literature has long been critical of Japan’s prioritization of its own national interest in determining aid policy, and Japan does indeed have a significantly

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higher ratio of tied to untied aid than many other donors. Beijing has also been the target of criticism for its policies. Other international actors are concerned that by giving aid without conditions and without coordination with the international community, China’s programmes could run counter to the efforts by these other actors to use targeted and sustainable aid to promote transparency and good governance. China’s ODA is often seen as targeted to secure access to resources or to shore up diplomatic support against Taiwan. Finally, South Korea has been criticized not only for its relatively low level of ODA as a proportion of GDP, but also for high levels of tied aid, similar to Japan’s policies. Nevertheless, significant collateral benefit in terms of regional development and human security has accrued as a by-product of Japanese strategic positioning. First Chinese, then Southeast Asian industrial infrastructure has been developed using Japanese funds, and in turn the strengthening of infrastructure has attracted and facilitated the inflow of FDI from multinational corporations. Japanese aid and human security initiatives may well have been motivated in part by national interest, but by happy coincidence, other peoples in the region have benefited significantly from their pursuance. China is in the unique position of being trusted by regimes labelled as ‘rogue’ by the West, such as Myanmar and North Korea, and thus humanitarian assistance is less likely to be viewed as external interference in sovereign states. Finally, as a new emerging donor of ODA, South Korea symbolizes three things: (1) its rapid rise from one of the poorest countries in the world to the thirteenth largest economy is a message of hope to other developing countries; (2) South Korea’s rapid economic development was accompanied by democratization; and (3) these milestones were achieved in the context of insecurity. Furthermore, South Korea is unique among donors in not suffering from any neo-imperial baggage. Thus global governance norms and regional foreign policies and diplomacy in East Asia can be seen to be following a mutually constitutive process. Rising Asia does not imply the beginning of the end of international normative consensus, but rather a stronger paradigm of overlapping consensus built on foundations in both the East and the West.

4

International Politics in Northeast Asia A Case for Stability Artyom Lukin

Introduction Northeast Asia’s1 already high standing in the world order continues to rise. There are now hardly any doubts that this formerly peripheral regional system will shape the global international order in the 21st century. There is a substantial amount of conflict and tension in the region, including flashpoints such as the Korean Peninsula, issues over Taiwan, various territorial disputes, etc. Northeast Asia is still lacking a solid and working system of cooperation to ensure mutual security. What are, then, the principal reasons for this state of affairs? First, there is a lack of mutual trust, which leads to acute security dilemmas. Real trust is possible only among those who know and understand each other well. To be able to find solid common ground, the countries need to have similar basic characteristics, including the same or, at least, compatible values. As a rule, the more homogenous the states are, the more likelihood there is that they are going to be partners rather than rivals. However, Northeast Asian states are separated by great differences in terms of culture, economic systems, political regimes and ideology. Until these gaps are bridged, it will be difficult for them to share common terms of understanding and trust each other. Second, Northeast Asia is still plagued by mutual resentments, animosities and traumata rooted in history. Third, Northeast Asia is a unique region, the only of its kind, as most of its constituent units either already hold great power mantles (the US, China, Russia, Japan) or strongly aspire to major power status (both Koreas, South and North). This makes them highly ambitious, fuelling contests for leadership. Fourth, the core Northeast Asian states (China, Japan and the two Koreas) are characterized by nationalist sentiments of high intensity. Nationalism is closely connected to the Westphalian type of international relations based 1 Northeast Asia is understood here as an international-political region comprising China (the mainland and Taiwan), Japan, Korea (North and South), Russia, and the United States. China, Japan, and Korea are often seen as the core states of NEA.

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on sovereign nation-states. The Westphalian order emerged in Europe in the mid-17th century and afterwards spread to other parts of the world. The development of the Westphalian system in Europe was accompanied by the growth in great power nationalism, which climaxed in the first half of the 20th century with the two world wars. Since the second half of the 20th century, many Western countries, especially in Western Europe, started a gradual transition to the post-Westphalian order under which sovereignty and nationalism are no longer seen as unconditionally positive values. Whereas in the West, the notion of a nationalistic nation-state with unbound sovereignty is viewed by many as an anachronism to be overcome, in Asia it may be well in its prime. Being home to ancient civilizations, China, Korea and Japan are still relatively young as modern nation-states. The Western model of a nation-state began to take root in Northeast Asia relatively late, in the second half of the 19th century. But for now, the Westphalian state-centric order prevails in the region. In Northeast Asia’s international relations, non-state actors play only minor roles. Nation-states, as the actor of international relations system, have no real competitors in this region. Northeast Asia, in its present form, is an international system of the classical Westphalian kind – typical of the modern era. The classical Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states, along with the phenomenon of mass nationalism, leads to intensified conflicts in the international arena, as exemplified by the First and Second World Wars that were unleashed by the European states in the age of modernity. Asia provides similar examples. Thus, China and India, which had peacefully coexisted for more than 2,000 years, became strategic adversaries once they started building modern nation-states. This is also the case in the China-Japan relationship, which had been generally peaceful, but turned into bitter antagonism since the late 19th century. In sum, there is an array of powerful factors fuelling rivalry and conflict in Northeast Asia. However, there also exist systemic forces2 that generally contribute to peace and stability in the region. The most important of them are nuclear weapons, demographic trends, and multilateral institutions. Whereas institution-building has long been recognized and studied as a significant stabilizing factor in international relations, demography and its impact on Northeast Asia’s geopolitics has only recently been receiving attention from International Relations scholars. The role of nuclear weapons 2 The term ‘systemic’ here designates that these variables apply to all or most of the actors of the Northeast Asian system. Of course, such a use of the term is different from the Waltzian perspective whereby ‘systemic’ is essentially about the structure of the international system.

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has always been a controversial subject, with mainstream thinking now regarding atomic weapons largely as a source of instability. However, this paper views nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia in a more optimistic light. The following sections examine these three determinants.

Is Northeast Asia Headed for Demographic Peace? Demography and geopolitics have always been closely connected. While during the previous 500 years international politics mostly existed in the context of rapidly rising populations, now demographic trends are going into reverse. Many of the world’s major and regional powers have entered a period of steady aging, while some of them are already experiencing stagnant or even declining populations. The most evident and easily predictable impact will be in the economic sector. Increasing numbers of retired workers will not be entirely replaced by new workers because of low birth rates. The shrinking of the working-age population will result in slower GDP growth. In addition, governments will have to spend more money on retirement and health-care costs. The only way to finance increasing elderly-related spending is to cut discretionary items in government budgets, including expenditures on defence. The aging nations are expected to moderate the growth of their military budgets or even slash them (Haas 2007). The aging of the population and falling birth rates also have effects on social and psychological aspects, directly impacting upon the military power of nations. In low-fertility countries, average families have just one or two children. Having to let the state draft one’s only son into the military, even for the sake of national security, becomes a major sacrifice. Also, one should not overlook another socio-psychological aspect of the issue. General societal greying will lead to an increase in the average age of national leaders and statesmen who make foreign-policy decisions. Elderly people tend to be more cautious and conservative. That is why the greying nations are going to be less prone to risky behaviour in the international arena. Countries with a prevailing share of senior citizens are likely to pursue more passive and status quo-oriented foreign policies (Jackson & Howe 2008: 4). According to the president of the East-West Centre, Charles E. Morrison, the sharp fall in population growth rates and the aging of populations represent one of ‘the megatrends’ reshaping the Asia-Pacific region (2009-2010: 5). All Northeast Asian countries have low or even super-low birth rates and are facing the challenge of aging (see Table 4.1).

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Table 4.1 Northeast Asian countries’ key demographic indicators 2010

Country

China Japan North Korea South Korea Russia United States

Population growth rate (%)

0.61 -0.19 0.34 0.27 -0.34 0.90

Total fertility (children per woman) 1.79 1.27 1.85 1.26 1.46 2.02

Total Median age Percentage (years) aged 60 or population (millions) over (%)

34.2 44.7 34 37.9 38.1 36.6

12.3 30.5 14.3 15.6 18.1 18.2

1354 126.9 23.9 48.5 140.3 317.6

2030 (projection)

Country

China Japan North Korea South Korea Russia United States

Population growth rate (%)

-0.00 -0.64 -0.00 -0.30 -0.55 0.53

Total fertility (children per woman) 1.85 1.45 1.85 1.44 1.68 1.85

Total Median age Percentage (years) aged 60 or population (millions) over (%)

41.1 53.5 38.4 47.6 43.5 39.5

23.4 37.9 19.9 31.1 25.0 25.3

1462 117.4 25.3 49.1 128.8 369.9

2050 (projection)

Country

China Japan North Korea South Korea Russia United States

Population growth rate (%)

-0.33 -0.79 -0.27 -0.77 -0.51 0.36

Total fertility (children per woman) 1.85 1.60 1.85 1.59 1.83 1.85

Total Median age Percentage (years) aged 60 or population (millions) over (%)

45.2 55.1 41.9 53.7 44.0 41.7

31.1 44.2 24.7 40.8 31.7 27.4

1417 101.6 24.5 44.0 116.0 403.9

Source: Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpp

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Explosive population growth played a major contributing role in Japan’s expansionism since the late 19th century. From 1870 to 1940, Japan’s population more than doubled. Many prominent politicians and academics asserted at the time that the country needed more resources for its growing population and hence called for foreign conquests (Sovasteev 2009: 84). However, a century later the picture has dramatically changed. At present, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with 1.2 children per woman. At the same time, its longevity has risen considerably, up to 82 years. Japan has become the oldest country in the world and ever since 2005, its population has been shrinking. Japan’s current population of 126 million is projected to shrink by a quarter by 2050, when about 40 per cent of the country will be over 65 years old, according to government estimates (Associated Press 2010). A declining and aging population poses a grave challenge to Japan’s economic and financial sustainability. The demographic crisis directly impacts upon the country’s strategic capabilities. Contracting GDP growth and rising spending on the elderly force the government to allocate less money to defence. From 2002 to 2008, military expenditures decreased by 4 per cent. That trend is likely to continue (Tsunoda & Glosserman 2009). Fewer and fewer potential recruits are available for Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. Due to mounting fiscal constraints, Japan also has had to slash its Official Development Assistance programmes that have long been a crucial tool in its foreign policy. Japan has become the first country in global history that experiences aging on such a dramatic scale. Ironically, whereas back in the 1960s through the 1990s Japan was the flying geese leader of Asia’s industrial development, now it is setting the pace in demographic trends. China has always been a demographic colossus. However, today the Middle Kingdom is headed for tough times, as the Chinese who were born during the Mao-induced baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s are getting old and will start to retire soon. This wave of aging will hit in full force in the 2020s. By 2030, China’s population is expected to peak and start declining. By 2050, China’s median age will reach 45, which will make China one of the oldest nations. In fact, its case is unique, because China is likely to be the first country to grow old before getting as rich as its industrialized East Asian neighbours (if measured by GDP/capita). This will exacerbate the country’s social and economic troubles related to aging. The shrinking size of average families, along with rising life expectancies, is leading to a ‘4-2-1’ problem, when one child in a family will have to care for two parents and four grandparents (Kaneda 2006).

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Even if Beijing reverses its ‘one child’ policy, it would be unlikely to change the current trend of decreasing birth rates. The success of the ‘one child’ policy has been driven by modernization and urbanization, not just by government diktat. In 1978, less than 18 per cent of the Chinese lived in cities, while today more than half of the population resides in urban areas. Other predominantly Chinese societies outside China’s mainland can be good indicators of what may be in store for modernizing mainland China. Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have very low birth rates and their governments’ efforts to boost fertility have so far failed to produce any tangible results. Demographics will affect the strategic balance between China and the United States. Most projections forecast that China will overtake the United States in terms of GDP at some point between 2020 and 2030, which is exactly when the PRC will enter a period of demographic decline. There is some irony in this. Right now, China is still in a favourable demographic phase, but it remains militarily and economically weaker than the United States. However, just when China approaches the United States in terms of aggregate national power after 2020, the laws of demography will start to work against it. South Korea’s demographic prospects look rather bleak. Of all the developed countries, it is facing the most drastic decline in the workforce. Its total population is projected to shrink by almost 9 per cent by 2050, while the population of working-age South Koreans is expected to drop by 36 per cent, and the number of South Koreans aged 60 and over will increase by nearly 150 per cent. In other words, by 2050 the entire working-age population will barely exceed the 60-and-older population (Goldstone 2010: 34). However, in comparison to Japan, South Korea is much more open to foreign labour migrants and international marriages. Expanding foreign immigration gives a boost to its flagging demographics. Although North Korean birth rates are slightly higher, they, too, have a pronounced declining tendency. North Korea’s fertility fell below its replacement level in the mid-1990s and now stands at 1.8 children per woman. In the case of eventual reunification, the population of the reunited Korean Peninsula will be around 75 million and the younger North will somewhat improve the demographics of the greying South. However, after reunification, the North would be expected to undergo rapid modernization that would further reduce its already low birth rate. The US population is gradually aging and the elderly-related expenditures are going to be an ever-increasing fiscal burden. Nevertheless, due to higher birth rates and immigration, the aging of Americans takes place at a slower

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pace and on a much smaller scale. By 2050, the median age of US inhabitants is projected to be the youngest both among the Northeast Asian counties and the world’s great powers, with the exception of India. Moreover, the US population is projected to continue to grow up to 2050 and beyond (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2009). In an era of an aging and dwindling workforce, nations are likely to compete for younger, more productive and talented immigrants. Again, the United States, with its open and diverse society, high living standards and vast experience with immigration, is going to be better positioned in this intensifying competition for human resources. Favourable demographics will greatly help the United Sates maintain its strategic positions in Northeast Asia and globally. Russia is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of depopulation. Russia now ranks ninth in the world in terms of population, while in 1950 it held fourth place. It seems possible that by the mid-21st century Russia will have dropped to the bottom of the top twenty most populous countries. Among Russia’s regions, its Far East has been most badly hit. Its population decline began in 1991, when Far Eastern residents started to leave the area for the territories west of the Ural Mountains. Since 1993, this migration outflow has been exacerbated by fewer births and more deaths, as the entirety of Russia entered a period of population decline. As a result, the Russian Far East has now lost about a quarter of its population. Former president Dmitry Medvedev, visiting the region in July 2010, identified the shrinking population as ‘the most alarming, the most dangerous trend’ (Medvedev 2010). Aging and declining populations will diminish both the material capabilities and the socio-psychological inclinations of aging states to pursue assertive foreign policies, which heavily rely on force and coercion. In a sense, we might be entering an era of demographic peace. It appears that the demographic peace proposition is no less valid than the widely popular democratic peace theory, which postulates peacefulness of democracies.3 It might well be that the demographic peace conception is even more justified because democracy can be interpreted in a variety of ways, whereas an aging population and its related social and economic effects operate in a very similar manner across all countries. The demographic peace proposition can be useful in analysing and predicting international relations in Northeast Asia, where all of the key actors have entered a greying period. On balance, aging is going to contribute to 3

For a discussion of the democratic peace theory, see Russett (1994).

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the region’s stability, reducing the risk of interstate wars and conflicts. In particular, this will affect the two central players in Northeast Asia – Japan and China. Japan’s population decline considerably restricts Tokyo’s strategic capabilities and options, rendering fears of its possible remilitarization largely irrelevant. What is even more significant is that an expanding scale of the demographic crisis might result in Japan eventually losing its great-power status. This will alleviate Chinese and Korean apprehensions about Tokyo’s latent imperial designs. China, too, is expected to confront serious demographic challenges, which will weaken its offensive geopolitical capabilities. In addition, an aging and shrinking population will ease the urgency of securing access to natural resources abroad ‘at any cost’, a feature of China’s current foreign policy that causes many to worry today. Aging is likely to alter the national identities and strategic cultures of Northeast Asian states. The greying countries are expected to be less combative and assertive in international affairs, while showing more willingness for compromise and dialogue. Such a trend is already being displayed in Japan, the first country to have entered an era of greying. According to Yoshihide Soeya (2010), issues associated with aging significantly shape Japan’s perspectives and interests. Another Japanese academic points out that ‘older and mature’ Japan is going to be more ‘quiet and inward-looking’ (Kato 2010).

The Emerging Institutional Architecture in Northeast Asia: A Game on Two Chessboards? It is generally recognized that international institutions promote peace and security by facilitating dialogue and cooperation, creating shared norms and rules as well as fostering collective identity. Although Northeast Asia is still lagging behind many other regions in building multilateral institutions, some progress has been made over recent years. We can observe a trend towards a two-tiered structure of multilateralism in the region. The first level is represented by the Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, which were initiated in 2003, involving China, North and South Korea, Russia, Japan and the United States. The nuclear problem has not yet been resolved, but the Six-Party process, as many believe, might potentially lead to a Northeast Asian regional organization to manage political and strategic security. In February 2007, the participants of the SixParty Talks agreed to set up five working groups, one of which was tasked

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to study ways to achieve ‘Northeast Asia peace and security mechanism’. Despite periodic walkouts by North Korea, the Six-Party Talks have already become a de facto permanent consultative mechanism in Northeast Asia, albeit with a mandate confined to issues related to the Korean Peninsula. The second layer of Northeast Asian multilateralism is embodied in the trilateral cooperation of the ‘core’ regional states – Japan, China and South Korea. Their informal trilateral summits have been held regularly since 1999, but until recently they took place on the sidelines of ASEAN Plus Three meetings. December 2008 saw a watershed event, when the first Northeast Asian summit was held on its own, attended by Japan’s prime minister, China’s chairman and South Korea’s president. The leaders signed an action plan for promoting trilateral cooperation and agreed to hold such meetings annually. The second summit was held in Beijing in October 2009. Global and regional problems were discussed, and the participants reaffirmed their willingness to deepen mutual cooperation. In particular, they agreed to sign a trilateral investment treaty and launch an official study on a China-Japan-South Korea free trade area (FTA). Formal negotiations on a trilateral FTA are planned to start in 2012. At their third meeting on Jeju Island in South Korea in May 2010, the three leaders adopted a blueprint for future economic cooperation, environmental protection and expansion of personnel and cultural exchanges. They also agreed to establish a permanent secretariat in South Korea in 2011 (Chosun Ilbo 2010). More than 50 trilateral consultative mechanisms, including seventeen ministerial meetings, are now in full operation and over 100 trilateral cooperation projects in the economic and social fields, people-to-people exchanges, and disaster management are being promoted (People’s Daily Online 2010b). Apart from official meetings, non-governmental forums are also held among the three countries, involving participants from academia, the business world, NGOs and the mass media. To be sure, the institutionalization of this trilateral interaction is still in its nascent stages. It is too early to speak of a new economic bloc born in Northeast Asia. However, the trend is clear. The necessary economic prerequisites are in place. China, Japan and South Korea have become mutually crucial trade partners. Their trilateral trade accounts for 17 per cent of the global trade volume and 90 per cent of total East Asian trade (Xinhua 2009a). The three Northeast Asian economies’ output makes up 16 per cent of world GDP (Associated Press 2009). Another major driving force is big business, especially in Japan and South Korea, which has a stake in economic integration and pushes for further development of trilateral cooperation.

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For a trilateral economic grouping to come into being, it is critical that China and Japan come to an agreement (Aggarwal & Koo 2008). The two biggest economies in Northeast Asia have to resolve their differences, particularly on the issue of regional leadership. There are essentially only two options. They could decide on joint management of the integration grouping in Northeast Asia, as well as East Asia at large. Or else Japan might have to accept China’s economic leadership. The latter seems increasingly likely, especially with China overtaking Japan as the second biggest economy in the world in 2010. So far, it has been China that has acted as the principal promoter of Northeast Asian integration. In 2002, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongzi proposed a plan for the trilateral free trade area. Japan was unwilling to support this plan at that time, fearing that it could strengthen China’s position in the region. However, after the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in 2009, Tokyo reversed its stance on the issue. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama emphasized the importance of East Asian integration, calling for an East Asian Community, with China, Japan and Korea as its collective core. It appears that Hatoyama’s regional initiatives were not only his personal preferences, but also reflected the interests of powerful sectors within Japan’s political and economic elites. Therefore, despite his resignation in June 2010, the idea of an East Asian economic community, based on a China-Japan-South Korea partnership, is likely to stay relevant to Japan. It is not yet clear how these two levels of an evolving Northeast Asian institutional architecture will interact and relate to each other. The question is whether it would be possible for a broader Six-Party grouping and an ‘Asian only’ bloc to act in concert. What if competition arises between them? For instance, what will be the implications if China, Korea and Japan go beyond the largely economic and cultural agenda they currently pursue, advancing it into political and security issues as well? Would the United States and Russia feel marginalized if trilateral partnership among Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo intensifies, with Washington and Moscow being kept on the sidelines? One can put the question even more bluntly: What is the likelihood that the emerging China-Japan-South Korea triangle would grow into a political alliance, with Beijing calling the shots? In fact, economic reasons for such a development seem to be in place already. Japan and South Korea are being increasingly drawn into the Chinese economic orbit. China has become the biggest trade partner for both Japan and South Korea. Their relations are characterized by asymmetric interdependence, with Japan and South Korea depending on China more than China depends on them. The recent

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global crisis has served to deepen this trend. China now accounts for 20 per cent of Japan’s total exports and imports, while just 13 per cent of China’s trade is with Japan. China’s share of South Korea’s trade currently stands at 20.5 per cent, while China’s trade with South Korea is only 7 per cent of its total volume (Sohn 2010). Meanwhile, America’s economic presence in the region has significantly decreased, although it is still quite noticeable. The United States remains a key export market for Northeast Asian countries and a major source of vital technologies. Washington is seeking to promote its own neoliberal version of regional integration, which, although so far not successfully, attempts to challenge China-centred regionalism in East Asia. America’s strategy is, in particular, based on the recently launched Trans-Pacific Partnership as well as bilateral FTAs – the most substantial one being the South Korea-US FTA. However, even if the United States were ultimately to lose the competition in economic regionalism to China, this would not automatically entail the advent of Sino-centric political institutions in the region. Economic integration does not necessarily result in stronger political intergovernmental or supranational arrangements. Indeed, when integration makes great progress in the economic area, member-states may deliberately constrain it in other, especially political, spheres, so as not to put their national sovereignty at risk. Even the European Union’s experience testifies to such a hedging strategy (Busygina & Filipppov 2010). East Asian countries, including Japan and both Koreas, are well aware of the risks inherent in their high economic dependence on China. Therefore, they are seeking to offset such risks by maintaining political and strategic ties to the actors capable of balancing a rising China, especially the United States. Both Tokyo and Seoul have no intention of abandoning their alliances with Washington. Indeed, they are even strengthening their strategic cooperation with the United States in some areas. There are reasons to believe that even North Korea is wary of China’s growing might and could be interested in the United States acting as a balancing force. 4 Russia, although its regional clout is much less than America’s, can be seen as another independent player, performing a balancing function. That is probably why in 2003, Pyongyang insisted on Moscow having a seat at the Six-Party Talks (Sevastyanov 2008: 252). In other words, the Six-Party process, and a prospective institutionalized mechanism with full American and Russian membership, might be viewed as a means to maintain the balance of power and prevent Chinese dominance in Northeast Asia. 4

See, for example, Lankov (2010) and Feffer (2010).

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The economic triangle of Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul could be transformed into a political bloc, only if full-fledged Chinese hegemony arrives – similar to what happened following the Second World War, when the United States used its predominance to build and manage a ‘Western’ institutional architecture. Economic leadership alone is not enough for actual hegemony. Two other requirements are military-strategic primacy and the recognition of hegemony as legitimate from the lesser states (Alagappa 2003b: 53-54). It is clear that China does not meet these requirements yet. Its military capabilities still cannot match America’s. And in terms of moral and political legitimacy, neither Korea nor Japan appear ready to recognize Chinese primacy. One cannot rule out the emergence of Beijing’s hegemony in the future. However, at present it seems unlikely. To sum up, in the foreseeable future Northeast Asia is going to witness the evolution of two sets of multilateral institutions. On the one hand, economic integration linking China, Japan and Korea will deepen and expand, which is likely to result in an economic community, possibly encompassing Southeast Asian countries as well. On the other hand, this economic process will be paralleled by the development of political multilateralism originating from the Six-Party Talks, with the active involvement of the United States and Russia.5 Thus, a ‘balance of institutions’ is likely to emerge, whereby China’s influence will be pre-eminent in regional economic cooperation, but significantly limited within the political multilateral arrangement.

Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Stability in Northeast Asia Massive physical violence remains an inherent and fundamental feature of international politics. Military-strategic considerations continue to shape the policies of many states, particularly great and major powers. Nuclear weapons, being the most powerful means of destruction mankind has ever created, continue to be a major factor in international relations in political, strategic and military terms. Nuclear arms are considered by many to be the most cost-effective way to maximize a state’s security in a dangerous environment. They enable states to satisfy basic security requirements selfreliantly and without incurring the high economic costs of comparably effective conventional defences (Goldstein 2000: 225). Coupled with deterrence strategies, nuclear weapons increase the likelihood of peaceful coexistence. 5 Within the wider framework of East Asia, India and Australia will likely be added to such a political arrangement.

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Kenneth Waltz is one of the most prominent advocates of the stabilizing influence of nuclear arms. He assumes that states are rational actors seeking to minimize their risks. Dealing with one another, nuclear powers are going to be extremely cautious, because the cost of a conflict may be too high. Even states with modest nuclear capabilities can successfully pursue deterrence vis-à-vis much stronger great powers. The history of nuclear states’ interactions unequivocally shows the sobering and moderating effect of nuclear arsenals. Waltz argues that ‘the probability of major war among states having nuclear weapons approaches zero’ (2008b: 287). Nuclear weapons are not suitable for offensive purposes: ‘From fifty years of experience, one may conclude that nuclear weapons effectively preserve a county’s vital interests, but are of little use in extending one country’s control over others’ (Waltz 2008a: 296). The pacifying function of nuclear weapons is highlighted by some leading Russian international relations experts. Sergei Karaganov, the chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, asserts that nuclear disarmament is a ‘harmful myth’. He claims that nuclear weapons are ‘a good asset designed to save the humanity from itself’ (Karaganov 2010). Nuclear deterrence is often credited with preventing a major armed clash during the Cold War. An intriguing question is whether the Cold War-type strategic stability at the global level, which is still in existence between the first ‘nuclear age’ powers (the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China), can be reproduced at the regional level between new nuclear powers. There are divergent opinions on this issue. Scholars at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences emphasize that the global proliferation of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles does not automatically result in establishing nuclear deterrence at the regional level. It is absolutely fair to say that the previous decades’ mechanism of maintaining strategic stability in the context of mutual nuclear deterrence, including systems to prevent unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, is mostly not available at the regional level in the relations between new nuclear nations (Arbatov et al. 2010: 26).

This and similar views imply that new nuclear powers will hardly be able to handle their deadly arsenals in the same responsible and rational manner as the established nuclear nations. However, such concerns are often exaggerated and even discriminatory. I argue that the nuclearization of regional international systems, and

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Northeast Asia in particular, does not necessarily undermine security. In this respect, it is useful to analyse the experience of South Asia, where two of the most important players, India and Pakistan, have acquired nuclear status. South Asia remains so far the only case of mutual and pronounced nuclear deterrence at the regional level.6 Since the late 1980s, India and Pakistan have possessed weaponized nuclear devices. Thus, the two countries have been coexisting under the conditions of mutual nuclear deterrence for more than two decades. On the whole, nuclear weapons perform a stabilizing role in the bilateral relationship. It is telling that after going nuclear the two arch-rivals have not fought major wars, whereas in their pre-nuclear period they had three large-scale armed conflicts (in 1947-1948, 1965 and 1971). Of course, their relations remain tense, with crises flaring up from time to time.7 Nevertheless, each time the two sides have managed to avoid escalation, which, to a large extent, can be attributed to the effect of nuclear deterrence. This point is highlighted by Muthiah Alagappa: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has blunted the potency of India’s large conventional military force. Although it has not cancelled out all the consequences of the large power differential between the two countries, it has had a significant constraining impact on India’s military options and assuaged Pakistan’s concern about the Indian threat. (2009)

At the same time, attempts by Islamabad to use the threat of nuclear escalation during the Kargil conflict in 1999 to win territorial gains in Kashmir failed. India stood firm and forced Pakistani troops to withdraw. Like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the 1999 and 2001-2002 crises between India and Pakistan marked a watershed in their strategic relations: the danger of nuclear war shifted their focus to avoiding a major war and to finding a negotiated settlement to bilateral problems (Alagappa 2009). Unlike the South Asian regional system, which is characterized by full nuclearization, Northeast Asia is a partially nuclearized region.8 Out of seven Northeast Asian players, there are four nuclear powers (the United States, Rus6 Potentially, the Middle East could soon become another case, if Iran produces nuclear weapons and enters a relationship of reciprocal nuclear deterrence with Israel. 7 Over the last two decades, the most dangerous standoffs occurred in 1999 and 2001-2002. 8 I assume that an international system is fully nuclearized if all its major actors possess nuclear weapons. Among existing regional systems, only South Asia f its this category. An international system is partially nuclearized if some of its major powers have nuclear weapons.

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sia, China, and North Korea), while the other three have non-nuclear status (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). It is significant that all of the non-nuclear actors have sufficient financial, technological and industrial resources to develop nuclear weapons in a relatively short time. Indeed, South Korea and Taiwan are known to have already embarked on nuclear weapons programmes in the 1970s and 1980s, but afterwards decided to terminate them. In the foreseeable future, a reduction in the number of nuclear powers in Northeast Asia is very unlikely. North Korea can hardly be expected to renounce its hard-won nuclear capability unless fundamental transformations (such as regime change) happen within the country. In fact, it seems that the world has already tacitly accepted a nuclear-armed North Korea. The more interesting question, then, is whether nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia will continue beyond North Korea. Japan is the only country in the world that is able to turn itself into a nuclear power almost overnight. Of course, Japan is committed to its Three Non-Nuclear Principles, which are not to possess or construct such weapons nor to allow foreign militaries to station nuclear weapons in Japan. However, as a parliamentary resolution, this statement is not legally and constitutionally binding. Japanese politicians have repeatedly made very ambiguous statements on the possibility of going nuclear. Tokyo subtly signals to its neighbours that, with respect to nuclear weapons, it will keep its options open (Samuels 2007a: 176). The nuclear option may become increasingly attractive to Japan, as the country faces the worsening demographic decline which considerably weakens its conventional military capabilities. As for South Korea and Taiwan, their nuclearization looks less likely, but cannot be ruled out altogether. In short, further nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia is not impossible. Are there any reasons to believe that Northeast Asia will enjoy the benefits of strategic stability as a result of mutual nuclear deterrence? The concept of deterrence is based on three assumptions. First, actors must be rational, acting on the basis of cost-benefit calculations. Second, nuclear deterrence operates best among nation-states that are by their very nature territorial entities and thus represent easily identifiable targets for retaliatory strikes. Third, deterrence assumes intense rivalry among opponents, with states in deterrent relationships considering war as a constant possibility (Paul 2009: 5-7). Northeast Asia’s international system perfectly matches these three assumptions. First, all actors in Northeast Asia are rational players, who are not willing to risk their own survival and are guided by the cost-benefit calculations. Even North Korea, despite the bizarre appearance of its ruling

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regime, is no doubt a rational actor. Second, the only meaningful actors in Northeast Asia are states. Non-state actors, be they NGOs or terrorist networks, do not have any significant role in the region. Most of Northeast Asian states have their human and economic potential heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, making them an easy target for nuclear strikes. Third, relations between major states in the region are burdened with rivalry and distrust, while some Northeast Asian powers see one another as potential adversaries. The view that nuclear deterrence can contribute to strategic stability in Northeast Asia is shared by some prominent scholars. According to Avery Goldstein, the mutual possession of nuclear weapons provides ‘the strongest reasons to expect that the dangers associated with China’s arrival as a full-fledged great power will be limited’ (Goldstein 1997-1998: 70). Alagappa argues that, on the whole, nuclear weapons in South Asia and Northeast Asia have had a pacifying effect. First, they have not fundamentally disrupted the regional distribution of power or intensified security dilemmas. In fact, by assuaging the security concerns of weak and vulnerable states, they promote stability in conflict-prone dyads. Second, fear of the devastating consequences of a nuclear exchange prevents the outbreak and escalation of regional hostilities to full-scale war, strengthens the political and military status quo, and impels conflicting parties to freeze the conflict or explore a negotiated settlement. Third, the combination of minimum deterrence strategies and general deterrence postures enhances stability among major powers and avoids strategic arms races like that during the Cold War. Finally, nuclear weapons reinforce the trend in Asia to circumscribe and transform the role of force in international politics (Alagappa 2008). Victor Cha believes that proliferation in Asia is ‘overdetermined’, deriving largely from the intersection of security needs and resource constraints. A rollback of nuclear capabilities is not likely, as long as the general security environment in the region remains precarious. In his view, ‘Asian nuclear and missile proliferation is certainly dangerous, but not nearly so disastrous as has been popularly predicted’ (Cha 2003: 459). He argues that there is no reason to expect that the likelihood of a nuclear exchange is ‘any greater today than in the first nuclear age’ (Cha 2003: 459). Another reason for ‘sober optimism’ is that the new nuclear powers in Asia recognize ‘the nuclear taboo’, which has become firmly institutionalized in international agreements and practices, severely circumscribing the realm of legitimate nuclear use (Cha 2003: 481-482). Although, since 1964, the number of Asian nuclear powers has risen from one (China) to four (with India, Pakistan and North Korea joining the club),

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this has not led to more major conflicts, let alone catastrophe. Concerns that states, having acquired atomic bombs, could become more assertive and warlike have turned out to be largely unjustified. For instance, there is little evidence to suggest that the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal per se has encouraged Pyongyang to take a more belligerent stance.9 Nuclear weapons, as noted earlier, are much more suitable for self-defence and maintaining the strategic status-quo than for aggression and expansion. This partly explains why most of North Korea’s neighbours have kept relatively calm regarding its nuclear capability. There is no denying that nuclear weapons are fraught with grave risks due to their immense destructive force.10 However, it would be naïve to believe that the contemporary world would be much safer without nuclear weapons. States are able to unleash Armageddon without resorting to nukes. We have to bear in mind the two world wars and countless other clashes that exterminated entire nations and civilizations in the past. Nuclear weapons can be a constructive and sobering force at both global and regional levels of international politics. Of all regional systems beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, it is Northeast Asia which has the characteristics most propitious for stable nuclear deterrence. It does not mean, of course, that proliferation in the region should be welcomed and promoted. But it would also be incorrect to claim that nuclearization has only negative consequences.

Conclusion: Scenarios for Northeast Asia I have examined three prominent and relevant systemic forces – demography, multilateral institutions and nuclear weapons – which, on balance, may mitigate conflict and promote stability in Northeast Asia. Several qualif ications are in order. First, it may well be that I have overlooked some systemic factors that are already at work or may emerge in the future. Second, apart from the variables influencing all or most Northeast Asian countries, there are ‘individual’ determinants peculiar to just one state. In certain circumstances, such determinants can have a 9 The spike in tensions on the Korean Peninsula in 2010 was mostly due to the internal dynamics of the relationship between the two Koreas and their domestic politics, as well as China’s reluctance to restrain North Korea. See, for example, Feigenbaum (2010) and Lankov (2010). 10 There is a huge body of literature on the risks and dangers related to nuclear weapons. See, for example, Sagan’s argument in Sagan, Scott & Waltz (1995) and Allison (2010).

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very powerful impact on the entire regional system. For instance, massive political or economic upheavals in China might lead to tectonic shifts in the region. In a similar way, North Korea’s implosion can cause a chain of unpredictable events, greatly changing the regional landscape. Third, although, on balance, the three systemic forces are beneficial for stability, they have their downsides. Negative socio-economic effects of population aging might cause instability in some countries, while the spillovers into the international realm cannot be completely excluded. Nuclear weapons, no doubt, have many inherent risks and dangers. And, as is evident from the foregoing analysis, building multilateral institutions can become another arena for competition between the most powerful players. Fourth, the stability-enhancing factors will operate simultaneously with the competition-inducing forces such as mutual distrust, lingering resentments, the concentration of ambitious great powers and rising state-centric nationalism. I argue that the pacifying tendencies will most likely gain the upper hand in the end. However, it is simply impossible to predict with certainty which of the two opposing sets of causal mechanisms will prevail or what will come out of their confluence (Friedberg 2005). In light of the preceding analysis, what could be the possible scenarios for Northeast Asia’s geopolitical landscape within the next ten to fifteen years? The Continuation of US Residual Hegemony Even back in the early 2000s, when the United States was at the height of its ‘unipolar moment’ in world politics, its position in the region was characterized as ‘incomplete hegemony’ (Mastanduno 2003). The limited nature of American primacy was largely due to the fact that it did not receive full acceptance and support from all of the key regional players, particularly China. At present, the United States – weakened by the economic crisis, distracted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and being increasingly overshadowed by a rising China – appears to have lost that kind of partial hegemony. Its current geopolitical status in Northeast Asia can be termed ‘residual hegemony’. The United States now retains a clear superiority only in military terms. The question is whether America will be able, and willing, to hold on even to such a truncated hegemony. Much will depend on whether Japan, South Korea and Taiwan keep their allegiance to Washington as junior partners in bilateral alliances.11 If they do, the United States could continue to function as a pivotal power in Northeast Asia, 11 In the case of Taiwan, this alliance relationship is, of course, de facto and informal.

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perhaps increasingly shifting into the offshore balancer mode (Layne 2006). Under this scenario, the United States will remain the most influential regional actor in military-strategic and politico-diplomatic terms, while in other areas its standing will be much less impressive. China’s Hegemony Beijing will become the most powerful player in the region, dictating the rules of the game and introducing a Chinese version of the Monroe Doctrine for Northeast Asia and perhaps for the entire East Asia. China’s primacy would be greatly facilitated if a declining America decides to withdraw from the region due to a lack of resources and/or political will. In order to become fully established, Chinese hegemony would have to be recognized by Japan and Korea. In this regard, Japan is the most crucial as well as the most problematic. It is very difficult to imagine Japan accepting Chinese predominance. Nevertheless, such a possibility should not be discarded outright. Japan has repeatedly demonstrated astonishing turnarounds in its foreign policy. It did so in the latter half of the 19th century, renouncing isolationism, and after 1945, transforming itself from a militaristic predator into a peaceful trading state. Japan is sometimes viewed as always seeking to align itself with the most powerful actor. According to such reasoning, if China replaces America as the region’s dominant actor, the Japanese might switch its allegiance from Washington to Beijing. Perhaps it would not be too difficult for Japan and other East Asian states to bandwagon with China, because, in a sense, it would mean a return to the longstanding order when the Middle Kingdom exercised suzerainty over much of the region.12 In a nutshell, China’s hegemony will require America’s withdrawal and Japan’s resignation, conditions not entirely improbable, but having little plausibility from today’s perspective. The Balance of Power This scenario anticipates a future in which no single actor has predominant influence in Northeast Asia, with power being distributed among two or more players. This is the most plausible geopolitical configuration for the region in the years ahead. Indeed, the current state of affairs, America’s 12 On the ‘natural’ and historically rooted character of Sino-centric order in East Asia, see Kang (2010).

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residual hegemony, is extremely close to the balance of power model. Perhaps it would not be a gross overstatement to claim that the balance of power has already arrived in Northeast Asia. The big question, then, is in what direction it is going to evolve. Balance of power can be bipolar, with only two predominant actors, or multipolar, with three or more crucial players. For Northeast Asia, the bipolar model will almost certainly represent the United States and China as the pre-eminent states. By contrast, the list of likely participants in a possible multipolar order is not clear as yet. Japan is almost sure to be a key player, albeit less influential compared to China and America. The Republic of Korea, especially if it reunifies with the North, is well positioned to claim a place among Northeast Asia’s major powers. The fifth likely candidate is Russia, albeit its strategic influence is severely constrained by the lack of development in its Pacific territories. Moscow has recently launched a massive programme aimed to boost the Russian Far East’s economy, partly because of the desire to play a more visible role in regional geopolitics. What may be even more important than the issue of polarity is the character of the emerging balance of power system in Northeast Asia. Richard Little’s distinction between an adversarial balance of power and an associational balance of power can be helpful. An adversarial balance of power represents f iercely competitive relationships, with a chronic danger of war. By contrast, an associational balance of power is based on an agreement among the major powers which collaborate to produce a durable stability (Little 2007). In Northeast Asia, an associational balance of power can operate both under bipolarity and multipolarity. In the bipolar context, this would essentially mean a condominium by China and the United States, a development that others might not find desirable. Japan, Korea and Russia would prefer a multipolar concert of powers, where they could act as less powerful but still influential players. The three moderating forces analysed in the preceding sections – demography, nuclear deterrence, and multilateral institutions – raise the chances for Northeast Asia to achieve a stable multipolar balance based on a concert-like consensus. Population aging and decline will inhibit the countries’ expansionist and belligerent impulses. Possession of nuclear arms by a number of Northeast Asia’s players will make absolute strategic preponderance by any single actor virtually unattainable. In its turn, a multilateral institutional framework will promote cooperation and common rules as well as constrain likely attempts at hegemony.

5

ASEAN and Its People Regional Internationalism and the Politics of Exclusion Math Noortmann

Introduction An ASEAN of the People, by the People and for the People – the title of the report of the First ASEAN People’s Assembly – voiced a strong constitutional appeal to Southeast Asian’s political elite (Centre for Strategic and International Studies 2001). The idea of a people-oriented turn in the regional integration process in Southeast Asia was building momentum towards the signing of the Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Singapore in November 2007. Over a period of less than seven years, the term people increasingly permeated both diplomatic and scholarly language (Severino 2006; Tan 2007). The idea that ‘ASEAN needs to shed its image of being an elitist organisation comprising exclusively diplomats and government officials’ infiltrated elite circles (Eminent Persons Group 2007). It was even suggested that the Southeast Asian elites understand the need to ‘reach out and engage the ordinary people of ASEAN with the ASEAN project’ in order to prevent a ‘disconnect[ion] between the elite and the people’ in the Southeast Asian integration project (Koh 2006). With the signing of the ASEAN Charter, however, that momentum was defied by Southeast Asian political elites (Koh 2006). There is little to nothing in ASEAN’s constitutive document which signals that the Southeast Asian elites are soliciting the engagement and cooperation of the Southeast Asian people, neither directly through representation and judicial review, nor indirectly through civil society organizations. It seems that Southeast Asian regionalism, and the political and peopleoriented interests of Southeast Asian’s elites have been profoundly misread. The activist focus on ASEAN’s so-called Track 2 and Track 3 diplomacy has ignored the elitist character of these mechanisms (Caballero-Anthony 2005). The political role of non-governmental actors has been profoundly overrated in the Southeast Asian context (Aviel 1999; Aviel 2000: 17). In terms of the people/elite dialectics, critical ASEAN scholarship must not only engage in politically scrutinizing NGOs in Southeast Asia, but also determine which NGOs are serving their own interests and which ones are serving the people’s interest (Petras & Veltmeyer 2001). Analysts of regional integration, both in the European and the Southeast Asian context, have

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always recognized and stressed the intrinsic role of the ruling elites in those processes (Haas 1958a; Moravcsik 1993; Marks 1997; Case 2002; Richmond et al. 2002; Acharya 1999).1 However, in the attempt to understand and explain integration processes, the people and the elite/people dialectics have been generally ignored. People have been reintroduced as an element of analysis in political and legal science only recently. The reawakening of the multitude has led philosophers and analysts of globalization and regional integration to come to a conclusion that the usual practices of international law and politics are over (Mény 1998; Hardt & Negri 2006). This conclusion, however, has (as of yet) not been confirmed by the ASEAN experience. In this article, I will argue that the people are neglected and ignored in both practising and discoursing on Southeast Asian integration. Mere characterization of regional integration as an elite project does not automatically engage people in the discussion. There exists a doubt that the institutional process of Southeast Asian integration was initiated by elites. Unlike the European case, Southeast Asian elites were not directly compelled to include people in their regional integration schemes and to move beyond the Westphalian politics of internationalism. In the Southeast Asian context, elites adhered to the traditional scheme of strict intergovernmentalism, which was based on the premise of the exclusion of people. It is suggested in this paper that the politics of excluding/including people has determined and is still determining the development of Southeast Asia’s regional integration.

Elites, People and Theories of Regional Integration The European Experience: Post-international Regionalism, or Bringing the People In The beginning of the institutional practices of regional integration is generally located in European time and space during the post-World War 1 It is submitted here that the traditional arguments against any comparative analysis between Europe and Southeast Asia, because of socio-political, cultural, economic and historical difference between the two regions and henceforth the two regional integration processes, are of a political rather than an analytical nature and cannot be considered to advance the understanding of different political and institutional regional developments. To the extent that regional identities are constructs, regional differences are too. For arguments against comparing Europe and Southeast Asia, see Severino (2006) and Frost (2008).

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II era. Therefore, the first generation of regional integration theories is almost exclusively shaped by the designs and currents of the European institutions. Among the first generation of regional integration theories, neofunctionalism is by far the most influential. To Ernst Haas, political integration was the following: [T]he process of attaining [a political community] among nation states … the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new and larger centre, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states. (1961; emphasis added)

In that sense, Haas posited integration as a post-international or a protosupranational legal and political phenomenon in a traditional international arena. In ‘The Challenge of Regionalism’, Haas posed a fundamental question about the ‘hierarchical level at which social action relation to integration is thought to take place’: Does successful responsiveness, communication and the deemphasis of divisive issues rest on mass participation in politics or its minimisation? Are numerical small groups of economic, industrial, administrative and military elites the crucial actors or must the analytical focus be put on political parties and their constituencies? (1958a: 445)

Haas’s query indicates that he was, by no means, indifferent to the different political roles of the mass and the elites. That observation in itself did not constrain neofunctionalists, however, from adopting a qualified, but conclusive international, elitist perspective: [T]he nature of the elite structure is singled out as being of crucial importance … [I]t is equally desirable that ‘international’ contacts among elites of similar status and outlook in all the political units be made to flourish … Whenever a given doctrine associated with integration has been adopted by a politically crucial elite as its own and thus lifted from advocacy initially confined to literary and philosophical circles, integration has acquired a momentum of its own; it ‘has taken off’. (Haas 1958a: 443-4)

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Semi-elitist agencies like the European movement did not provide a doctrine useful for the study of the integration process, according to Haas. It merely constituted a loose association of all the contingent-wide groups favouring some kind of European unity (Haas 1958a). Haas focused on the governing political elites. Specific interest groups, like the ones in the business and labour sector with the most interest in market integration in the 1950s, were irrelevant to Haas as a group. For his understanding of the integration process, it is sufficient ‘to single out and define the political elites, … the leaders of all relevant political groups, … which in the bureaucratised nature of the European organisations [play] a manipulative role’ (Haas 1958b: 115). To the extent that Haas questioned the underlying assumptions of his approach, the neglect of the emancipation of the peoples of Europe was not one of them. Haas thereby disregarded the fact that some of these assumptions were intrinsically linked to some form of non-governmental activity and idealism. Haas, for example, questioned the assumption that ‘a definable institutional pattern must mark the outcome of the process of integration’ (1976). However, he did not reconsider his opinion in 1958 that the European movement was unable to agree on the governmental institutions which had to mark the outcome of the process of integration as insignificant (Haas 1958b). By adopting an elite-centred approach to European integration, neofunctionalism carved itself a successful niche in the more traditional state-oriented understandings of international relations, but at the same time it overlooked or ignored the position of the people as a specific institutional feature of regional integrative processes. The ASEAN Model: Regional Internationalism, or Bringing the National Elites Back In The ASEAN project, which was launched in the second half of the 1960s, had a number of significant points in common with the EC’s project, which had started a decade earlier. Although both were elitist projects, soon after their inceptions, they took off in different directions. In its first seven years of existence, ASEAN easily qualified itself as a ‘club of foreign ministers’ (Fifield 1979). The first summit of the heads of government in Bali in 1976 was the result of events that were external to ASEAN, rather than being the result of politics of regional integration. By the end of the 1970s, ASEAN’s greatest asset was considered to be its ‘spirit of cooperation’: a spirit which was largely found in the rhetoric of security and social, cultural and economic cooperation and which was ‘growing, reaching out from the governing elites to the influential groups in business,

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the professions and the media’ (Frost 2008). A study by Monte Hill based on a quantitative assessment of ASEAN’s community formation confirmed that ‘[t]here appears to be no movement whatsoever toward regional community formation among the five ASEAN countries’ in that first period of its existence (Hill 1976: 575). Some of the conclusions of that study – such as the fact that elite students, for example, preferred to study in countries outside the ASEAN region – are probably still valid today (Hill 1976). Acharya, in his excellent The Quest for Identity, characterizes Southeast Asian regionalism as follows: [A]n elite-driven process in which human rights and democracy don’t figure. Despite its claims to be based on broad historical, cultural and societal ties, the drive for regionalism is to a large extent reflected in the need of the postcolonial elite to ensure regime survival. (2000: 140)

James Cotton takes Acharya’s conclusion one step further and states that ‘ASEAN was created for the end of keeping particular elites in power’ (2002). Both opinions recognize the importance of elites in very much the same way as Haas did in his neofunctional explanation of European regional integration. In opposition to Haas, Acharya and Cotton are more explicit and critical in regards to the motivations of the Southeast Asian elites. There is, however, no indication that the European elites were differently motivated, or that the motivations of the European and Southeast Asian elites had different normative qualities. However, if these elites indeed applied different politics of regionalization and regional institutionalization for power-political purposes, Cotton’s critical elite community perspective would be more appropriate than a neofunctional perspective. The latter theory’s original preoccupation with a defined institutional and supranational outcome disqualifies the approach for an easy adoption to the explanation of the Southeast Asian integration process. Bringing the People Back In? The qualif ied disqualif ication of neofunctionalism as an explanatory theory also endorsed other scholars to revitalize or develop new theoretical explanations for Europe’s regional integration process in the early days of Comparative Regional Integration Studies. John Galtung (1968), for example, stressed that integration is an interrelated complexity of values, actors and resource exchange. Moreover, Karl W. Deutsch came to understand the dynamics of integration processes as having a basis in ‘essential background

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conditions’ such as the involvement of civil society at large (Deutsch et al. 1957: 5). While all of these approaches moved away from the state-centred international relations approaches and created space for allowing non-state actors back, the more critical, neo-Marxist people and elites dialectic was generally ignored. That ignorance can still be found in contemporary Comparative Regional Integration Studies, particularly in weakly grounded social constructivist approaches to regional integration and regional institutional developments. How seriously constructivism can be misunderstood and uncritically adopted in this respect is made clear by Mely Caballero-Anthony, who argues the following: Constructivism proved to be a useful framework in explaining the lack or absence of concrete, formal mechanisms in ASEAN since the approach goes beyond the consideration of power and material interest and sensitizes us to the salience of ideational factors, to actors and agents that shape these ideas beyond the state and the intersubjective understanding that take place. (2005: 257)

Southeast Asia’s potential transition from a ‘sovereignty-bound’ form of regionalism (what I call regional internationalism) towards integrative regionalism has been based by observers on such phenomena as ‘regionalization without regionalism’, ‘soft regionalism’, and more recently the concept of ‘new regionalism’ (Acharya 2002b). The concept of new regionalism revolves around a variety of themes, of which the idea of regionalism from below is just one. While this aspect of new regionalism is well recognized, the role and position of people is still ignored. In its typical constructivist vain, new regionalism acknowledges and describes rather than investigates integration from below. International relations narratives on regional integration and regionalism still subsume the interest of the people under the imagined interests of their national states. Representation of non-governmental values such as culture, education, social norms, religion, law etc. guarantees that integration becomes a comprehensive process, which encompasses all aspects of society. An integration process, which ultimately aims at one specific form of integration, is likely to fail as it lacks Deutsch’s essential background conditions. Towards the end of the 20th century, people were brought back into the discourses of regional integration. In Europe, the integration process entered a flow acceleration, which triggered increasing popular challenge to

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such an extent that Yves Mény concluded in 1998 that ‘constitutionalism has grown to its limits and ruling elites are in crisis’. He observed processes that ‘reverse the post-war trend characterised by a persistent and still ongoing process of elite domination under the cover of “constitutionalism” and exclude people from the political process, a trend towards “politisation” characterised by “agencies, authorities, courts and QUANGO”’ (Mény 1998). According to Mény, that transformation has not only been supported by ‘political, economic and social elites’ but also by ‘academics’ (1998). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe a similar phenomenon at a global level, where the traditional forms of intergovernmental representation had come under popular scrutiny. According to Hardt and Negri (2006), the passage of sovereignty is no longer possible without regard to the multitude. The question as to the relationship between and the different roles of elites and people in integration projects has significant implications not only for the legal and political theories of regional integration, but also for the politics and institutional designs of global integration (Noortmann 2006). In the transformation of the complexities of justice in regional and global order formation, it is increasingly important to distinguish between peoples and people. According to Hardt and Negri, the latter term, people, refers to a kind of ‘oneness’ that ‘synthesises or reduces social differences’ because ‘the component parts of the people are indifferent in their unity; they become an identity by negating or setting aside their differences’ (2006). People are plural singularities with social, religious and political differences within (Hardt & Negri 2006). People is an inclusive concept, which accepts those differences within and the different identities of individuals that make up an ever-growing community. On the other hand, peoples is an exclusive concept as it divides people along ethnical or racial lines, and it is a useful concept in the maintenance of the international order.

Bangkok + 40: What Is in It for the Southeast Asian People? The People in the ASEAN Charter ‘We, the Peoples…’ the resemblance between the opening words of the Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the famous first words of the Charter of the United Nations cannot be missed. The use of the language of old-style internationalism could not be more profound. Assuming that drafters of the ASEAN Charter were aware of historical,

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political and legal contingencies of the term peoples and that the term peoples was an intentional choice, the opening phrase of the ASEAN Charter pinpoints ASEAN’s predominant problem. The term peoples refers to the concept of nationhood, and through the idea of the nation-state, incorrectly so to states. At the same time, it serves to avoid the use of the conventional terminology: heads of state, heads of government or states. While the latter language would be more in line with overall international diplomatic practices, it would also convey that treaty-making is an elite procedure. As stated in the introduction, the text of the ASEAN Charter defies the expectation that Southeast Asia’s elites are turning Southeast Asian integration and ASEAN’s institutional development into an inclusive process. Since ASEAN came into being, the essential reasons for its existence have changed. The external political and military threat of communism has been set aside by the economic threat of globalization. The new internal security problem, which Bilveer Singh has termed ‘the Talibanisation of Southeast Asia’, has replaced the notion of konfrontasi, which has shaped the thinking of ASEAN’s elites (2007). Furthermore, it has been its raison d’état for a long time, but one which, according to many Southeast Asian writers, has become unthinkable now. It must be questioned, however, whether these environmental shifts have affected ASEAN’s elites to the extent that they feel the necessity of shifting from an international unity among the ASEAN nations, towards a transnational unity among its people. The latter would definitely require the institutional involvement of traders and entrepreneurs, producers and consumers, and employers and labourers where economic integration is concerned and the involvement of artists and their public, clergyman and believers, teachers and students took cultural, religious and educational integration into consideration. The text of the ASEAN Charter is far from ambiguous in this respect. Only one of the fifteen purposes of the ASEAN Charter refers to ASEAN’s people. According to 1(13), the ASEAN Charter seeks, ‘to promote a people-oriented ASEAN in which all sectors of society are encouraged to participate in, and benefit from the process of ASEAN integration and community building’, except for more general questions concerning the relationship between Article 1(13) and all other objectives listed in Article 1. Indeed, the main question is: What is meant by a ‘people-oriented ASEAN’? Unfortunately, the answer involves a substantial amount of educated guesswork, as the ASEAN Charter does not provide us with an answer. Except for the reference to the ‘promotion of people-to-people interaction’ as one of the tasks of the ASEAN Foundation (Article 15(1)), people are omitted from the substantive

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text of the ASEAN Charter and excluded from the practices and procedures of the organization. The text of the Charter stands in strident contrast to the idea of the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) that there exists a need: To cultivate ASEAN as a people-centred organisation and to strengthen the sense of ownership and belonging among its people, including enhancing the participation of and interaction among Parliamentarians in ASEAN Member States (AIPA), representatives’ civil society organisations, the private business sector, human rights groups, academic institutions and other stakeholders in ASEAN. (Singh 2007: 6)

The EPG’s report on the ASEAN Charter furthermore suggested ‘empowering’ the people and ‘involving people in functional cooperation activities in ASEAN’ (Singh 2007: 20; emphasis added). The report, however, also falls short of indicating the means to achieve those purposes. Rather than setting out mechanisms and procedures for people’s empowerment and involvement, the report adheres to a top-down vision and endorses the idea that all this has to be promoted rather than affected. The perception of ASEAN’s former Secretary-General, Rudolpho Severino (2006), of ASEAN’s problem in Southeast Asia’s search for an ASEAN Community reflects how flawed the conception of Southeast Asia’s regional integration and the role of ASEAN is. ASEAN should be an institutional tool, not an objective. For the past forty years, ASEAN is claimed to have been successful in avoiding war between the ASEAN member states, but is has definitely not contributed to the creating of a Southeast Asian identity. Since identity is the result of identification, the people of Southeast Asia will not establish a common identity if they cannot identify themselves with ASEAN as the tangible object of Southeast Asia. And that is precisely the internal challenge that the region and its institutional vehicle is facing, and it is there that we find crossroads, dilemmas and challenges. What mechanisms are available for the people of Southeast Asia to identify them with ASEAN as a new transnational political construct? The concept of unity out of diversity – ASEAN’s leitmotiv – is not so much ‘an elite conceit’ as Donald E. Weatherbee claims, but a core element of the Southeast Asian elite swindle. ‘Unity out of diversity’ is the Southeast Asian elite version of the Caesarian adagio divide et impera [divide and rule]. The Southeast Asian elites rule because of the myth of an amalgam of historical, religious, ethnic, cultural, political and economic diversities. This is not

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to say that these diversities are non-existent. On the contrary, Southeast Asia constitutes diversity, like every other region. The question is how this diversity is politically narrated and turned into a mythical truism. While that idea is an appealing one to those who envisage regional integration as a process from below, it raises the question as to the politics of determining the ‘needs of ASEAN’s people’. Who determines what people need and how; or through which procedures? That question circumvents the dialectics of normative change. Norm creation is always a dynamic process in which the norm itself is a subject and an object of creation and recreation, adoption and rejection, generalization and particularization, and prescription and application. There is little doubt that the dynamics of norm creation involve such processes as diffusion, framing and grafting. There is equally little contention on the issue of ‘norm localisation [as a] reinterpretation and re-presentation of the outside norm’ (Acharya 2004). The problem remains the same: who reinterprets and who re-presents the outside norm? Here, I differ from Acharya’s (2004) idea that transnational norms have to be spread through local agents as key norm takers. Acharya’s (2004) description of these key norm-takers as having ‘legitimacy’, ‘authority’, ‘credibility’ and ‘prestige’ indicates that we are not talking about people but about self-acclaimed elites. These elites do not necessarily act in the interest of the people and it is not unlikely that norms will or will not be localized according to elite preferences and politics, such as the Westphalian norm of state sovereignty. Norm diffusion, grafting and framing in a regional context is not simply a matter of taking outside transnational norms in, but also a matter of taking inside national norms out. This is another form of regional localization and adoption of norms. The idea of the localization of norms in a regional context can only be properly called localization in the dialectics of the global and the local. In terms of the ten ASEAN states, regional norm adaptation is a form of transnationalization rather than localization. Where are ASEAN’s people in this process? How can they formally represent their individual, societal or corporate interests? According to Hiro Katsumata and See Seng Tan (2007: 1), an ideal ASEAN is ‘for people and governments’, which is an ASEAN that serves both interests. According to the latter authors, the term people refers to a variety of actors ‘inside states’, and ‘the interests of these actors include the promotion of human rights and democracy, safeguarding their communities from the threat of terrorism, the enhancement of their business interest, gender equality and international exchange and friendship’ (Katsumata & Tan 2007). Assuming that these, in themselves, laudable objectives reflect the true interests of

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the people, the question is not so much how to promote these interest but how to protect them and how to provide the people with procedures and tools for their protection. Putting people at the centre is not a matter of mere reference to human rights. There is little value in mere reference to human rights whether it is in the ASEAN Charter’s preamble, list of objectives (Article 1(7)) or in its articles (Article 2(i)), or in the intention to ‘establish an ASEAN human rights body’ (Article 14) or not that warrants the conclusion that we are witnessing a paradigm shift in ASEAN’s recognition of its own people. Can we expect that an ASEAN human rights body would be granted to adopt a different approach to complaints of individuals and violations of human rights than ASEAN’s hailed and criticized principle of consensus? The presence of a formal body, which could hear and investigate human rights violations and complaints, does not necessarily have to be a judicial institution. Between a full-scale human rights court and no complaint procedure at all, there is a wide range of quasi-judicial, political and administrative complaint procedures that permit individuals to voice their concerns more directly and formally within the intergovernmental organization. The further procedural management and supervision of a complaint is a different problem altogether. Complaint procedures can be arranged along the lines of: (1) the World Bank Inspection Panel, (2) UN Human Rights Council or treaty-based commissions, with their different opting in/out possibilities or (3) the various human rights procedures in other regional organizations (EU, Council of Europe, OAS, OSCE). The ultimate question for ASEAN is whether they are able to fully engage the private sector in the integration process or not. If individuals and organizations are not provided with a formal independent forum to complain about violations of the rights under ASEAN treaties and regulations, these rights and regulations are virtually non-existent. At most, one could maintain that these would then have a normative political value. In two specific sectors, possible changes are likely to be noticed: the private business sector and the NGO sector. ASEAN’s Business Elites The earliest schemes for involving business stakeholders in ASEAN date back to the 1981 Basic Agreement on ASEAN Industrial Complementation and the 1983 Basic Agreement on ASEAN Industrial Joint Venture. These schemes had ‘very limited success’, according to Davidson (2002), notwithstanding several improvements and amendments over time. The reasons for the failure of these schemes have never been the subject of

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in-depth study or policy analysis. However, the top-down, state-initiated project approach, and the intrinsic exclusion of ordinary and spontaneous private sector initiatives must be taken into account as possible reasons for the in­effectiveness of the schemes. While the need to involve the private sector is officially recognized time and again in a variety of ASEAN agreements and projects, very little has materialized. For example, in Article 6 of the 1992 Framework Agreement on Enhancing Economic Cooperation, entitled Private Sector Cooperation, it is stipulated as follows: Members States recognise the complementarity of trade and investment opportunities, and therefore encourage, among others, cooperation and exchanges among ASEAN private sectors and between ASEAN and non-ASEAN private sectors, and the consideration of appropriate policies aimed at intra-ASEAN and extra-ASEAN investments and other economic activities.

Also, in non-binding declarations such as the 1997 Hanoi Action Plan, which draws an implementation map for the ASEAN Vision 2020, the enhancement of the private sector involvement is envisaged. Unfortunately, one must conclude that the ASEAN vision does not include more than ‘a study to identify high-impact investment opportunities in key areas under the food, agriculture and forestry sectors in ASEAN and to provide essential information for investment decisions on these opportunities’, and to establish ‘networking and strategic alliances with the private sector to promote investment and joint opportunities in ASEAN’ (ASEAN Secretariat 1998). ASEAN’s Non-governmental Elites The worldwide proliferation of NGOs in the 1990s reached Southeast Asia at the end of that decade. Since then, the Southeast Asian NGO scene has become more diversified and pluriform (Aviel 1999; Aviel 2000). While there is little doubt that the number of people oriented in grassroots groups and community organizations has increased, so have NGOs with a profound government, donor or business orientation (Reinalda 2001). Southeast Asian NGOs are not exempted from the idea that NGOs are ‘too close for comfort’ (Hulme & Edwards 1997). Moreover, under the ASEAN scheme of NGO accreditation, an elitist community of ASEAN quangos (quasi-NGOs) has been created, which are intended to serve ASEAN rather than the Southeast

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Asian people. There is little reason, therefore, to exclude Southeast Asia from contemporary critical discourses on the role and position of NGOs (Donini 1995; Petras & Veltmeyer 2001; Noortmann 2003). Especially, because the normative approach to NGOs in Southeast Asia tends to neglect the distinction made above, in that sense, NGOs’ role and positions are misrepresented as representing rather than serving Southeast Asia’s people. Two examples serve to demonstrate the fundamentally flawed perception of ASEAN’s NGO community: (1) the concept of ‘entities associated with ASEAN’, in particular, ‘accredited civil society organizations’ and (2) the concept of a ‘Track 2 diplomacy’ and, in particular, the setting up of an ASEAN People’s Assembly. Annex 2 of the ASEAN Charter lists five categories of the so-called ‘entities associated with ASEAN’: (1) parliamentarians, (2) business organizations, (3) think tanks and academic institutions, (4) accredited civil society organizations and (5) other stakeholders in ASEAN (The ASEAN Secretariat 2008). Whether and to which extent these organizations are truly civil society organizations must be questioned. Not only are most of the listed NGOs (semi)industrial organizations or professional organizations; also almost all of these NGOs should be labelled as quangos or gongos. Again, the main question is, how can ASEAN facilitate NGOs in their representational function? JoAnn Aviel’s studies (1999; 2000) on the Southeast Asian NGO community have demonstrated that in the field of human rights and environmental protection, NGOs that are not affiliated to ASEAN have an increasing impact on governmental decision-making in ASEAN. If Aviel is correct that ‘although NGOs have been on the periphery of ASEAN, the future of ASEAN may depend as much on their activities as on those of ASEAN’s governments and private sector’ (1999: 78), the pertinent question to ask, once more, is, how is ASEAN going to make sure that nonstate actors will be heard and their opinions considered? She holds that ‘networks have been formed which have increased communication between elites and NGOs on these issues [human rights and environment] and have increased functional cooperation’ (Aviel 2000: 29). Unfortunately, there is little in the ASEAN Charter to substantiate that claim. Based on the status of these NGOs within ASEAN and their specific role, these organizations should be qualified as quangos. NGOs that pursue a proper public interest and serve rather than represent the interest of the people have to face governmental ‘countermovements’ and restrictions in displaying their views, which underlines the differences between elite and non-elite NGOs in Southeast Asia (Aviel 2000). Aviel states as follows:

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NGO activity in Southeast Asia continues to grow and is helping to forge links among the people in the region. These links are greatest among the elite, but regional meetings of NGOs and a greater focus on regional issues have helped to increase contacts and regional awareness among more and more people. (1999: 89)

Where Aviel refers to Southeast Asia, Caballero-Anthony observes NGO activity in the ASEAN context. She claims that the participation of Track 2 and Track 3 actors in ASEAN processes are contributing to the building of constituency of Southeast ASEAN Community and regionalism. The issue, however, is in the nature of that community which may no longer be anchored in the ASEAN Way, or in its institutional culture that the ASEAN elites had assiduously cultivated throughout the associations history (Caballero-Anthony 2005: 267). The two positions designate opposite understandings of the position and role of NGOs in regional integration processes. While Aviel believes that ASEAN-NGO relationships may be contentious, Caballero-Anthony insists that the liaison between intergovernmental and non-governmental actors is more harmonious. Whether NGOs and the people’s interests that they are supposed to communicate will go hand in hand with ASEAN’s interests is to be questioned. The use of the term peoples is likely to be informed by ASEAN’s traditional focus on regional peace and security, which is still the eye-catching first objective of the ASEAN Charter. Article 1 of the Declaration of Minimum Humanitarian Standards of the ASEAN Charter reads as follows: ‘maintain and enhance peace, security and stability and further strengthen peace oriented values in the region’. ASEAN’s 21st-century vision, as laid down in its Charter, however, seems to be more eclectic than that. The Charter’s multiple objectives include diverse aims, such as ‘regional resilience’, ‘creating a single market’, ‘sustainable development’, ‘democracy’ and ‘the strengthening of the ASEAN community’, In this respect, there cannot be any doubt that the ASEAN member states seek to transcend the narrow, konfrontasi-informed security language that dominated Southeast Asia’s 20th-century historical and political experience. In the wording of the ASEAN Charter, it is committed ‘to intensifying community building through enhanced regional cooperation and integration’. Where communitybuilding is the objective, regional cooperation and integration are the tools, and ASEAN is the institutional vehicle. It is in that spirit, aspiration and ambition that Southeast Asian regionalism and ASEAN as its institutional component must be scrutinized. In particular, the role and position of

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Southeast Asia’s people in the ASEAN process of regional integration has to be subjected to legal and political analysis, both from the perspective of academic understanding as well as policy development. The ASEAN Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS) is perhaps the best example of non-people oriented GONGOism in ASEAN. Considering itself an association of NGOs, ASEAN-ISIS states its purpose as to ‘encourage cooperation and coordination of activities among policyoriented ASEAN scholars and analysts, and to promote policy-oriented studies of, and exchanges of information and viewpoints on various strategic and international issues affecting Southeast Asia’s and ASEAN’s peace, security and well-being’ (12th ASEAN ISIS-IIR Taiwan Dialogue 2010). One of its strategic goals was to obtain ‘recognition from the ASEAN member states as a valuable mechanism for policy-making by institutionalizing the meeting between the Heads of ASEAN-ISIS and the ASEAN Senior Officials [and the establishment of an] international political process – that of “track two” diplomacy’ (12th ASEAN ISIS-IIR Taiwan Dialogue 2010).

Conclusion In 2005, Donald Weatherbee concluded that ASEAN remains part of an elite scheme, which ‘gives institutional expression to an essentially declaratory regionalism that originates … in the political will of the Southeast Asian policy elites’. Neither the ASEAN Charter nor the recently inaugurated ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) have changed that state of affairs. The intergovernmental configuration of the AICHR does not signal a change in the practices, concepts and thinking of intra-ASEAN regional policies and diplomacies. Civil society scepticism is justified. The Charter and its bodies institutionalize existing intergovernmentalist politics of exclusion. But not all commentators consider contemporary Southeast Asian regional integration and its institutionalization process as elite business as usual. Whether the elites of the Southeast Asia have the same ambitious and engaging spirit as the founding fathers of the UN or the EU remains to be seen. An analysis of the ASEAN Charter and its institutional context is not the only way of assessing ASEAN’s true integrating aspirations, but also its commitment to the people of Southeast Asia. We must in the end conclude that the ASEAN Charter is another expression of the proverbial ‘Asian Way’ or have the Southeast Asian nations transcended that fallacious combination of the Westphalian paradigm and Asian values.

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Regional community-building is a vexed and interactive process: interactive in a sense that it is top-down and bottom-up, push and pull, inclusive and exclusive. Schemes and projects only reach out to the people but are insufficient. People need to connect, to reach in. Integration can be facilitated, but not moulded. There is not any Southeast Asian discourse that does not reach a conclusion short of answering this vital question: How does ASEAN provide the protection for the interests of its people other than assuming that these interests are perfectly protected by the ruling political and governmental-bureaucratic elites? None of the actors (such as non-governmental organizations and corporations of individual citizens) has as of yet offered an ASEAN means of redress against an infringement of their interests by either ASEAN member states or ASEAN organs. The ASEAN Charter might have provided a momentum for regional and institutional change. That momentum seems lost for now. The reasons for the lost momentum are eloquently formulated by Ellen Frost: In this new global and regional context, integration and community building should be understood as code words. They symbolise Asian’s leaders’ search for autonomy, self-reliance, growth, security, and influence without the conditions and rules imposed by a foreign power or global institutions. These leaders look into the integration movement for opportunities to cope more successfully with domestic challenges and thus to strengthen their national sovereignty, not to share it. This search is at the core of Asia’s new regionalism. (2008: 11)

The ASEAN Way is not only a particular set of regional values and norms; it is also a particular elitist political and diplomatic culture. In differentiating between various forms of regionalism we should not hesitate to distinguish between those forms of regionalism, which seek to transcend the traditional practices and institutions of the international/Westphalian order, and those that are not intended to bring about change (Hurrell 2007). These forms of regionalism must be called quasi-regionalism or regional internationalism, if anything at all.

6

Non-official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia Civil Society or ‘Civil Service’?* See Seng Tan

Over a decade has passed since the phenomenon of non-official diplomacy emerged as a notable theme in the international affairs of Southeast Asia.1 The emergence of unofficial diplomats from epistemic communities as well as ‘Track 2’ networks across the Southeast Asian region – such as ASEANISIS (ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies) and CSCAP (Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific), among others – has contributed, among other things, to a more expansive understanding of diplomacy as a multitracked enterprise with governmental as well as non-governmental features (Hernandez 1994; Simon 2002; Woods 1993). Moreover, in the light of ongoing (albeit incipient) institutional changes to longstanding regional norms and practices, non-official diplomacy has arguably had some impact in engendering those regional transitions.2 Nevertheless, efforts to arrive at some definitive conclusion about the nature and context of this broadened notion of diplomacy have not been entirely successful. This is largely due to the disagreement among analysts over the aims and accomplishments of non-official diplomacy vis-à-vis the Southeast Asian region. For my purposes, at least two broad observations, both apparently antithetical of each other, are noteworthy. On the one hand, non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia is seen by some as emblematic of a growing and thriving civil society throughout the region, although it is clear that civil society is more developed in some regional states than others (Acharya 2003; Yamamoto 1995). On the other hand, this diplomatic form * This chapter was previously published in Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs in 2005 (vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 370-387). The editor, author, and publisher of the present volume wish to thank ISEAS Publishing for their kind permission to reprint the manuscript. 1 See, among others, Ball (2000), Desker (2003), Evans (1994), Katsumata (2003), Kraft (2000), Langford and Brownsey (1991) etc. 2 This is most clearly expressed in idealist and constructivist writings that emphasize the role of epistemic communities and norm makers and takers in promoting ideas and norms that partly influence elite attitudes and policies on Southeast Asian regionalism (Acharya 1997; 2000; 2001). See also the special issue of The Pacific Review 7 (4) (1994).

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has also been viewed more critically as having supported and legitimated regional governments and their policies (Jones & Smith 2002a; 2001; Khoo 2004). In this sense, non-official diplomatic agents ostensibly serve as a sort of shadow ‘civil service’, as it were. Upon closer inspection, however, a more complex picture emerges that calls into question the supposed coherence of that distinction. Against that backdrop, this paper analyses the evolution of non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia in the post-Cold War era, paying close attention to the multifarious practices and processes in which non-off icial diplomatic agents engage that make them not only civil society participants whose ideas challenge the identity and interests of the state, but, paradoxically, also ‘civil servants’ who promote and protect those very things. Whether this inherent tension is resolvable is open to question. If anything, the heterogeneous ‘nature’ of non-official diplomacy resists efforts to fix and reduce it to an either/or option between civil society and ‘civil service’. Drawing upon Der Derian’s (1987) ‘genealogical’ interpretation of French diplomacy during and after the Revolution of 1789, this study seeks to examine various diplomatic forms and forces that comprise non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia, including those which lie outside the pale of the modern ‘common sense’ logic that underpins orthodox diplomatic theory but which play an integral part in the ongoing formation and preservation of modern diplomacy.3 As Maurice Keens-Soper once conceded, it may ‘be more accurate to say that diplomacy is partly defined by the invasions and distortions which permanently threaten its purposes’ (1973: 913). In this respect, this article argues that non-official diplomacy embodies and embraces both orthodox diplomatic as well as radical ‘anti-diplomatic’ practices, which coexist in irresolvable tension with one another. By probing the ambiguities and contradictions of non-official diplomacy, we find that the enduring story of diplomacy has been and is being defined more by the demands of a hyperrealist and state-centric reading of diplomacy and less by the actual day-to-day activities of which diplomacy consists.

The Many Faces of Modern Diplomacy James Der Derian’s (1987) conceptual categories of ‘diplomacy’, ‘anti-diplomacy’ and ‘neo-diplomacy’ are particularly useful for capturing various 3 As Harold Nicolson noted in his seminal study on diplomacy, ‘it is not religious which has been the main formative influence in diplomatic theory: it is common sense’ (1963: 24).

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diplomatic activities that exceed the representational limits of modern diplomatic theory. 4 Diplomacy follows closely the modern conception of diplomacy as essentially state-to-state relations characterized by order and continuity, ruled by common sense, and which preserve the raison d’état (reason-of-state) principle. Anti-diplomacy refers to the vertical or hierarchical relationship between modern state and society. More specifically, it emphasizes the kinds of interactions between official and non-official or between state and society that are anathema to the purposes of modern diplomacy. They include dissident and resistance movements; in the case of revolutionary France, for instance, anti-diplomatic pressures emerged in the form of the bourgeoisie’s push for political power. To the extent that interstate relations are affected by anti-diplomatic forces, one may think of the rise of revisionist regimes whose revolutionary experiences are perceived by other states as threatening the international status quo. In this sense, anti-diplomatic threats may arise in terms of the revolutionary regime’s newfound international aggressiveness or the possible ‘spillover’ of anti-diplomatic practices to other communities. Finally, neo-diplomacy refers to alternative forms of mediation practised by non-official diplomatic agents that may prove either instrumental or detrimental to the purposes of diplomacy.5 Neo-diplomatic forms, such as ‘people-to-people’ diplomacy, are not necessarily new to the extent that historically they have, in effect, been in existence (Woods 1993). That they have attained greater visibility in recent times, as has been the case with non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia, is due to the proliferation of Track 2 and other networks linking various interested individuals and groups throughout the region. It is entirely possible that the interplay of incipient diplomatic forms, anti-diplomatic resistances and compromises between those opposites heralded the arrival of modern diplomacy. Revolutionary France is an interesting historical example of how multiple diplomatic forms have clashed, reformulated, regressed and stabilized, but remain ever ‘at risk’ of further transformations. However, unlike the teleological story of modern diplomacy, such alternating subversions and consolidations did not evolve in a rational course, guided by – in ways reminiscent of Kant’s appeal to universal Reason – a common sense at once heroic, universal and 4 I borrow the notion of ever present tension between ‘reality’ and our available representational resources from Soguk (1993: 361-362). 5 A possible objection to Der Derian’s approach is that while it implicitly claims to resist domestication by a state-centred metaphysics, its categories nevertheless re-inscribe, if only unintentionally, a view of diplomacy as organized around the very domestic/international distinction germane to statist assumptions (cf. Laffey 2000).

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un-beholden to history, and eventuating in the current diplomatic form (Gramsci 1971: 326). In their dealings with anti-diplomatic forces, proponents of old-style diplomacy resort to tactics of accommodation and marginalization that reflect ‘lowly origins’ (Nietzsche 1956). Edmund Burke (1967), we may recall, famously inveighed against threats posed by the French Revolution to the diplomatic culture and enterprise shared by the monarchical European powers as well as to the very identity of Britain. That the Revolution was an estrangement from (if not repudiation of) the social composition, cryptodiplomacy and power politics of the ancien regime could therefore have meant that the emancipation logic of the Revolution’s emancipation logic was, in an important sense, anti-diplomatic.6 Amid these conflicts rose a non-official diplomatic form, neo-diplomacy, which, in accordance with Enlightenment objectives, aimed to transcend the intrigue, suspicions and machinations of old-style diplomacy.7 According to that logic, diplomatic agents represent all the people, not simply the aristocracy; it constitutes, as it were, a form of people-to-people diplomacy as well as state-to-state diplomacy. 8 The durability of this post-revolution neo-diplomacy was short-lived, however, for the exigencies, logic and rhetoric of war, which culminated in the rise of Napoleon in 1799, rapidly obtruded upon the principles and practice of neo-diplomacy. In other words, the neo-diplomacy of revolutionary France was more or less overwhelmed by a hyperrealism 6 In this respect, the memorialization of the founding of ‘America’, of the ‘New World’, as in part the repudiation of much of that for which the ‘Old World’ stands suggests that revolutionary America also evinced a form of anti-diplomacy in its fight for independence against the British. Indeed, the memory of anti-diplomacy remains a salient one in the ongoing re-presenting of what America ‘is’ and ‘is not’. For instance, when referring to the alleged deep-seated American distrust of diplomacy and diplomats, Barbara W. Tuchman (1972) wrote that, for many of her fellow Americans, ‘Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interwar period, appeasement of Fascism’. That such a representation runs counter to the other story of American diplomacy – one which has included, on numerous occasions, Old World-type diplomatic practices – implies that the conventional image of diplomacy is but one among many images, whose ‘orthodoxy’ is not at all natural nor self-evident. Instead, it is sustained, and only tenuously so, by practices of representation, of statecraft. 7 For example, the diplomatic innovations of the French foreign minister Dumouriez in 1792 were quite radical even by today’s standards: the call for a totally open diplomacy, with all diplomatic correspondence rendered available to the people, including the senior officials of other European powers (Der Derian 1987: 175-176). 8 According to Thomas Paine, the American statesman Benjamin Franklin was the embodiment of non-official diplomacy after the French Revolution: ‘He was not the diplomatic of a Court, but of MAN’ (quoted in Hinsley 1963: 77).

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wherein the ‘signs and symbols of realist realpolitik’ were circulated in the economy of power and discourse in order to tame the incipient neodiplomacy. As such, neo-diplomatic forms ended up being domesticated if not colonized by old-style diplomacy such that the former came to be deployed in diplomatic discourse as well as other related social discourses in the service of raison d’état.9 One can therefore say that post-revolution France instituted a form of diplomatic practice suitable for mediating relations with emerging democracies as well as absolutist regimes. From the nouveau regime came the beginnings of a diplomatic culture, expressed in the ongoing inclusion and exclusion of diplomatic forms both clashing and converging, that invokes the modern disposition towards the organizing of space and time along inside/outside divisions, especially the domestic/international divide of inter-nation-al diplomatic relations. With the cooption of the neo-diplomatic form by old-style diplomacy, the alliance between diplomacy and hyper-statecentrism was again stabilized, if only tentatively (Der Derian 1987: 183). In reason-of-state, the Machiavellian strategy for riding the vicissitudes of a crumbling medieval hierarchy comes full circle in the compromise (albeit a never fully settled one) between old Europe and revolutionary France.10

Non-official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia In conceptual terms at least, non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia may be read in terms not dissimilar to those which (à la Der Derian) defined revolutionary French neo-diplomacy: the supposition that relations between sovereign states, in order to be sound and healthy, ought to be based on relations between individual citizens. The gist of non-official diplomacy, according to one formulation, is as follows: In fact, democracies conduct their foreign relations through two channels. The one channel which is the formal channel is ‘state-to9 According to Meinecke, ‘It was the diplomat, sending in his reports, who was the acknowledged discoverer of the interests of states’. The diplomat ‘found himself compelled to try and bring events, plans, and the possibilities at any particular time, over one common denominator. So it is that the beginnings of the new doctrine [reason-of-state] reach back to the beginnings of modern diplomacy – in what was for it the classic period of Machiavelli’ (1957: 148-149). 10 Despite occasional concessions to diplomacy as ‘dynamic, adaptive, and changing’, conventional diplomatic theorists and historians tend to read diplomacy as if its meaning were essentially uncontested (Walker 1992).

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state diplomacy’ and our familiarity with this practice requires no further elaboration. The other channel of relationship between nations is an outgrowth of the concept of popular sovereignty applied to foreign affairs. It conducts no negotiations, dispatches no notes, signs no treaties, presents no demarches. It has come to be called ‘people-topeople diplomacy’ – the direct reaching out of people to speak to other people, quite apart from the formal practice of their governments. (Joesoef 1977: ix-xi)11

Thus understood, non-official diplomacy is in a sense neither novel nor unique (Woods 1993). In describing the historical European fascination with regional diplomacy, Hanns Maull (1994) has suggested that the perceived need among interested parties for networks and dialogue programmes possibly dates back to medieval or absolutist times where mutual understanding between members of different elites was easier, both linguistically and culturally. Non-official diplomacy today in Southeast Asia acts both in concert and at odds with official diplomacy to mediate interstate relations. Moreover, the growing complexity of technical, social and environmental issues that comprise today’s enlarged security agendas requires that ‘nonstate’ agents participate to a greater extent in policy-making, thereby further altering diplomatic practices. Ostensibly, non-official diplomacy provides venues for ‘thinking the unthinkable’, as it were. Members of ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP, for example, pride themselves on dealing with issues deemed sensitive or even taboo by governments and wich are consequently excluded from the official diplomatic agenda. This is an equivocal claim at best, however. On one hand, it is arguable whether political-security issues are particularly sensitive in the light of the institutionalized and mostly bilateral security ties between ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member states. Indeed, that ASEAN’s very formation had to do with political-security rather than economic reasons (as originally mandated) has never been in doubt except for sceptics of ASEAN cooperation. On the other hand, the issue of human rights (i.e. civil and political rights and freedoms) for ASEAN regimes (and, one suspects, for dominant sectors of civil society as well) clearly is; again, it was non-official diplomatic agents who evidently took the lead in encourag11 For Berman and Johnson, unofficial diplomats are ‘private citizens acting alone or attached to non-governmental organisations [who] became involved in the conduct of interstate relations [through] contact with private citizens or government officials from other countries as well as their own government’ (1977: 3-5).

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ing a security dialogue on the matter, but arguably a ‘government-endorsed’ dialogue (Hernandez 1994; Katsumata 2003; Kraft 2000). Nevertheless, that non-official diplomatic discourse seems almost always to gravitate to official positions only serves to highlight ever-present dispositions and practices of patrolling and taming aspects of discourse deemed radical, unruly and hence potentially subversive to the state. In other words, non-official diplomacy is an arena in which raison d’état elements are incessantly at odds with anti-diplomatic elements such that the contemporary diplomatic culture of Southeast Asia today is partly defined by the ‘invasions and distortions’ that threaten its very purpose (Keens-Soper 1973). Civil Society Face of Non-official Diplomacy Although civil society includes anti-diplomatic aspects, it clearly also encompasses facets that support and even promote the reason-of-state principle, or at least are sympathetic to it.12 The rise of non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia has long been associated with the emergence of an incipient regional community and transnational civil society in the region (Acharya 2001; Yamamoto 1995). But as the following discussion suggests, the growth of civil society in the region can also be traced to certain ongoing developments that either challenge, or at least substantially complicate, the way diplomacy has long been practised in the region. How non-official diplomatic agents have engaged in these anti-diplomatic activities in both direct as well as indirect ways is clearly a question of interest. In this respect, at least three developments are noteworthy. The first development concerns the longstanding norm of non-interference that ostensibly underpins official diplomatic relations in Southeast Asia. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, ASEAN members did not provide early warnings to one another, presumably out of deference to this norm. That this position is likely no longer tenable today has partly to do with efforts by regional epistemic and Track 2 communities, together with pressure from international institutions, to persuade regional governments concerning the need for change (Adler 2005; Callinicos 2001). Transnational challenges such as the regional haze problem spawned by Indonesian bushfires and the various flu pandemics caused serious economic and health 12 This is best captured by Gramsci’s well-known equation: State = political society + civil society. Thus understood, civil society is both the ground that sustains the dominance of the state as well as that from which challenges to the state can arise (Cox 1999).

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concerns, while mounting problems with drug and human trafficking and refugee flows proved equally worrying. Against this backdrop, non-official diplomatic attempts to raise awareness and proffer solutions, including calls to establish regional early warning and other preventive mechanisms – particularly those that involve intrusive measures –conceivably militate against the non-interference principle and potentially unsettle diplomatic conventions (Caballero-Anthony 2005; Nesadurai 2004; Tan & Boutin 2001). Indeed, Bangkok’s call to replace ASEAN’s ‘constructive engagement’ policy, which in itself is rooted in non-interference, with a more invasive ‘flexible engagement’ could also be viewed as an anti-diplomatic initiative. The principal articulator of the ‘flexible engagement’ initiative was Surin Pitsuwan, then foreign minister of Thailand, while Sukhumbhand Paribatra served as Pitsuwan’s deputy minister – both veteran ASEANISIS members who subsequently rose to the highest echelons of Thailand’s foreign affairs ministry. The initiative met with resistance from member capitols, especially Hanoi and Yangon. Moreover, ASEAN’s failure to provide a timely response to the violence in East Timor during its secession from Indonesia – despite urgent appeals from regional epistemic communities for concerted action13 – also partly highlighted the shared circumspection among regional regimes about anti-diplomacy in general. While ASEAN remains and will likely continue to remain divided on the issue of non-interference, there have been indications of some willingness among member states to adopt less dogmatic interpretations of the doctrine.14 This is exemplified by the Association’s decision in 2000 to institute a troika system that would provide a rapid diplomatic response to unfolding crisis, the conduct of economic peer reviews and the creation of 13 For example, in the year 2003 alone, the contexts wherein these appeals took place included myriad Track 2 meetings such as: the National Institute of Defence Studies conference on ‘Nontraditional Roles of the Military and Security in East Asia’, Tokyo, 21-22 January; The United Nations and Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies workshop on ‘The Third United Nations-ASEAN Conference on Conflict Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding in Southeast Asia: ASEAN/UN Experiences in Anticipating and Mediating Conflict’, Singapore, 17-19 February; the 17th Asia-Pacific Roundtable on ‘Confidence Building and Conflict Reduction’, Kuala Lumpur, 7-9 August; the ‘Initiative for a Southeast-Asia Human Development Report (SEAHDR)’, Manila, 18-20 August; the Asia Pacific Peace Research Association (APPRA) Conference 2003 on ‘Visioning Alternatives to Violence’, Siem Reap, 21-24 August, and so on. For a complete inventory of multilateral Track 2 meetings on Asia-Pacific security, human security issues, and community-building, see Dialogue and Research Monitor, available at http://www.jcie.or.jp/ drm/2003/track2.html#II.5. 14 While affirming that non-interference remains a cardinal Association principle, an Indonesian senior official nevertheless conceded that ‘it is no longer a principle which cannot be discussed’ (Suryodiningrat 2000: 1).

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an ASEAN Surveillance Process in regional financial cooperation. Indeed, in the light of the growing legalizing ‘imperative’ that characterizes a fair bit of ASEAN’s regional process today, the hallmarks of the once-venerated ‘ASEAN Way’ (decision by consensus, preference for informality and organizational minimalism, and so on) have increasingly come under duress.15 Even the mother of taboo concerns, the political-security dimension, has not remained completely impervious, as evidenced by the discussion of domestic political concerns in Myanmar in the presence of its head of state at the ASEAN Summit in Singapore in 2002. Despite longstanding criticisms of ASEAN’s constructive engagement with military junta-governed Myanmar, it is notable that non-governmental groups and individuals from the region have been making regular visits to Myanmar for the purpose of helping the Burmese leadership to ‘build institutional capacities’, as it were, so as to facilitate their incorporation into ASEAN membership (Rajaretnam 1996). At best, these incidents constitute a limited complication of noninterference, but they also represent instances of anti-diplomacy that, on occasion, have prompted hyperrealist diplomatic rejoinders. The ongoing liberalization of Southeast Asian regionalism – partly the consequence of democratic transitions in the Philippines, Thailand and most recently Indonesia – is another regional development with potentially anti-diplomatic tendencies (Acharya 2003). Regional cooperation in Southeast Asia has long remained the exclusive preserve of governments, while the engagement by civil society in that enterprise has been minimal despite the proliferation of Track 2 processes. However, post-Cold War attention to non-traditional security concerns has led to various campaigns on environmental degradation, human rights abuses, poverty and social justice sponsored by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have been pursued at the regional level and which occasionally contradict official policy as well as official diplomatic conventions. Against longstanding official positions on security matters, civil society groups seek to challenge the dominant discourse and practice of security and diplomacy in their efforts to ‘build constituencies for peace’ (Caballero-Anthony 2004). 15 As it is, the Association has not been particularly averse to arming itself with formal provisions for monitoring compliance through the use of regional mechanisms that have legally binding dispute-settlement authority backed by sanctions, such as the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone Treaty, the ASEAN Free Trade Area, or the Regional Haze Action Plan. Such agreements challenge the model of ‘soft’ multilateralism cum regionalism with which ASEAN has long been associated. The latest expression of such ASEAN-styled formalization is the declared intention to establish an ASEAN Community (Caballero-Anthony 2005; Tan 2005: 53-59).

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For the most part, NGOs active in Southeast Asia and elsewhere are understandably reluctant to collaborate with regional intergovernmental institutions, preferring instead to pursue their own separate networking and advocacy activities. Despite those constraints, there have been modest efforts by both governments and civil societies to promote dialogue over social and security issues. The ASEAN Peoples’ Assembly (APA) conventions, held in Batam in 2000 and Bali in 2002, are good examples. Castigated as ‘an incoherent babble of voices’ (Rashid 2001), the APA has also been viewed conversely as emblematic of the prevailing zeitgeist wherein groups that for long harboured suspicions of one another are now collaborating to accomplish goals they cannot realize in isolation from or in hostile opposition to each other (Caballero-Anthony 2004). These sessions attest to the growing acknowledgement within regional officialdom of the significance of engaging with regional civil society, and can rightly be regarded as an embryonic step towards participatory regionalism. Insofar as the APA succeeds as a regional mechanism for highlighting human security concerns in the region, the role of NGOs in humanitarian intervention and specifically peace operations would constitute a natural outgrowth of that progress. In this respect, the APA, as a civil societal effort at drawing together representatives from two non-official diplomatic tracks and collectively pressuring established diplomatic conventions, can be viewed as anti-diplomatic. Finally, there is the growing agenda of regional cooperation against international terrorism and the conditions that engender and support it. States are today enlisting the assistance of humanitarian and relief organizations and other non-official actors in their wider counterterror efforts (Natsios 2004). On their part, regional Security Studies communities and their members have also weighed in on the issue of not only international terrorism in Southeast Asia, but that of political Islam as well (Gunaratna 2003; Ramakrishna & Tan 2003; Tan & Ramakrishna 2002). Understandably, not all such efforts have been entirely supportive of extant interstate cooperation on counterterrorism, with criticisms of concerns ranging from over-reliance by regional governments on praetorian strategies, weak state capacity and legitimacy, bureaucratic and interagency rivalry, enduring socio-economic and political disenfranchisement of Muslim populations, and the non-interference norm (Jones & Smith 2002b; Tan & Ramakrishna 2004). The anti-diplomatic tenor of some of these efforts is undeniable. Along with other aspects of regional transition, the foregoing developments argue for the likelihood of increased pressures on regional governments to allow for a more participatory approach to regional diplomacy.

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Should these changes continue to occur in a sustained and substantive way, a ‘business as usual’ approach to regional affairs may no longer be feasible. In that respect, the longstanding adherence to a purely state-oriented approach to regional diplomacy may either have to be revised to cater to changing regional perceptions of what best provides for the stability and prosperity of the region. But equally noteworthy for our purposes is the fact that regional diplomatic practice in Southeast Asia, among other things, is partly defined and moulded by a host of anti-diplomatic pressures that jeopardize the very conventions and purposes of diplomacy. ‘Civil Service’ Face of Non-official Diplomacy Be that as it may, non-official diplomacy in Southeast Asia has also functioned in a ‘cheerleading’ capacity on behalf of state interests (Jayasuriya 1994; Jones & Smith 2002a; 2001). Where the diplomatic activities of regional Track 2 networks are concerned, self-surveillance and regulation are evidenced in the ways non-official diplomats work to accommodate discourses that support a state-centred ontology and to marginalize other discourses that potentially subvert that ontology. For example, both ASEANISIS and CSCAP have hitherto harboured an inveterate reticence about expanding their dialogue processes to include participation by other NGOs whose interests are perceived to be inimical to the diplomatic enterprise.16 ASEAN-ISIS has long debated the option of including certain NGOs, but has hitherto eschewed doing so for fear that its ‘hard-earned legitimacy’ and agenda might be compromised.17 Evidently, Track 2 diplomacy can be in practice a highly circumscribed exercise. That the state goal of non-official diplomatic forums is to yield ‘policy relevant’ ideas and proposals is to subordinate anti-diplomatic initiatives (or the potential for such) to the more parochial parameters of modern diplomacy, which aim to maintain the regional status quo. What is evident is the diplomatic compromise to which some non-official diplomats seem to have ‘resigned’ themselves. Paradoxically, as a potential site in which to engage in the more innovative aspects of neo-diplomacy, 16 Several Track 2 members, not least the late Gerald Segal, have expressed to this author their concern that expanding the dialogue process would only dilute its viability; more specifically, they argued that limiting the latitude of the process as well as participation is necessary in order to preserve the ‘legitimacy’ of the Track 2 process. 17 Author’s interview with Filipino Track 2 participant Malaya Ronas, who argued that ‘pragmatism’ is the key to preparing proposals that would be acceptable for presentation to ASEAN SOM meetings.

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non-official diplomacy exercises the self-regulation of such creative tendencies by implicitly subscribing to the restrictive and ‘safe’ conventions of diplomatic orthodoxy. Just as monarchists in revolutionary France were able to secure modern diplomacy from the dangers of anti-diplomacy and neo-diplomacy by recourse to hyperrealism – aided, doubtless, by the fortuitous outbreak of war in Europe – there are equally vigilant practitioners of statecraft in non-official diplomatic communities, who, troubled by what they see as the giddy fantasies of dreamers who enthuse about regional institution-building and community-formation as the key to the region’s peace and prosperity, have inveighed against such idealism. Reasoning that peace in post-Cold War Europe, relative to Asia, is more plausible due to ‘the apparent satisfaction of the great powers with the status quo’, an academic argued a decade ago that where Southeast and East Asia are concerned, ‘an ample pool of festering grievances [exists] with more potential for generating conflict than during the Cold War, when bipolarity helped stifle the escalation of parochial disputes’ (Betts 1993-1994: 64). Likewise, another prominent analyst noted: ‘in the long run it is Asia that seems more likely to be the cockpit of great power conflict. The half millennium during which Europe was the world’s primary generator of war (as well as wealth and knowledge) is coming to a close’. Hence, ‘for better or worse, Europe’s past could be Asia’s future’ (Friedberg 1993-1994: 7). Still another analyst (based in Southeast Asia) has rendered the even more interesting assertion that ‘certain primordial impulses, like […] a type of domination founded upon classical raison d’état [that are] inherent in the human condition will somehow remain dormant as long as the peoples and governments of the Asia-Pacific preoccupy themselves with the business of making money’ (Da Cunha 1996: x). That such prognostications about impending interstate conflict in the region have, in retrospect, generally been off the mark is not at issue here (Alagappa 2003a: ix-xv). That they serve to preserve and promote the reason-of-state principle and, in doing so, re-instantiate longstanding diplomatic conventions and norms perceptibly threatened by non-official diplomatic attempts at institution-building through hyperrealist interventions clearly underscores an inherent proclivity towards maintenance of the diplomatic status quo. The writings of Kishore Mahbubani, diplomat turned academic dean, are illustrative of the proclivity of diplomatic orthodoxy to tame perceived anti-diplomatic unruliness. Highlighting the need for regional governments to eschew the high probability of conflict and turbulence in the region – a ‘natural groove of history’, as he put it – Mahbubani (1998: 148) argues that if the region ‘is to defy the historical odds and make a smooth transition

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from one order to another, a new consensus must soon be forged’. That is, a non-official diplomatic consensus regarding ‘what is to be done’ in a region fraught with the tensions and contradictions that pervade and distort the diplomatic enterprise. Shortly after this appeal for consensus, Mahbubani again addresses the issue, this time in the context of the 1996 missile crisis in the Taiwan straits: We faced a danger then [the missile crisis], but we also saw a new opportunity because it woke up key minds in Washington, DC, Tokyo and Beijing on the importance of preserving the status quo. A new consensus emerged in the region: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. This is why we have not had any major geopolitical crisis in East Asia since March 1996, despite phenomenal historical change in our region. (1998: 150-151)

He further elaborates on the ‘nature’ of that new consensus: This consensus could rest on three distinct and somewhat unusual pillars. First, the current geopolitical order should be frozen in place. Under present circumstances no better order can be achieved. Second, all key players must develop a common understanding of the region’s constraints and realities. Third, they will need a vision that draws out common elements from the region’s tremendous diversity and so lay the groundwork for a sense of community. (1998: 139)

In promoting the need to forge a region-wide, non-off icial diplomatic consensus, what appears to be an open invitation to discussion can conversely be seen as a move to safeguard the diplomatic enterprise from being politicized. It is a move to securitize and sanitize the state-centric presuppositions of diplomacy from the sorts of questions orthodox diplomatic discourses ‘must refuse to ask if they are to affirm their foundations and sustain the limits that define them’ (Ashley 1989: 259). Mahbubani’s domesticating gesture is effected by way of a discourse implicitly predicated on raison d’état: preserve the realpolitik-based status quo; freeze in place the ‘current geopolitical order’; adduce a ‘vision’ of, ‘lay the groundwork’ for, a ‘sense of community’ among states (1998: 139) – in short, to maintain and strengthen the ontological commitment to the state. On the one hand, the vaunted, non-official diplomatic consensus eloquently urged for and which, in ways not entirely clear, suddenly ‘emerged’ in the aftermath of a missile crisis does not seem to merit the sense of triumphalism in his statement;

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his message, after all, is ‘do nothing. On the other hand, it is triumphalist in that it implicitly celebrates the logic of reason-of-state by disseminating it over and over again in diplomatic discourse to discipline those who dare wake the sleeping dogs of anti-diplomacy, with terrifying consequences.

Conclusion The non-off icial diplomatic enterprise of Southeast Asia can thus be understood not as a well-defined and bounded community and arena of activity driven by common sense, but rather as a loose-knit ensemble of sites upon which diplomatic, anti-diplomatic and neo-diplomatic forms and forces variously clash, converge, consolidate and crumble. These forces meet in ways that unsettle the conventional understanding of modern diplomacy to which orthodox diplomatic theorists rigorously hold. That diplomatic ‘civil servants’, in ways similar to the efforts by Burke and the French monarchists at domesticating the unruly forces of anti-diplomacy, continue to discipline the multifarious diplomacies put into effect by ‘civil societal agents’ that transgress the boundaries which ostensibly define the limits of what properly constitutes diplomacy is evident in their discourses. In other words, diplomatic orthodoxy is, inter alia, also about ‘the forceful delimitation of the spaces in which [diplomatic interpretation] can operate’ (Dillon 1995: 333). But as this study has sought to show, the story of non-official diplomacy in contemporary Southeast Asia portrays a considerably more fluid and complex picture of diplomacy than apologists of diplomatic orthodoxy, who tend to reduce the ambiguous, complex world of Southeast Asian diplomacy to rather simplistic categorizations, would allow. Such categorizations have rendered exempt from serious critical reflection the practices and predispositions – the ‘power politics’, as it were – that make it possible for us at all to think and speak of modern diplomacy according to the delimitations that define and sustain diplomatic orthodoxy. How modern diplomatic agents have been able, for the most part, to affirm and sustain a reductionistic account of diplomacy is the result of a diplomatic historiography that presupposes an unproblematic teleology in international life. The ambiguous, contradictory and undoubtedly complex world of the non-official diplomacy of Southeast Asia makes such reductionisms untenable.

7

China and India as Regional Powers Policies of Two Aspiring States Intersecting in Burma Ming Hwa Ting

With the rapid economic growth experienced by both China and India over the last two decades, commentators such as Kishore Mahbubani are confidently proclaiming that the 21st century belongs to Asia (Mahbubani 2008). Consequently, there are also many works predicting the nature and effects, whether benign or belligerent, associated with the concurrent rise of China and India. However, this chapter, unlike existing predicative literature, does not seek to make claims about the consequences of the rise of China and India. This is because the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk; it is only when events are over that we can fully appreciate the significance of what has occurred. However, it does not necessarily mean that it is not possible to make more informed predictions of this development. To this end, this chapter argues that in order to make sense of the impact the Sino-Indian rise will have on international society, it is necessary to observe their interaction in a context in which they possess the luxury to choose, and not in a context where they are compelled to take a particular course of action, thereby ruling out their policies towards countries in East or South Asia – areas of primary strategic importance to China and India, respectively. This is because the act of choosing provides insights into their ‘black boxes’, namely the process involved in the formulation of their foreign policies, a process that is usually obscured. Consequently, this chapter uses prospect theory to analyse Sino-Indian interaction in Burma in order to achieve the aim of understanding the nature and effects on international society as they seek to become major powers. Prospect theory is used because it is able to explain why China and India have been devoting resources to improving relations with states of peripheral importance such as Burma, which should not be the case if they seek to maximize their utility.

Prospect Theory as Analytical Framework Unlike expected utility theory, prospect theory does not assume actors to be rational entities who seek to maximize utility. Instead, prospect theory, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky argue, better reflects real-life decision-

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making because it starts off with the premise that how actors perceive gains or losses is not fixed. Consequently, they argue that individuals’ decisions are dependent on whether they believe the resulting outcome is interpreted as a gain or a loss. An actor is likely to be more risk-acceptant if the outcome is framed as a loss. This is because the actor wants to avoid incurring the said loss. Conversely, an actor is likely to be more risk-adverse if the resultant outcome is framed as a gain. Extending this argument to its logical conclusion means that actors have increased propensity to incur risks to avoid or recoup losses due to the endowment effect, and to be more cautious in seeking new gains. In other words, individuals are likely to be risk-acceptant when they perceive themselves to be in the realm of losses and are likely to be risk-adverse when they are in the realm of gains. As Kahneman and Tversky explain: In the positive domain, the certainty effect contributes to a risk adverse preference for a sure gain over a larger gain that is probable. In the negative domain, the same effect leads to a risk seeking preference for a loss that is merely probable over a smaller loss that is certain. The same psychological principle – the overweighting of certainty – favours risk aversion in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. (1979: 47)

The above is caused by losses being regarded to elicit a higher psychic cost and therefore would create a more lasting response as compared to gains. Hence, an identical situation would result in different actions if the outcome was framed as either a gain or a loss. Furthermore, Robert Jervis believes that individuals ‘renormalise for gains much more quickly than … for losses’ (Jervis 1992: 200). When gains are made, the associated euphoria tends to be fleeting, whereas the pains associated with losses tend to be more durable, and the natural reaction is therefore to attempt a recovery to the previous status quo prior to suffering the said losses. This insight explains why individuals in many cases persist in the pursuit of seemingly obvious failing or unprofitable measures, as reflected in the common expression of throwing good money after bad. Individuals continue to pursue such counterintuitive actions because to do otherwise would be to accept a definite loss. The remote possibility of a turnaround is sufficient to provide enough incentive to throw caution to the wind. Opportunity costs are seen to outweigh the actual out-of-pocket costs. The resulting new state of affairs in which losses are experienced does not count and is not regarded as the new status quo because individuals

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have yet to accept this new development. However, if gains were to be made, individuals would quickly adjust to this improvement and regard it as the normal state of affairs. According to Kahneman and Tversky, this discrepancy arises as ‘gains and losses are coded relative to an expectation or aspiration level that differs from the status quo’ (1979: 286). The endowment effect accounts for this difference. This is because an actor is likely to attach and place more value and importance on an entity after gaining possession as compared to before gaining possession of the said entity, which Richard Thaler terms the ‘underweighting of opportunity costs’ (1980: 43). Hence, this reference point is not neutral, though it is often regarded as such. It is important to note that how states frame the status quo will influence the actions they take. A state may become dissatisfied if it perceives itself to be short-changed, even if it is not the case. It is entirely possible for a state to adjust to the new and diminished references when circumstances change. However, the crux of the issue is that there is often a time lag involved. Reactions are therefore dependent on the context, and more importantly, on how the situation is framed. Hence, prospect theory posits that ‘a person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise’ (Kahneman & Tversky 1979: 287). However, it is important to note that what constitutes the status quo is not as straightforward as the situation at the precise time the assessment is made. Instead, this reference point is subjective and it is influenced by factors such as social comparison with peers as well as historical expectations. Relative gains are usually given precedence over absolute gains, and so an actor making fewer gains than a counterpart regards the resultant outcome as a loss, since the absolute gains made are usually overlooked. In most cases, a state is likely to still refer to a previous high point, and not the present diminished position it is currently in, as the status quo. This is an important point to note, because China and India used to be the most dominant actors in continental Southeast Asia; hence the term Indo-China. As a result, it is plausible for these two states in the present context as aspiring powers to regard their previously dominant positions in continental Southeast Asia as the historical status quo. From this perspective, China and India would therefore regard themselves to be currently in the realm of losses in spite of their rapidly improving positions in Burma. As a result, they are likely to implement active policies in that theatre, which allows for the analysis of how they formulate their foreign policies. From an International Relations perspective, prospect theory’s most important contribution is the observation that ‘people hate to lose even

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more than they love to win and this will systematically bias their attitudes towards risk’ (Mercer 2005: 3). It is expected that China and India, as aspiring powers, value their present political status, and do not want it to be eroded since they are less self-assured as compared to established powers. As Kissinger puts it, ‘the distinguishing feature of a revolutionary power is not that it feels threatened – such a feeling is inherent in the nature of international relations based on sovereign states – but that nothing can reassure it’ (1957: 2; emphasis in the original). However, in order to fully comprehend how and to what extent China and India might go to protect or even regain what they perceive to be their historic or rightful status, a development which would invariably affect international society as it adjusts to changes made to the status quo, a further step is required. In fact, it would be necessary to observe their foreign policy decisions in a theatre not only where their interests converge, but also where there exists enough strategic leeway for them to choose different options. Also, they should not be presented with a fait accompli or a situation in which they experience what Herbert Butterfield terms ‘Hobbesian fear’, which is likely to manifest itself in primary theatres of strategic interests such as East or South Asia.1

A Case Study: Burma Burma is chosen as the case study because it is a state where Chinese and Indian interests meet and overlap. Burma shares a 1,370-mile border with China, and an 832-mile border with India. However, the onset of globalization and with it the compression of time and space has obscured the salience of geography in the discipline of International Relations. Geography may not be in vogue now, but it does not mean that it is no longer relevant. Geography stills matters to this triad of states, and this is due to the fact they share land borders. In the absence of large bodies of water to serve 1 ‘If you imagine yourself locked in a room with another person with whom you have often been on the most bitterly hostile terms in the past, and suppose that each of you has a pistol, you may find yourself in a predicament in which both of you would like to throw the pistols out of the window, yet it defeats the intelligence to find a way of doing it’ (Butterfield 1949: 89-90). Thomas Schelling provides another account: ‘If I go downstairs to investigate a noise at night, with a gun in my hand, and find myself face to face with a burglar who has a gun in his hand, there is a danger of an outcome that neither of us desires. Even if he prefers just to leave quietly, and I wish him to, there is a danger he may think I want to shoot, and shoot first. Worse, there is a danger he may think that I think he wants to shoot. Or he may think that I think he thinks I want to shoot. And so on’ (Schelling 1960: 207).

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as natural moats and obstacles, it is that much easier for the transmission of influence and projection of powers. Hence, Lewis F. Richardson (1960: 176-180) argues that borders, apart from serving as a convenient marker, are very important in geopolitical analysis because there is a link between the number of borders two states share and the number of conflicts between them. As a result, the diminished geographical distance magnifies any existing tensions and problems, which is highly pertinent to the purpose of the present research. As China and India become major powers, their interests and concerns will naturally transcend their geographical boundaries as they adopt an increasingly global perspective. However, in order for both China and India to be regarded as major powers, they must first be able to influence developments along their borders, which is why they are likely to have an ongoing interest in Burma even though the latter is not of primary strategic importance to either of them. Richard Tucker’s observation on the USA’s continual involvement in Central America is applicable: When engaged in a conflict for global stakes, what may appear as a marginal interest will be invested with a significance it would not otherwise have, for almost any challenge is likely to be seen by the challenger and by third parties as a test of one’s will … In Central America there are no vital raw materials or minerals whose loss might provide the basis for legitimate security concerns. Yet Central America bears geographical proximity to the United States, and historically it has long been regarded as falling within our sphere of influence … [If] the Soviet Union observes our passivity to events in our own backyard that signal the loss of American control, what conclusions might it draw about our probable passivity in other, far more difficult areas? (Tucker 1981: 144-145, 76-77, 80)

Ironically, Burma’s value proposition therefore lies in the fact that it is of secondary importance to both China and India. Like Central America in the above quote, Burma’s importance arises vis-à-vis its geographical proximity to China and India, which then makes this Southeast Asian state important for its signalling function, as the two rising powers could use it in ‘an unimportant context to deliver an important message’ (O’Neill 2001: 106). Furthermore, in order to better comprehend Chinese and Indian foreign policies, it is important to observe them in a context that allows them to choose from a range of options. In other words, it is necessary to observe them when they pursue a policy they choose to, and not a policy

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that they have to pursue, such as when confronted with a fait accompli. Arnold Wolfers’s burning house analogy illustrates this point effectively: Imagine a number of individuals, varying widely in their predispositions, who find themselves inside a house on fire. It would be perfectly realistic to expect that these individuals, with rare exceptions, would feel compelled to run towards the exits. General fears of losing the cherished possession of life, coupled with the stark external threat to life, would produce the same reaction, whatever the psychological peculiarities of the actors. Surely, therefore, for an explanation of the rush for the exits, there is no need to analyze the individual decisions that produced it … A different situation would arise if, instead of being on fire, the house in question merely were overheated. In such a case … serious external danger … would be absent. The reactions of different inhabitants might range all the way from hurried window-opening and loud complaints to complete indifference. (1962: 13-14)

From the Chinese perspective, the sovereignty dispute over Taiwan affects its core national interest. Any move by Taiwan to declare de jure independence or support by any other states to facilitate such a development would therefore elicit a very strong response from China. Such a move would go against the One-China policy and China has made it clear on numerous occasions that it would use military force to prevent changes to the existing arrangement. In this instance, even though China might retaliate with military force, it does not provide any insights into whether China’s rise is of a benign or belligerent nature. The same limitation also applies to India’s policy towards states in South Asia. For instance, any moves by Pakistan that threaten India’s interest are very likely to draw a very aggressive response from India. Any states, no matter their predispositions, when faced with a high-stakes situation that directly threatens their core national interest will take the same drastic actions. For China and India, developments in East and South Asia constitute the burning house and the ensuing knee-jerk reaction does not provide any useful insights into how these states formulate their foreign policies, thereby rendering it irrelevant for our present purpose of understanding the issue of the rise of China and India and its effect on international society. It is inevitable that Chinese and Indian interests will eventually converge. As this chapter will demonstrate, it has already happened in Burma, and developments there might foreshadow the effects and consequences when it occurs in theatres of primary importance. Furthermore, as prospect theory

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points out, states feel losses suffered more acutely than gains made, and so states will focus more on relative gains rather than absolute gains. In this context, China and India as aspiring powers would then be expected to devote more effort in consolidating their respective positions in Burma as they size each other up in this contest for status and prestige, given they do not want the other actor to achieve any relative gains there at their expense. Long-term Sino-Indian interaction is therefore likely, which then provides credible insights into the nature and future effects of their concurrent rise on international society (French 2007). For instance, if either or both China and India were to adopt a very aggressive policy towards Burma, or if peaceful co-existence were not possible, it would show that their rise would threaten order within international society. At the same time, Burma’s status as a pseudo-pariah state also makes it an ideal site to observe the unalloyed effects of Sino-Indian interaction. Burma’s poor human rights records as well as the continuing rule by the military junta have resulted in estranged relations with many states. Consequently, there is not much foreign presence and influence in Burma. Furthermore, the military junta’s inherent distrust of other states also reduces external presence within the state. For instance, the sudden shift of the capital from Rangoon, which is located near the coast, to the remote inland site in Naypyidaw clearly shows the military regime’s continual fears of a coastal invasion by hostile states (Selth 2008). The level of distrust is so high that when Cyclone Nargis struck Burma in May 2008, the military government refused permission to American naval vessels to dock and supply humanitarian aid to its citizens (Schmitt 2008). In view of these factors, it is clear that Burma is a state largely devoid of Western influence and presence, which provides a unique vantage point to observe Sino-Indian interaction.

China-Burma Relations Given the vast disparity between China and Burma in terms of geographical size, population and military capabilities – widely accepted determinants of power in international relations – it is clear that Burma does not pose a strategic threat to China. Even though Burma lacks the capacity to directly threaten China in its own right, nevertheless, it is possible for it to be used as a conduit by a hostile third state to affect developments in China. In a testament to the continuing relevance of geography to international relations, Sheng Lijun (1995: 119) argues that this sense of Chinese vulnerability vis-à-vis Burma is still present today.

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This sense of geography-induced Chinese vulnerability has a long history. Its roots could even be traced as far back as the Ming dynasty. Then, Ming China regarded Burma as a strong regional power that could be courted as a potential ally to undermine the Mongols’ position in Yunnan (Twitchett & Mote 1998: 313). Hence, Burma was commonly referred to as the ‘back door’ to China (Garver 2001: 242). In comparatively more recent times, Sun Yatsen (1953: 9) went as far as to assert that Burma was ‘Chinese territory’ lost to foreign powers during China’s century of humiliation that dated from its defeat in the First Opium War in 1840-1842. Consequently, some old Chinese maps included northern Burma as part of China (Steinberg 1990: 76). Burma’s strategic importance to China was again on display after 1949 when some defeated Nationalist troops withdrew from China and retreated to Burma (Kaufman 2001). By 1951, Nationalist troops based in Burma, with arms supplied by the United States, infiltrated Yunnan (Garver 2001: 252). From these examples, it is possible to think that Burma could again be used by hostile states as a staging point to encroach into China. Consequently, Burma ‘stands high in the degree of importance China attaches to its peripheral areas’, and it has been vigilant to ensure that Burma remains friendly and receptive to its overtures (Than Han 1988: 62). Furthermore, China also regards India as a threat and challenger. It is therefore in China’s interest to ensure it has positive relations with both Burma and Pakistan along with states bordering India, in order to contain the latter more effectively. If China were successful in this endeavour, it would be able to act with fewer constraints, since India is rendered less effective as a counterweight (Steinberg 2001: 226). The regional environment would then become more hospitable for China (Goh 2007: 15). Bilateral relations between China and Burma became closer after Beijing’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Just like Burma a year before, China was heavily criticized for its heavy-handed action, which caused the two states into even closer alignment (Liang 1997). Since 1988, apart from providing diplomatic support to Burma in various multilateral institutions in the face of Western criticisms over its military coup and detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, most recently in August 2009 after the junta extended her period of house arrest, China has also provided Burma with concrete assistance. China has sold military equipment and technology to Burma at subsidized prices that made it possible for the Burmese military to undergo significant expansion (Devare 2006: 189). For instance, in 1990 and 1994, China sold arms and military technologies to Burma in two deals worth US$1.2 billion and US$400 million, respectively, which allowed the Tatimadaw (the Myanmar

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armed forces) to modernize itself (Than 2003: 197; Liang 1997: 84-86), and more importantly, to maintain its grip on political power (Mydans 2007). The Chinese military is also reportedly manning military intelligence installations at various locations, such as at Great Coco Island, Ramnee Island, Hainggyi Island and Zadetki Kyun (Haacke 2006: 26). Due to the rapidly deepening political and military ties, Sino-Burma economic relations have also become closer in recent years. For instance, in January 2003, General Than Shwe headed a high-level delegation to China. During this visit, China’s president Jiang Zemin indicated that China would provide a US$200 million loan to Burma at preferential rates. In return, Burma is expected to be more receptive towards Chinese investment there (Economist Intelligence Unit 2003: 15). With the explicit approval and backing of senior political leaders from both sides, bilateral economic ties improved very rapidly. Unsurprisingly, in terms of trade and economics where official figures are available, China replaced Thailand to become the top investor nation in Burma in July 2009 (Economic and Commercial Counsellor’s Office 2009). Recently, in yet another sign of closer political relations, the Chinese head of state Wen Jiabao made a goodwill visit to Burma in June 2010 and was received by General Than Shwe. In September 2010, General Than Shwe made a reciprocal visit to China and the Chinese leadership made use of the opportunity to express its strong support for the upcoming November elections in Burma. Apart from economic and political considerations, geostrategic factors are also responsible for Chinese interest in Burma. China requires energy resources to power its growing economy, which Burma is keen to export to a friendly state such as China to earn much needed foreign exchange (Perlez 2006a). Given Burma’s deplorable human rights record, it has been subjected to various economic and trade restrictions, and these sanctions have directly undermined the military junta’s ability to earn foreign exchange. Aware of Burma’s receptivity, Fu Chengyu, chairman of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, stated in 2006 that China was focusing its attention on exploring oil on Ramree Island as well as at other sites in Burma that it has rights to (Perlez 2006b). Such an arrangement suits China. The majority of China’s energy imports pass through the Straits of Malacca. As the world’s second largest energy consumer and the third largest energy importer, China has heightened sensitivity towards safeguarding its energy security. By having a strong presence in western Burma, China is able to diversify the routes of its energy imports by building a pipeline running from Burma’s coast along the Indian Ocean to Yunnan directly, thereby bypassing a potential choke point in its energy supply – the Straits of

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Malacca. Zhang Yuncheng argues that China’s over-reliance on the Straits of Malacca is very risky, as any incidents, either civilian or military in nature, would severely disrupt Chinese energy imports.2 As a sign of Chinese intent to diversify the routes for its energy imports, construction work on oil and gas pipelines running from Kyaukphau to Yunnan started in September 2009. China is believed to be paying for the entire cost of the project, which is estimated at US$2.5 billion (Storey 2009a). Expectedly, increased Chinese presence in Burma is making India uncomfortable, as it now seeks to play a bigger role there as well. It has to be noted that Indian interest in Burma became apparent only after China established its presence in this Southeast Asian state, and India’s recent engagement did not arise through Burma’s intrinsic importance to the former state. In other words, the catalyst for India’s engagement with Burma was the perceived losses it had incurred in this theatre after China had implemented its charm offensive there, and not so much for the gains it could have made. After all, if India had been motivated by making gains in the first instance, it would have taken the initiative to do so much earlier.

India-Burma Relations India and Burma were historically very close. Due to their geographical proximity, Burma was governed from Calcutta and later Delhi until 1937. From India’s perspective, Burma is very important for the same reasons as China. During WWII, Japan’s attacks against Nagaland and Manipur were undertaken by troops based in Burma. Hence, noted Indian strategic analyst Kavalam Madhava Panikkar posited that ‘the defence of Burma is in fact the defence of India, and it is India’s primary concern no less than Burma’s to see that its frontiers remain inviolate. In fact no responsibility can be considered too heavy for India when it comes to the question of defending Burma’ (Panikkar 1944: 46). Like China, India also does not want hostile states to use Burma as a staging point for military action. Yet, for prolonged periods, India and Burma had failed to register on the consciousness of the other actor. ‘In India, Burma has hardly featured prominently as a large and important neighbour, while in Burma the common view about India is ambivalent’ (Devare 2006: 190).

2 Zhang Yuncheng, ‘The Malacca Strait and World Oil Security’, Huanqiu Shibao, 5 December 2003, quoted in Holmes (2007).

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With Burma developing closer ties with China, India has now sought, albeit belatedly, to improve its ties with this Southeast Asian state. As C. Uday Bhaskar points out: It is commonly averred that Indian security concerns … since independence have focused on two visible neighbours – Pakistan and China, in that order of priority. However, using the term strategic in a more rigorous sense, [it can be argued] that India’s primary strategic concern is China, and if so, Burma occupies the next slot … while Pakistan follows in the next position. (1999: 415-416)

This turnaround in official Indian sentiment was in sharp contrast to its ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude towards Burma after the State Law and Order Restoration Council [SLORC] seized power after the military coup on 18 September 1988. At that time, India was one of the most vociferous critics of the SLORC and the military regime in Rangoon. For instance, India supported Aung San Suu Kyi and awarded her the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, a move that understandably worsened bilateral relations. Indian actions were in sharp contrast to the strong support China offered to the military regime. Hence, General Than Shwe, when hosting the visiting Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Li Ruihan in 1995, said China was ‘the Burma people’s most trusted friend’ (Liang 1997: 80). India’s quasi-alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War also made it difficult for them to have good bilateral relations. Although Burma, like India, was a member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), it withdrew from the organization in 1979 when Cuba hosted the conference. This was because Burma opposed the movement’s pro-Soviet stance. It only rejoined NAM in 1995 upon Suharto’s invitation, when Indonesia hosted it. Until the early 1990s, bilateral relations between India and Burma were therefore very poor. However, this situation changed when the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union’s dissolution, putting India, according to C. Raja Mohan, ‘in deep mourning’ (2007: 102). Not only did India lose a valuable and longtime political and economic ally, it represented the ‘loss of an entire world’ (Menon & Nigam 2007: 166). India had to rethink its foreign policy. Without Soviet support, it had to implement new measures and the ‘Look East’ policy was one of them. The primary objective was to re-engage with Southeast Asia. For India to select Southeast Asia as the first destination indicates the importance it attaches to the region. From a geopolitical perspective, the Soviet Union’s collapse meant that India had to deal with China in its own

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right. Since Chinese economic and political influence in Burma had been increasing since the late 1980s, India had to increase its presence in the state as well in order to prevent itself from being flanked by states that are friendly to China. India’s ‘Look East’ policy is therefore not just an economic exercise. It is, as the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs opined, a ‘strategic shift in India’s vision of the world’ and a means to reach out to ‘civilisational neighbours’ in that region (Ahamed 2006). The growing Chinese presence in Burma, which marks the apparent end of Burma’s non-alignment policy, has therefore forced ‘New Delhi, for the first time, to pay increasing attention to events across its eastern frontier with Burma’ (Malik 1998: 112-113; emphasis in the original). The visit of Jyotindra Nath Dixit, India’s External Affairs minister, to Burma in 1993 signalled this formal and official reversal in Indian foreign policy that now places emphasis on realpolitik rather than on normative issues such as human rights and democratization. Consequently, Burma’s lack of democracy under the rule of the military junta, as well as Burma’s appallingly poor human rights record, no longer pose insurmountable obstacles to normalizing bilateral relations. India’s turn towards pragmatic diplomacy in order to engage and improve relations with Burma was further evidenced by the conclusion of a Border Trade Agreement in 1994, which made it easier for economic activity to take place between them. Rather than distancing itself from Burma, India is now keen on embracing Burma. In 2001, External Minister Jaswant Singh paid another visit to Burma. While there, he emphasized India’s need to have eastward access, and this objective could not be achieved if India distanced itself from Burma (Sinha 2001). Signif icantly, Singh’s delegation included senior representatives from Assam, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, as well as Arunachal Pradesh, Indian states bordering Burma, which highlighted India’s desire for closer links with this Southeast Asian state. In November 2003, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, India’s Vice-President, visited Burma. It represented the highest level visit since Rajiv Gandhi’s 1987 visit prior to the military junta taking control a year later in 1988. India’s reaction, or more accurately the lack of one, to the military junta’s heavy-handed crackdown on the pro-democracy protests by the country’s monks in 2007 is arguably the clearest signal that India has completely distanced itself from its previous normative foreign policy of pushing for democratization and improving human rights in Burma. When asked why India chose to remain silent in this instance and instead adopted this amoral stance, Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee stated that India’s ‘basic principle is to live in peaceful co-existence and we do not

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believe in exporting ideologies. It is for the people of the country to decide what type of government they would like to have’ (AFP 2006). However, for India the underlying rationale is that it wishes to prevent Burma, which had appeared to deviate from its earlier policy of strategic neutrality in the late 1980s, from becoming too close to China. India’s goal is to avoid being outflanked by hostile states allied with China. China’s relations with Burma are significantly more developed, and India wants to close the gap by engaging Burma in as many areas as possible; condemning its poor human rights record is detrimental to achieving this objective (Weiss 2007). In his memoirs detailing his tenure as India’s Minister for External Affairs, Jyotindra Nath Dixit stated it was important that ‘Burma does not become part of an exclusive area of influence of other great powers’ (1996: 167). India’s post-Cold War policy therefore set about normalizing relations with whatever government was in control of Burma and then expanding the range and content of bilateral relations. India now regards itself as a major actor internationally, and not just a ‘South Asian Gulliver’ (Perkovich 2001: 329). In order to fulfil this role, India now has to ensure it has the capacity to influence developments along its borders. Since China has increased its presence in Burma, India needs to do likewise to prevent the former from becoming overly-aligned with the Chinese. Although India remains deeply committed towards its internal democratic institutions, it has now ceased to promote democratization outside of its borders, as other pragmatic interests have assumed precedence (Kapur 2006: 203; New York Times 2007b). Given Southeast Asian states’ strong collective support for the sacrosanct principle of non-interference, especially in matters of governance, India therefore has to adhere to it and work closely with Burma’s existing government, no matter its political complexion. Hence, India has been supplying military aid to Burma, which has allowed the military junta to maintain its grip on political power by increasing its foreign policy options without being overdependent on Chinese support.3 This Indian policy attests to the complete reversal of its previous policy of supporting pro-democracy forces in the country (Human Rights Watch 2006). India’s new attitude of adopting engagement over estrangement dovetails very neatly with the belief of Lord Curzon, Viceroy and Governor-General of India from 1899 to 1905, that covert dependence by a weaker state on a more powerful state would, 3 According to a leaked 18 January 2008 cable from the United States Embassy in Rangoon, it was reported that Chinese officials were ‘fed up with the footdragging by the Than Shwe regime’ over its policies towards political reforms in Burma that has led to much political and economic instability and affected Chinese business interests there (US Embassy 2010).

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over time, inevitably lead to overt and direct dependence, a development that is clearly not in India’s favour: Of all the diplomatic forms or fictions … the uniform tendency is for the weaker to crystallise into the harder shape. Spheres of Interest tend to become Spheres of Influence; temporary leases to become perpetual; Spheres of Influence to develop into protectorates; protectorates to be the forerunners of complete incorporation. (1907: 47)

In another concrete and literal sign of India’s commitment towards improving and maintaining links with Burma, India built a road in 1999, which was aptly named the Indo-Myanmar Friendship Road, to enhance transport links between the two states. It was completed in January 2001. The construction of this road is very beneficial for Burma, since India is one of the largest markets for Burmese exports. Given the continual Western embargoes and trade sanctions, Burma’s economy has been badly affected. The completion of this road is very timely, for it provides another avenue for this isolated state to increase its economic interaction with the outside world and earn foreign exchange, thereby allowing the military government to maintain its monopolistic hold on political power. As an indication of the importance Burma placed on this transport route, it undertook major upgrading works, due to be completed in 2010, to repair sections of the road that had degraded (Xinhua 2009b). This is because increased trade with India brings in additional income, ensuring that it remains financially beneficial for military personnel to maintain the prevailing domestic political status quo. Even though India’s engagement with Burma has directly contributed to the political longevity of the ruling military junta, India has implemented such a policy in order to prevent a ‘Tibetanization of Burma’, which would be detrimental to its interests (Malik 1998: 118). In recent years, Indian political leaders have therefore met frequently with their Burmese counterparts, which is a strong indication of India’s desire to put in place a policy of pragmatic engagement with its Southeast Asian neighbour. More importantly, having made significant improvements to their bilateral relations, it is expected that India values these gains. For instance Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held talks with Prime Minister Soe Win at the sidelines of the eleventh ASEAN Summit held in December 2005 in Malaysia. Like other world leaders, Singh conveyed India’s perfunctory wishes that Aung San Suu Kyi be released, but otherwise did not put any pressure on Myanmar’s military government. In April 2006, Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam made an inaugural visit to Burma in his capacity as head of

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state (Indian Chamber of Commerce 2006: 2). Since India perceives itself to be ten years behind China in terms of its engagement with Burma, India is now keen to close this gap (MacDonald et al. 2005: 17). These Indian overtures dovetail neatly with prospect theory’s axiomatic assumption that losses matter more than gains. This is because India is pursuing closer links with Burma, not because it wants to overtake China in this area, but because India does not want its gap with China to widen any further. India’s commitment to closing the gap with China continues today. As recently as July 2010, General Than Shwe, fresh from receiving Wen Jiabao just a month earlier, was invited to visit India. During this visit, the general met with Indian President Pratibha Devising Patil, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, daughter-in-law of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, as well as various business and industrial representatives. This high-level meeting once again confirmed India’s reversal of its earlier policy of not engaging with the military junta as the Indian government seeks to prevent Burma from becoming overly-dependent on China. Expectedly, India’s growing links with the military regime has caused Aung San Suu Kyi to criticize India for its lack of commitment towards human rights and democratization in Myanmar (ABC News 2010). The above discussion seems to suggest that India is now devoting more attention to nurturing its bilateral relations with Burma. This is not an unexpected outcome. After all, India’s actions are in line with prospect theory’s belief that actors tend to over-value gains they already made due to the endowment effect and are likely to react adversely should their fortunes later reverse.

The Chinese and Indian Presence in Burma: Waxing and Waning As the above discussion has made clear, China and India have devoted much effort and resources in their charm offensive to secure and cement positive relations with Burma. Even though relations between China and Burma as well as relations between India and Burma have improved, it does not mean that China and India have been able to pursue their preferred policies towards Burma at will. Even though significant disparities do exist between Burma and its much larger neighbours, the former, true to its commitment to non-alignment, has been able to play one power against the other so that it does not become a client state of a particular power. Burma has been keen to play China against India and vice versa, to ensure that no single power holds undue sway over it (Zaw 2009). For instance, both China and India have ongoing interests in oil exploration and extraction in

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Burma. However, it does not wish to allow either aspiring power to become overbearing. In a sign of adroit diplomacy, Burma signed an agreement with China in 2006 to export gas from the partly-Indian owned A1 and A3 offshore blocks, even though Yangon has assured New Delhi that it would be the recipient of any exports (Dutta 2006). Burma’s decision surprised India because two Indian firms, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Videsh Limited and Gas Authority of India Limited, owned a 30 per cent stake in the oil fields. Coincidentally, Burma’s conclusion of a memorandum of understanding with China came after it accepted a Chinese soft loan totalling US$84 million (Wardell 2006). Despite Burma’s apparent alignment with China, and the appearance of being a Chinese client state, recent events indicate otherwise (Jagan 2009). In an attempt to introduce a new constitution in 2010, Burma’s military government wanted ethnic armies to disband and become militias under the control of Burma’s military, which they oppose. In an interview with the New York Times, Zauja Nhkri, commander of the Kachin Independence Army Officer’s training school, reiterated the group’s willingness to fight against government troops (Fuller 2009a). As a sign of Burma’s government’s seriousness in disbanding such ethnic armies, it attacked the Burma National Democratic Alliance Army in September 2009, and caused more than 30,000 refugees to subsequently cross the border into Nansan, China (Fuller 2009b). Furthermore, as a result of the fighting, two Chinese citizens were killed and Chinese business interests in Kokang were also affected. At a press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu expressed the Chinese government’s concern and ‘hope[d] Burma could properly handle its domestic issues and take every measure necessary to restore stability along the border and guarantee the safety and property of Chinese citizens in Burma’ (Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Independent State of Papua New Guinea 2009). In the wake of the border unrest, the Chinese authorities are seeking 280 million yuan in compensation from Burma’s government for damages to Chinese businesses in Laogai, the capital of Kokang (Hywe 2009). China is wary of any reprisal actions Burma might take because, apart from the inflow of refugees (Naing 2009), fighting may result in increased production of narcotics by the irregular armies in order to finance resistance efforts, which may then find their way to Southwest China (Storey 2009b). China has been rather supportive of such armed groups. This is because China wishes to maintain order and stability in the border area and also seeks to ensure that it has allies in the event the military regime loses its grip on political power. Or, China could use such armed groups to act as its proxy. If the military

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junta were to introduce policies hostile to China’s national interest, China could then influence these predominantly ethnic Chinese forces to wage a military campaign against Burma’s government on its behalf. Since such a conflict would be considered a civil war, other actors would be less likely to intervene. In this scenario, China would then be in the position to influence developments in Burma without being directly involved. In December 2009, Lieutenant-General Ai Husheng, chief of staff of the Chengdu Military Region, met with Lieutenant-General Min Aung Hlaing, who is the chief of the Bureau of Special Operations, to discuss the issue of border security, but no clear resolution was reached (Moe 2009a). From a short-term perspective, new oil and gas pipelines that are due to come into operation in 2012 linking Rakhine to Kunming pass through such restive border regions. Any outbreak of conflict there will naturally hinder the construction’s progress, which undermines the Chinese desire to reduce its dependence on energy imports from the Straits of Malacca. Hence, Burma’s current efforts to forcibly disband such armed groups go against China’s preference for maintaining the status quo through observing the ceasefire agreements it helped broker in 1989. Furthermore, China’s failed attempts to dissuade the military junta from undertaking this recent offensive provides an indication that its influence on Burma is not as strong as previously assumed. Significantly, this recent military offensive also demonstrated that Burma is keen to send a signal that it is not an entirely pliant Chinese client state, which is evidenced by its recent receptivity towards Indian overtures so as to play one power against another.

Conclusion Burma’s current resistance towards China is not surprising, as it has been keen to improve relations with India. When General Than Shwe visited India in October 2004, both states concluded agreements that facilitated cooperation in areas of non-traditional security, such as combating insurgency, drug trafficking and organized crime. This is because Burma, with its historical commitment towards non-alignment, does not want to be dominated by China. Even though Burma’s relations with China have shown much improvement in recent years, it is still wary of Chinese intentions as these remain unclear, as evidenced by Chinese support for various rebel groups (Moe 2009b). Burma has therefore also been very welcoming of India’s attempts at improving ties. For instance, on a visit to India in early 2003, Foreign Minister Win Aung of Burma met with senior Indian officials

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and discussed ways of improving bilateral ties through enhanced economic cooperation (Economist Intelligence Unit 2003: 15). Burma’s shifting policies towards both China and India mean that their positions are not necessarily secure. Both aspiring powers have been making significant gains there, but the gains can be easily reversed as the military junta changes its stance, sometimes quite abruptly. In this context, an observation of how these two aspiring states react and reverse any losses they experience will provide a unique perspective on their often obscured decision-making processes and provides a preview of how they might act in the future when their interests in theatres of more importance are threatened or undermined. As prospect theory points out, the endowment effect ensures that China and India value the progress they made in their respective bilateral relations with Burma, and that both aspiring powers are likely to react strongly if they experience any setbacks in that theatre. As Burma is of secondary strategic importance to both China and India, they have the luxury to decide the policies they want to implement there; there is less imperative for them to exercise self-restraint, which is necessary in theatres of primary importance. This exercise of agency is very useful because it provides a unique vantage point to observe how China and India formulate their foreign policies in a context in which they are more likely to do what they want to do, since they are not under undue duress. Prospect theory therefore lends itself well to analysing this issue, because it is able to account for why actors devote time and treasure to shoring up or reversing any losses in peripheral areas. Although this chapter does not make any predictions about the nature and effects of the rise of China and India, it has singled out Burma as the ideal, but overlooked, site to foreshadow impacts on international society, with the aim of making future predictions and forecasts of this development more accurate.

8

Reinventing Japan in the Asian Century Towards a New Grand Strategy?1 Tom Wilkins

Introduction: Japan in a Time of Troubles? Sometimes Japan appears to be on the wrong continent. Everywhere else in Asia, from Shanghai, to Mumbai to Jakarta, there is an aura of perpetual motion, a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. The region is on a frenetic 365-day-a-year hurtle into a brighter future. Japan once shared Asia’s dynamism and mission. But not anymore. Today, Japan is an island of inertia in an Asia in constant flux. Japan’s political leadership is paralysed, its corporate elite befuddled, its people agonised about the future. While Asia lurches forward, Japan inches backward. (Schuman 2010: 20)

Prima facie this appears an accurate appraisal of contemporary Japan. Unlike China, India and others, Japan is certainly not ‘rising’. But there are two strong caveats to this bleak assessment. Firstly, Japan is well endowed with ‘power resources’ that give it the capital to overcome current misfortunes and successfully ‘reinvent’ itself (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Gibney 1992; Gibney 2000; Takao 2008b; Buruma 2004). It has already achieved a fully developed industrialized high-technology economy and society, with its citizens enjoying vastly greater per capita incomes than those of the rising Asian giants, China and India. It must be remembered that Japan is still the third largest economy in the world, after the US and China, with a GDP of US$4.3 trillion (CIA 2011). It has a large population of 127 million, a highly educated workforce, an advanced manufacturing and information technologies base and dedicates US$52.8 billion (JPY4.68 trillion) to military expenditure (the sixth highest spender in the world) (Hackett 2011). Secondly, Japan has only just begun to mobilize its vast potential resources in terms of international power projection; that is, a well-defined international agenda, supported by the full spectrum of material and diplomatic instruments needed to implement it. In other words, it has 1 I would like to thank Niamh Cunningham and Jenna Heim, my interns, for their time in helping me prepare this chapter.

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only recently begun to actualize its great resources (latent potential) into power capabilities (de facto tools of diplomacy). This being the case, it is premature and ill-conceived to write Japan off as a power in rapid decline. Some commentators such as George Friedman, despite his tendency towards hyperbole, consider that ‘Japan sooner or later will make a big comeback’ as a ‘great power’ in the future (Friedman 2009; 2010). In sum, Japan should not be underestimated, as Tokyo will certainly remain a major player in the unfolding ‘Asian Century’ (Mahbubani 2008). There are a number of competing outlooks on the kind of role Japan will play in the future strategic environment. Will it finally overturn its (largely self-imposed) constitutional and normative inhibitors to become a ‘normal country’, one that wields military forces as a viable instrument of diplomacy?2 Or will it follow a ‘middle power’ course – abandoning pretensions of great power, eschewing high politics and concentrating on issues like ‘comprehensive security’ or ‘human security’ (Soeya 2005)? The debate about Japan’s strategic orientation remains undecided, but one thing is clear: ‘Japan has not arrived at a new consensus about its grand strategy for the 21st century. It does appear, however, that such a grand strategy will involve elements of the omnidirectional foreign policy that it has pursued in the past’ (Kang 2010: 182). This chapter considers the problems and prospects for Japan in the Asian Century. The first part surveys the multiple and overlapping foreign and domestic contexts that shape Japanese diplomacy to assess whether Japan has the wherewithal to ‘re-invent’ itself in the Asian Century. The following section considers how this may be achieved through a newly emerging grand strategy. The chapter concludes that Japan has definitely set in place a series of well-crafted polices and initiatives designed to overcome the challenges it faces and continues to advance its national interests in a rapidly shifting regional and global environment.

Explaining Japanese Foreign Policy and Diplomacy Before we can turn to the bases of Japanese diplomacy, we are confronted by what Kenneth Pyle dubs the ‘Japan puzzle’ (2007a). There are many competing analytical vectors that one could employ for an explanatory 2 For the latest scholarship on the ‘normal country’ (that is, a country that takes on an international role commensurate with its capabilities, and reduces its ‘abnormal’ self-imposed limitations on such a role, but without necessarily becoming a great military power), see Soeya et al. (2011).

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understanding of Japan’s foreign and diplomatic posture, past and present. These approaches largely cleave to one of the theoretical branches of International Relations: realism, liberalism or social constructivism (Hook et al. 2005). It is worth briefly acknowledging these standpoints as they naturally course through the following analysis. Realist interpretations of Japanese foreign and diplomatic policy have evolved coeval with the shifts in the Japanese standpoint, from previously ‘reluctant’ to their presently ‘active’ conceptions. This approach has been most evident in the writings of Pyle, and, particularly, Michael Green. In 2003 the latter characterized Japan as a ‘reluctant Realist’ state. He emphasized how decision-makers in Tokyo worked within their domestic and international confines to craft an unassertive, but pragmatic realpolitik diplomacy. This was designed to pave the way for the more activist and independent Japanese policy that we are witnessing today. This dovetails with Pyle’s contention that realism has historically been the strongest overall influence upon Japan’s foreign policy (2007a). There are those that now argue we are seeing the results of ‘reluctant’ realism that Green predicted in a more ‘active’ form. David Arase argues that ‘[t]he parallel alignment of factors at different levels of analysis, together with Japan’s record since 9/11, suggest that Japan’s security role could change with unexpected speed and scope in coming years, for good or ill’ (Arase 2007: 583). This prognostication is buttressed by those, such as Richard Tanter and Christopher Hughes, who highlight the large ‘remilitarization’ component of this newly active stance (Tanter 2009; Hughes 2004).3 The liberalist (or pluralist) approach has gone through a similar evolution from ‘reactive’ to ‘adaptive’ conceptions of Japanese diplomacy. Kent Calder’s image of Japan as a ‘reactive’ state in international politics was written largely from an International Political Economy perspective in the 1980s (Calder 1988). The foundation of his thesis is the ‘Yoshida doctrine’ (named from the first post-war Prime Minister, Shigeru Yoshida). In this doctrine Japan emphasized economic development and domestic stability almost to the exclusion of any international profile, and eschewed any active military role overseas. Calder thus cast Japan as a state that only responds to changes in its external environment with little inclination to actually shape it through its own initiatives. In fact, as Japan developed through the economic booming period of the 1960s-1980s, as ‘Japan Inc.’, it became so dysfunctional that it forfeited the ability to pursue any independent foreign 3 To be sure, ‘remilitarization’ means a build-up of (underdeveloped) military capabilities, not a return to a ‘militarist’ domestic political system, dominated by the armed forces.

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policy initiative. Riven by powerful political factions, corporate interests and competing bureaucratic interests, Japanese foreign policy was almost inert, meaning that ‘it has been virtually impossible to even articulate, much less implement, anything that could be likened to a grand strategy’ as a consequence (Berger 2007b: 263; Johnson 1982; Johnson 1984). Thomas Berger’s notion of a ‘liberal adaptive state’ is the more recent addition to the liberalist perspective. He argues that ‘Japan is making a serious effort to contribute to the international system, not only economically, but in the diplomatic and security spheres as well, and what motivates its doing so is an essentially liberal philosophy of international relations’ (2007b: 260). He also focuses on how Japan has become a more ‘active player’ – ‘one with greater capacity for adaptation and independent action than many observers had once thought likely or even possible’ (2007b: 259; emphasis added). The third constituency might be loosely termed a social constructivist approach, since it looks at the role of identity and mutual perceptions as explanatory forces. In Normalizing Japan, Andrew Oros looks at how domestic factors have generated a distinct ‘security identity’ – an ideological attachment to a certain set of foreign policy principles, particularly antimilitarism, or even pacifism (2008). This national identity is what defines Japan’s security discourse and thus its policy outputs, according to Yasuo Takao (2008a). It draws upon the role of historical memory and perceptions in defining the possibilities for Japanese decision-makers, both in the internal and the external sense (Conrad 2003: 85-89). This stems from Japan’s militarist legacy at home and abroad from the 1930s to 1945 (Ienaga 1978). As Richard Samuels points out, ‘history, as an active instrument of regional diplomacy, has become an outsized presence in Japan’s relationships with its neighbours’ (2007b: 129; also Berger 2007a). Therefore ideational factors require consideration in explaining Japan’s diplomatic stance. All of these perspectives provide revealing insights into the complex process of policy formulation in Japan. This chapter is not explicitly theoretical, but recognizing all these perspectives, it thus adheres to Peter Katzenstein’s call for ‘analytic eclecticism’ in the study of Japan (2008). Indeed, I have adopted an analytically thematic, rather than theoretically explanatory approach, with discussion of Japan’s place in the Asian Century organized as follows: In the first part of this chapter, as informed through the theoretical debates outlined above, I examine some of the foundational building blocks behind Japan’s foreign and diplomatic policies. I have divided these into external and internal drivers. The main external drivers are: environmental shocks, globalization and economic interdependence. The main internal drivers are: domestic politics, societal issues and soft power. Once these

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diplomatic substructures are considered, in the second half of the chapter I demonstrate how Japan’s foreign policies are channelled towards a newly emergent grand strategy, forged upon these bases.

The Foundations of Japanese Diplomacy External Drivers This section looks at how external pressure influences the shaping of Japan’s diplomatic posture. According to Pyle, ‘the international system has had a powerful effect on Japans’ foreign policy’ (2007a: 21). This section considers external factors under the rubrics of (i) environmental shocks, (ii) globalization and (iii) economic interdependence. (i) Environmental shocks Much of the literature contends that Japanese foreign policy can be directly traced to external events, or the influence of major actors in the international system. Berger offers an example that is indicative, when he states: The end of the Cold war triggered a major transformation of Japanese politics, economy, and society exceeded in magnitude only by the opening of Tokugawa Japan following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships in 1854 and the defeat of imperial Japan in 1945. (2007b: 269)

Japan today again faces a transformed external security environment in which military threats are becoming ever more salient. The 2010 National Defense Program Guidelines (NPDG) point to Chinese military modernization, North Korean nuclear and missile developments and Russia’s ‘increasingly robust’ military activities as the key contributors to this threatening local milieu (Ministry of Defense of Japan 2010; 2008). The discovery of a Chinese Han-class (nuclear-powered) submarine patrolling in Japanese territorial waters in 2005 shook the Japanese, in what the Japanese Defense Agency (now the Ministry of Defense) considered a ‘highly provocative act’ by China (Shimoyachi 2004). More recently, a Chinese fishing trawler was involved in a collision with a vessel of the Japanese coast guard. The Japanese public castigated their government for its irresolute diplomacy, and anti-Chinese sentiment was further inflamed. What is significant about this minor maritime clash is its occurrence in proximity to the

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Senkaku/Daioyutai Islands, whose sovereignty is disputed by China and Taiwan. Such ramifications on Japanese public perceptions of China have been noted – in fact exacerbated – by Beijing’s heavy-handed response. Beijing’s attitude contrasted starkly with the ‘mature’ diplomacy practised by Tokyo. Though seen as irresolute at the time, Tokyo gained both the renewed support of its US ally, and that of most of the Southeast Asian maritime states. These states were all too aware of their own contested maritime claims and desire for a mutually respected code of conduct in their regional waters. But Tokyo drew the lesson that diplomacy itself is not a sufficient guarantor of national security. Japanese military assets are now being redeployed from the northern island of Hokkaido to reinforce its island chains in the south. These are closest to potential intrusions and serve to protect the vital sea lines of communication through which the nation’s trade and energy supplies flow. As such, the significance of the incident is magnified and echoed by the wider constellation of maritime territorial disputes in the region. (Take, for example, Tokyo’s quarrels with Russia over the Northern Territories, and the Takeshima/Dokdo Islands, currently in Korean possession [Emmers 2009; Bitzinger 2009].) The Chinese and Russians are not the only interlopers into Japanese territory. In 2001 a North Korean surface ship engaged in a naval skirmish with Japan’s coast guard. Japan is especially sensitive to such infiltrations by Pyongyang’s forces since the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the 1970s. This issue still remains an obstacle in the normalization of relations between the two countries and complicates the stalled ‘de-nuclearization’/Six-Party Talks process. Japanese fears of Pyongyang’s continued willingness to use force as an instrument of its own diplomacy were heightend by the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in March 2010. The recent NDPG sum up that ‘North Korea’s military activities constitute an immediate and grave destabilizing factor to regional security’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2010: 4). Unwelcome intrusions into Japanese territory are not confined to the sea. Technological advances since Perry’s era mean that Japan is vulnerable from the sky and from cyberspace. Again, China and North Korea are the main instigators of such incursions. Part of the fall-out of the 2010 maritime clash was suspected cyber attacks (distributed denial of service attacks) on Japanese government networks, emanating from China (Taipei Times 2010). That these networks are routinely probed by alleged Chinese operators is well known to the Japanese. More overtly, repeated test-firings of North Korean ballistic missiles, some of which have traversed Japanese air space, are a

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continued cause for alarm in Tokyo, especially when coupled to Pyongyang’s active nuclear programme. The launching of Taepodong ballistic missiles in 1998 and 2008 underscored the threat posed by Pyongyang. Likewise Russian Tu-95 Bombers intruded into Japanese airspace in February of 2008; evidence of a residual Russian threat. Thus, Japan feels its national territory under pressure on all sides, chiefly from China as a rising power, and North Korea as a bellicose ‘rogue’ state, both of which have unresolved historical grievances against Japan. These pressures are already catalyzing changes in the attitudes and policies of the Tokyo government, just like the arrival of the ‘black ships’ triggered profound transformations a century and a half earlier. In sum, ‘Japan’s external security environment has provided little breathing space’ for decision-makers (IISS 2011: 210). (ii) Globalization The emergence of an increasingly ‘connected’ global system has placed another, perhaps more amorphous, pressure on Japan’s stature in the world. Although few agree on the precise definition of globalization, the following description captures its essence: ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’ (Held et al. 1999: 2). The level of interaction by the citizens of states in the global polity acts as some measure of that state’s power and influence. Despite being a world economic leader and ally of the American global hegemon, ‘the odd thing is that Japan is not a very globalised society at all’, as Bill Emmott commented (2008: 116). In fact quite the opposite: Japan is probably alone among the advanced nations in its failure to fully embrace the trends of globalization. As Pyle records: ‘In an era of globalization in the 21st century, Japan still remains notable for its insularity, as evident, for example, in its reluctance to accept foreign workers, political refugees, or even foreign investment’ (2007a: 18). This points to serious challenges and deficiencies for Japan from a liberalist vector. In the first years of the 21st century, now finding itself with far stronger competitors among its neighbouring powers, Japan faces the real challenge of embracing ‘globalization’. Quite simply, much of the widely extolled ‘internationalization’ of the 1980s boom era was cosmetic and had little structural impact on the Japanese and their place in the world. Japan has always prided itself on having an extremely homogenous society, unlike the multicultural and cosmopolitan societies found in Europe, North America and elsewhere. This is an indulgence that, in the strategic sense, Japan can ill-afford. As Emmott notes, ‘Japan’s engagement with the world

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has been highly selective and pragmatic: done when necessary, but not simply to be done for its own sake’ (2008: 116). As a consequence, Japan is finding itself outstripped by its rivals in its ability to function within such a system. While the elements of the bureaucratic elite continue to represent Japan well on the international stage, these are but a tiny minority. The deficit in English language proficiency and exposure to global norms means that colossal tranches of information and knowledge are inaccessible to the Japanese. It also prevents Tokyo leveraging its other great advantages to serve as a ‘core’ of the global system, as London and New York are able to do (Attali 2009). Much of the problem can be traced to the Japanese educational establishment. Unlike Chinese and South Korean universities, which accepted and embraced the internationalization of their faculties and student bodies, Japanese institutions remain woefully behind. The recession, and the inward-looking mentality this has brought to the student body, seems to be deepening this insularity among the current generation, while their peers elsewhere have never been more mobile in the global society. This has detrimental consequences for Japan’s diplomacy and place in the world. It keeps the cadre of ‘internationalized’ elite smaller than elsewhere and stretches their resources. It also means that Japanese public opinion is less informed by the actual experience of the world beyond Japanese borders, with all the impact that such relative ignorance has on opinion-formation. As Glen Fukushima concludes: [G]lobalisation – politics, economics, finance, business, technology, culture, education, et cetera – has been the single most important force affecting the lives of ordinary citizens around the world. It is ironic that, just as other countries are engaging more actively with each other to create networks of individuals, organisations and nations to enhance their well-being and prospects for the future, Japan is turning inward and fading from the world stage. (2010)

(iii) Economic interdependence On the metric of engagement with the economic dimensions of globalization, Japan is better prepared and more active than when measured purely by the integration of its citizens in the globalized society. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye long ago identified that states would lose some of their economic sovereignty through ‘complex economic interdependence’ as ‘globalization’ proceeded apace (1997). Such a condition is now a fact of economic life for every advanced country, including Japan. This brings

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benefits and opportunities, but for Japan creates a rather difficult dilemma, one that Michael Wesley calls ‘rivalrous interdependence’ (2011). Despite some of the drawbacks above, and its current state of economic stagnation, Tokyo is well-integrated into the global economic and financial system, and is active in the creation and maintenance of trading regimes that work in its favour, and safeguard its interests. As Japan makes guarded attempts to liberalize its economy, it will need to seek further inroads into the rest of Asia. Japan also remains immensely important to the majority of East and Southeast Asian nations in terms of investment and technology transfer (Hatch 2010). This is unlikely to change dramatically in the near future. Japan and the US have enjoyed close economic interdependence ever since the occupation period (1945-1952) and throughout the Cold War. The trade disputes of the 1980s that wracked their close political relationship are now but a distant memory, as the US-Japan economic relationship takes a back seat (Friedman & LeBard 1991). It is now China that looms large in this picture. Today, Japan has an extraordinary level of investment and overall economic stake in China. In 2010 Japan’s trade with the PRC stood at 20.7 per cent of total share, which was almost double Japan-US trade (12.7 per cent) (Japan Corporate News Network 2011). In 2009, Japan’s investment in China totalled US$4.1 billion – with annual growth of 12.7 per cent (Kakuchi 2010). An estimated 10 million Chinese work for Japanese factories based on the mainland (Kang 2010: 177). As Lam notes, ‘their country will rely more on the Chinese economy as an engine of growth for the stagnant Japanese economy’ (2011: 43). Herein lie the seeds of the dilemma. While complex interdependence theorists have always argued that such close commercial ties act as inhibitors to conflict and engines for peace, there are clear divergent economic and strategic preferences in Tokyo’s case, which complicate the picture (Blainey 1988; Levy 1998). This can be summed up in the expression ‘seirei keinetsu [politically cold, economically hot]’ as a descriptor of bilateral relations. As Kang notes, ‘Tokyo has chosen to embrace China economically and hedge against China militarily … At this point, economic interdependence has not had spillover effects that ameliorate or resolve political disputes’ (2010: 181). This places Japan in an awkward predicament of ‘rivalrous interdependence’. First, its own economic and military power is being rapidly surpassed by its greater neighbour; a neighbour with bitter memories of the Japanese invasion of 1937-1945 (He 2007). At the same time, Japan’s own economic well-being is so closely tied to the neighbouring giant that it restricts its room for independent manoeuvre in the economic sphere.

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Thus, Lam concludes that ‘Japan will have trouble trying to square the circle in the years ahead: adopting a tougher diplomatic and security stance towards China while seeking more benefits from the latter’s burgeoning market’ (2011: 43). Internal Drivers In a globalized world, the external and internal drivers of foreign policy are sometimes hard to disaggregate as they are in constant interplay. This condition is known as ‘inter-mestic politics’, and it compels decision-makers to play a ‘two-level game’ that bridges these two spheres (Putnam 1988). This section considers how (i) domestic politics, (ii) societal issues and (iii) soft power shape Japanese external policies in turn. (i) Domestic politics Liberalist scholarship claims that the domestic political system impacts strongly on the foreign policy-formation process (Moravsik 1997). Lam Peng Er notes that ‘This “foreign policy-domestic politics” linkage is remarkable because international relations are usually not the main driver of domestic political change in Japan’ (2011: 37). Indeed, as we will see below, ‘[a] viable grand strategy also demands the effective management of domestic politics’ (Samuels 2007a: 3). There are several pertinent issues on this score: political turmoil, bureaucratic uncertainty, and a nationalist/internationalist turn. First, the governing political establishment experienced a major upheaval in 2009, which had clear impacts on Japanese diplomacy. Since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been entrenched as the ruling party of Japan, with one brief hiatus of eleven months, and has traditionally worked hand-in-glove with the civil service and corporate interests (Johnson 1984). But the LDP was ousted from office after a landslide victory by a coalition led by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)-led coalition. The DPJ itself was a merger of six formerly separate opposition parties: the Democratic Party (Minshuto), the New Fraternity Party (Shinto Yuai), Voice of the People (Kokumin no Koe), the Sun Party (Taiyoto), and the Democratic Reform Party (Minshu Kaikaku Rengo) which joined to form Minyuren (Minshu Yuai Taiyo Kokumin Rengo). This rocked the political establishment in Japan to its foundations. However, initial confidence in the Yukio Hatoyama premiership quickly collapsed, resulting in Hatoyama’s resignation in 2010. The DPJ under the new leadership of Naoto Kan has sought to retain the focus on domestic concerns, given his inexperience in the foreign-policy arena. As Sheila Smith notes, ‘Kan’s agenda is primarily domestic. His

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programme is to focus on a troika of interrelated policy goals: to stimulate economic growth, to get Japan’s fiscal house in order, and to build the social welfare capacity that Japan’s aging society desperately needs’ (Smith 2010). Kan’s diplomacy lacks any flamboyant diplomatic initiatives, such as those that marked the Hatoyama premiership. Hatoyama sought to renegotiate the status of American bases on Okinawan soil, but was forced into a humiliating climb-down by a combination of US and domestic pressure. Thus, Kan spent his first period in office patching up alliance relations and returning to ‘business as usual’ in the US-Japan relationship. Likewise, no grand regional initiatives such as Hatoyama’s call for an ‘East Asian Community’ have been forthcoming from the Kan-led government (Mulgan 2009). This vision has quietly given way to more practical regional cooperation within existing frameworks, such as ASEAN, though it seems unlikely that Kan will replicate the diplomatic dynamism of the Kunichiro Koizumi era. Japan’s foreign policy-making is further hampered by bureaucratic problems. Firstly, the powerful Japanese bureaucratic machine has been shaken by a number of (largely financial) scandals. But the revolution in the domestic government has generated more significant problems. Part of the DPJ agenda actually continued the main thrust of the previous Junichiro Koizumi LDP administration, working to curtail the policy input of the civil service. Berger notes that ‘[e]ven though the bureaucracy in Japan remains central to the policy-making process far more so than is the case in the United States, over the past decade its authority has been shaken and its ability to shape political decision-making sharply curtailed’ (2007b: 271). Moreover, friction has been generated in the accession of a new government. The civil service ministries have been so accustomed to the LDP as an unchanging source of government that the newly arrived DPJ may have difficulties understanding the entrenched LDP-sensitive mechanisms and personnel. Some personnel may be unresponsive or disruptive in executing their duty as defined by their new and unfamiliar political masters. Another important trend in the domestic sphere is the growth of popular engagement and activism in the political process. There are two strains to this recent trend. First, as Japan faces increasing danger abroad and hardships on the domestic front, there has been a turn towards a more ‘nationalist’ popular mood, which has been played out in domestic political debates and foreign policy initiatives. Debates on the revision of the Japanese constitution – particularly the issue of Article IX, that forswears the nation’s right to belligerency – became commonplace. The gradual erosion of constitutional prohibitions and self-imposed norms enunciated during the Cold War are indicative of this changed mood (Gilson 2007: 39).

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However, the degree to which anti-militarist or pacifist identities among the Japanese population have eroded is subject to question. Takao still maintains that ‘domestic norms largely inhibit Japan’s strategic security decision-making’ (Takao 2008a: xiii). Therefore, it is accurate at this time to state that ‘Japanese public opinion remains strongly resistant to allowing Japanese forces to engage in actual combat, and the Asian regional reaction to a militarily assertive Japan is bound to be strongly negative’ (Berger 2007b: 260). Nevertheless, Berger concurs in his ‘adaptive liberalist state’ thesis that the public has entered into foreign policy debates with greater gusto – ‘the Japanese, to put it simply, are becoming more cosmopolitan and outward looking’ (Berger 2007b: 272). (ii) Societal issues One of the strengths of a state is its sense of national morale and social cohesion. Until recent years, Japan would have scored highly on these counts. This is no longer the case, since ‘Japan’s economic and political crises are thus translating back into a social and spiritual one as well’ (Berger 2007b: 273). Some of the core problems involve demographic trends, popular disaffection and the potential for violent expression of social discontent. Japan faces a looming demographic crisis, which will soon begin to deepen its economic problems. Analysts have therefore pointed out that Japan faces a ‘demographic time bomb’ (World Tribune 2008). This is a result of the combination of low birth rates and greater longevity among the elderly. It is estimated that Japan’s population will shrink from its current 127 million to somewhere between 85 and 100 million by 2050 (Emmott 2008: 97). This is predicted to make Japan vulnerable to its more populous and economically dynamic neighbours, especially China and India, and possibly Vietnam and Indonesia. Japan today faces an increasing number of social ills. One of the core elements is the disaffection of growing sections of Japanese society – those that feel that they are excluded or alienated by the mainstream trends (Pyle 2007a: 284). Growing numbers of disenfranchised and dissatisfied individuals may undermine the long-term health of the Japanese economy (Reiko 2006). Workers are less well-educated and trained than their predecessors, and have little stake in the national polity. As Frank Gibney bluntly attests: ‘The Truth is that for two generations Japan has been living off the social and political, as well as economic, capital accumulated in past years’ (Gibney 2000: 85). Another dimension to this societal malaise and disaffection is the potential for domestic disturbance or violence. With the disappearance of the taken-for-granted prosperity of the bubble era, societal strains may be

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violently expressed. Japanese society is no stranger to popular protest, as the demonstrations against the US security treaty in the 1960s, at Narita airport in the 1970s and the Okinawa bases at present testify, not to mention the dark years of the 1930s when the Japanese polity degenerated into domestic anarchy and militarism. At its extreme, the disaffection with society led to crime and terrorism, such as the sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995 by the criminal/religious cult Aum Shinrikyo (Kaplan & Marshall 1996). (iii) Soft power Domestically-generated soft power is another component in Japan’s diplomatic portfolio. This term, coined by Nye, has become an important fixture in both academic analyses and the diplomatic discourse of states. Soft power is basically the ‘ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’ (Nye 2004: x). The bases of soft power are the values, culture, policies and institutions of a nation. The attraction of the oncevaunted Japanese economic model has now all but vanished, as developing states now look at Beijing as the template for success. Berger attests that ‘the decline in Japanese economic fortunes has also reduced one of its critical “soft power” assets, the attractiveness of its economic model’ (2007b: 269). The discussion here must therefore focus on three alternative props of Japanese soft power. The first is the country’s international reputation; the second, its aid policies; the last, its global ‘brand’. In the post-war period Japan was gradually readmitted to the international community at the behest of the US, first through the medium of the San Francisco peace treaties (1951), and then to global institutional and economic forums. Japan’s participation in the United Nations, in particular, has been exemplary, as part of a coordinated effort to establish its credentials as a ‘good international citizen’, and champion its bid for membership of the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council. Japan is the second largest contributor to the organization’s regular budget and an active supporter and participant in peace-keeping operations (Mulgan 1993; Zisk 2001). As part of its overall commitment to ‘comprehensive security’, Japan has promoted its agenda for ‘human security’ by establishing (with the United Nations Secretariat) the UN Trust Fund for Human Security. Berger attests to a belief that progress in international affairs is both possible and necessary and that Japan can contribute to a progressive shift in international relations by building strong multilateral institutions, promoting international trade and commerce, and fostering the spread of democracy and human rights. (2007b: 268)

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It would appear that Tokyo gained a significant success on this score as a BBC World Service Country Rating Poll indicated that 57 per cent of those surveyed held positive opinions of Japan’s global influence (against 20 per cent negative), placing it as the fifth most-admired nation (BBC 2011). Closely related to its carefully cultivated international image of moral authority, and reinforcing its activism in the UN, are Japanese ‘peace consolidation diplomacy’ and Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) efforts, which are geared towards raising the profile of Tokyo’s international contribution (Lam 2009). Good examples of this policy in practice are the humanitarian relief provided by Japan to Indonesia in the wake the 2004 tsunami and 2009 earthquake, or reconstruction teams in Iraq (Gilson 2007). Its assistance is also being extended to ‘strategically located littoral states’ such as Djibouti and Sri Lanka, on the grounds of maritime security cooperation against piracy (Sato & Asano 2008). This is underwritten by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which provides technical cooperation, loans and grant aid to developing nations, thus illustrating that Tokyo still disposes of useful economic levels of soft power (Tanter 2009). Takashi Shiraishi advocates the use of such instruments as a means for ‘supporting regional infrastructure – in energy, trade, standards, intellectual property, and finance’ (Samuels 2007b: 151). The ODA White Paper 2011 encapsulates these aims, vowing ‘to use aid more strategically to promote peace and prosperity and to further Japan’s wider foreign policy interests’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2002). Japan has been lauded as a ‘soft power superpower’, making this a vital diplomatic lever for the country (Watanabe & McConnell 2008). In terms of soft power perceptions of Japan, many examples stand out, drawn from both the traditional and popular culture that are emblematic of the country. The global cultural recognition of the Japanese national ‘brand’ is an important element in sensitizing the public and policy-makers in other countries of Japanese culture and perspectives, and perhaps making them potentially more amenable to Tokyo’s policies. This goal is officially advanced in institutional form by the presence of branches of the Japan Foundation, which is dedicated to this purpose, in major cities around the world. ‘Soft power’ as Glenn Hook et al. note: is seen to derive from the diffusion of Japan’s economic products throughout the world, which is accompanied by a degree of acceptance of Japanese culture and knowledge frameworks. These influence the norms and value judgements of the recipients, which in turn influence their economic, political, and security decisions and policies in relation to Japan and the wider world. (Hook et al. 2005: 12)

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Japan’s Grand Strategy Having enumerated the foundations of Japanese diplomacy in the previous section, let us now consider whether it is possible to discern what might be described as a coherent ‘grand strategy’ behind the practice of Tokyo’s foreign policy. By ‘grand strategy’, I refer here to the definition by Colin Gary which indicates the ‘purposeful employment of all instruments of power available’ to a state to achieve its national objectives (Gray 2007: 283). The subject of Japan’s grand strategy is contentious, and as alluded to in the introductory section of this chapter, often correlates to the theoretical standpoint of the analyst in question. In the past the ‘reluctant’ realists (Green) and ‘reactive’ liberalists (Calder) have decried the presence of a clear strategic trajectory on the part of Japan, noting that ‘the principle of “omnidirectional” foreign policy, [has been] a risk-free formula that suggested no national strategy at all. To the extent that there was an international security strategy, it was directed from Washington, not Tokyo’ (Green 2003: 1). The ‘activist’ realists (Arase, debatably) and ‘adaptive’ liberalists (Berger) meanwhile point to the great increase in Japanese international, institutional and military engagement since the end of the Cold War. They suggest that Japanese policy-makers should be credited with more strategic vision than previous ‘reactive’ and ‘reluctant’ approaches granted to them. The broad outlines of Japanese grand strategy can be discerned from the annual Defense of Japan publication (Ministry of Defense of Japan 2008). But the recent NPDG of 2010 are the clearest indicators we have of Tokyo’s’ strategic vision, and this can be readily supplemented by multifarious official statements, and their assimilation into the various policy and academic discourses around the subject. In general terms, the NDPG 2010 speaks of the need to ‘prevent threats from emerging by further stabilizing the security environment in the Asia-Pacific region and by improving the global security environment, so as to maintain and strengthen a free and open international order and ensure Japan’s security and prosperity’, the continued importance of ‘human security’ also mentioned (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2010: 1). In order to achieve these conditions, Tokyo’s ‘[b]asic policies to ensure Japan’s security’ contain an admixture of internal and external strategies, thus lending a neat symmetry to the external/internal layout employed in the previous part.

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(i) Internal strategies The 2010 NPDG declare that Japan ‘promotes its own efforts’ to achieve its national objectives. This is very much in accord with the realist notion of ‘self-help’: the internal mobilization of Japan’s power resources towards its goals (Dunne & Schmidt 2008). This national mobilization is multipronged and includes economic revitalization, legislation to facilitate a more activist international role and the build-up and modernization of military capabilities. Firstly, Japan has been engaged in efforts to revitalize its now sluggish economic base, which Tokyo recognizes is both a means for achieving national objectives per se and a prerequisite for defence spending necessary to guard Japan’s territory. So far success on this score has been limited. Tokyo continues to eschew greater liberalization of domestic markets, including access for foreign investors to protected industries, and the importation of foreign labour resources. But Tokyo is considering its alternative options through means such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership regional trade talks (Sakamaki & Humber 2011). Another option is to overcome restrictions on arms exports to revitalize Japan’s domestic military-industrial complex (Takahashi 2008). The post-Cold War period has been marked by prodigious legislating on the part of the Japanese Diet. These efforts are designed to create the permissive legislative environment for the dispatch of its military forces overseas, which will also facilitate defence and force-restructuring. Landmarks in this process have been the Peace-Keeping Operations Law (1992), which allows Japan to deploy military forces overseas (in circumscribed conditions); the Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law (2001) consolidating this principle, with some restrictions removed; the wartime preparedness legislation (2003); and most significantly, the creation of the Ministry of Defense (2007). These all amount to the erosion of the restrictions imposed on Japan’s international participation by its controversial ‘Peace Constitution’, especially Article IX, which prohibits the use of force overseas, and inhibits participating in ‘collective defence’ alongside the US. All of this of course, has been facilitated by the ‘nationalist turn’ in domestic politics described in the first section of this chapter. The last major element of internal mobilization is ‘remilitarization’. Japan has steadily extended its force-projection capabilities (Hughes 2004). This is a part of doctrinal shift from a ‘Basic Defense Concept’ to a ‘Dynamic Defense Force’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2010). What this means is that Japan must engage in substantial force-restructuring, away from the Cold War notions of static defence by denial, and create a more flexible

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defence posture able to meet a wider range of contingencies. Japan’s armoured forces will be drawn down and redeployed away from Hokkaido to its south-western island chains. The emphasis instead will be on increased maritime capability supported by more effective airpower and ‘Intelligence Reconnaissance Surveillance’ assets (Samuels 2007a). These developments increase Japan’s capability not only to address maritime security threats such as piracy, smuggling and terrorism, but also to defend its territorial waters more effectively. Japan will have one of the most potent military forces in the world, though its global reach will remain limited. (ii) External strategies The external elements of Japan’s grand strategy are threefold. According to the NPDG 2010, they involve Japan to be in ‘cooperation with its ally and countries in the Asia-Pacific’ plus ‘multi-layered security cooperation with the international community’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2010: 2; emphasis added). The foremost of these is the continued centrality of the long-standing formal military alliance with the United States, created in 1951 and consolidated in 1960. The NDPG 2010 declare that ‘Japan will further deepen and develop the Alliance to adapt to the evolving security environment’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2010: 8). The major security benefits to Japan in responding to the effort to keep regional security are incontestable. First, the alliance allows Japanese armed forces privileged access to American military technologies that Japan is unwilling or unable to produce indigenously, which allows Japan to protect its territory and deter potential missile attacks. Second, the alliance treaty commits the United States to come to the military assistance of its ally in the event of an attack, even with nuclear weapons. Having such a powerful security guarantor is a colossal benefit, particularly when the financial and political costs of developing an indigenous nuclear capability for Japan are considered to be immense. Because of these inescapable factors, ‘the possibility that Japan might pursue a truly independent security policy outside the confines of the alliance remains remote’ (Kang 2010: 154). But alliance management is not without its difficulties. The various costs of US forces based on Japanese soil (particularly controversial in Okinawa), the palpable loss of security independence, and contributions to US-led coalition in wars in the Middle East are the prices to be paid for this ultimate security guarantee (Johnson 2007). But without the United States, Tokyo would be unable to maintain a military ‘balance’ against rising China and nuclear North Korea unless, perhaps, it massively increased defence

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spending from the low level of 1 per cent of its GDP, or embarked upon a nuclear weapons programme. Both of these eventualities – exacerbated by historical tensions in the region – would be likely to unleash a dangerous arms race. Thus, Kang argues, ‘the US-Japan alliance remains the sine qua non of Japanese foreign policy’ (2010: 154). Secondly, Japan has sought to build the networks of ‘strategic partnerships’ among ‘like-minded’ states around the region, in part to offset its dependence upon US support (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2010: 9). Foremost among these is the Japan-Australia strategic partnership, predicated on the Joint Security Declaration of 2007 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2007). This declaration commits the parties to build a close security relationship in both the military and non-traditional security spheres. Along with the signing of an Acquisition and Cross-Serving Agreement that improves military/logistical operability between the armed forces of the two countries, it effectively makes Canberra Japan’s number-two ally in the region (Cook & Wilkins 2011). The Trilateral Strategic Dialogue brings these two partners together with their US ally to coordinate regularly on security policies. There are high hopes for the successful Japan-India strategic partnership, and the potential benefit to Japan would be enormous, but so far, progress has been more limited than Tokyo would like (Wilkins 2011). Other countries that have been targeted as potentially worthwhile strategic partners, as a similar model to Australia and India, include Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Japan has also been active in its disbursement of ODA and other assistance towards capacity-building in the Southeast Asian region, particularly in the areas related to maritime patrol and disaster relief. Observers lament that one of the most powerful and suitable partners for Japan – the Republic of Korea – remains beyond its reach due to diplomatic complications stemming from historical grievances and the actions of North Korea. The final medium for the advancement of the Japanese grand strategy is engagement in regional organizations. Tokyo has been an active player in the regional security architecture of the Asia-Pacific, particularly in the formative stages of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group (APEC) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) (Yuzawa 2010). Japan is thoroughly engaged in pan-regional and sub-regional institutions and forums, including ASEAN Plus Three, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus, the East Asia Summit and the Six-Party Talks. Although Japan’s more recent initiative for an ‘East Asian Community’ under then-Prime Minister Hatoyama seems to have been forsaken, Tokyo is closely involved in the institutional workings of the Asia-Pacific. In this way,

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Japanese participation ensures a voice in the shaping of regional debates and norms; for example, efforts towards shaping the maritime code of conduct, in which Japan has a major stake. According to Berger, ‘Japan’s penchant for multilateral institutions is grounded in the deeply grounded liberalism of its adaptive state’ (2007b: 289).

Conclusions As noted in the introduction, Japan faces an increasingly competitive and threatening external environment. At the same time, Japan’s capacity to respond to this is being eroded by political, economic and societal fragility. Multiple and pressing issues present serious challenges to the practice of Japanese diplomacy. However, this chapter has shown that Tokyo’s decision-makers are girding themselves to face these trials. According to Berger, ‘Today, Japan is still in transition, but there are clear signs that it is beginning to grope its way toward a new strategic consensus’ (2007b: 272). Despite its relative decline in relation to its neighbours, Japan remains well-equipped with power resources, which are currently being translated into the power capabilities for direct use in the attainment of its strategic goals. A more robust domestic consensus, and a determination to play a more activist international role among the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, combined with a more salient role taken by the Ministry of Defense and Japanese Self-Defense Forces are portents of Japan’s efforts to reinvent itself. In the struggles that lie ahead, it can draw upon national resolutions and impressive high-tech military capabilities. Tanter concludes that ‘Japan’s security capacity is indeed expanding, and its security policy-makers are now willing to use military forces in defence of national interests more than at any time since 1945’ (2009). These indigenous efforts will be buttressed by its alliance with the world’s military superpower, the US; a relationship that grows ever closer as the mutual suspicions of China increase. This alliance will be supplemented by other important strategic partnerships with Australia, India and several Southeast Asian states. Finally, Japan will make its voice heard in regional and global multilateral institutions, though pretentions towards leadership on this score are likely to be abandoned. Thus, Japan will become a more visible actor on the international stage, and prepare itself for the strategic struggles that lie ahead in the Asian Century.

9

The China and Central Asia Diplomatic Waltz An Analysis of China’s Methods in Interacting with Central Asian States Askhat Safiullin

Introduction China’s engagement in Central Asia 1 differs uniquely from neighbouring countries with which it shares its border. In parallel with its bilateral relations, China is using a different form of regional diplomacy – an induced multilateral diplomacy in the form of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).2 The controversy about the SCO’s raison d’être continues despite an explicit statement in its charter on the region’s security needs for an institution to guard against non-traditional threats (SCO 2010a). The key argument I make in this chapter is that the SCO’s regional security identity greatly impacts the national security identities of the member-states. The key driver of this influence is the SCO’s collective security identity. It is a discourse built on the ideational constructs introduced primarily by China, such as the ‘Shanghai Spirit’ and the ‘Spirit of Good Neighbourliness’. The influence of the main security discourse in the SCO is expressed in behavioural changes of the SCO member-states that are eager to take certain roles and are replicating the ideas and themes introduced by the organization. They eventually reintroduce these themes in their respective domestic security discourses. Academic literature on the SCO in the International Relations field can be split into three groups based on the underlying theoretical approaches: neorealism (Stobdan 1998; Smith 1996; Sheives 2006; Stobdan 2008; Swanström 2005; Menon 1995; Harris 2005; Collins 1996; Blank 2007), liberal institutionalism (Allison 2008; Aris 2009a; Bobokulov 2006; Chung 2006; 1 In its contemporary meaning, the region includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. 2 A security organization, created ‘on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai (China) by the Republic of Kazakhstan, the People’s Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan’ (SCO 2002).

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Kavalski 2010) and different blends with constructivism (Akbarzadeh 1996; Carney & Moran 2000; Collins 2003; Fumagalli 2007; Kent 2002; Kubicek 1997; Kubicek 1998). The existing body of research on the region has at least two critical limitations. The first one is theoretical, as it usually comes with the restrictions associated with one school or the other. The second limitation is the level of analysis, which is generally either extra-regional or intra-regional. This polarization has limited the focus of the research and consequently numerous questions are either unexplained or ignored entirely. The core point of this chapter is that ideas matter and that ideational constructs are at work in regional cooperation. These ideational constructs were important in creating propaganda during the Cold War and in the post-Soviet era. They continue to remain an important component in creating national and regional identities. Identities, in turn, play a key role in bringing about internal solidarity, a precursor to reaching national goals. Attempts to create national identities in each state in the region were driven by inventive elites that either imagined or assumed that they had a common past and culture. However, it has been difficult to forge a common regional identity due to the existence of ethnically diverse populations and unresolved border issues. This process of redef ining identities and the creation of new states was – and still is – regarded by China as being a possible threat to its sovereignty. Because of this, China felt it was necessary to counter the threat by engaging the region in a cooperative mechanism. The goal of this chapter is to understand this engagement, to establish and investigate what constitutes the interplay between security and identities, and, finally, to show and analyse the evidence of the influence of the SCO, namely China-generated ideas, on Central Asian national security identities. These tasks are achieved through utilizing a broad theoretical framework, which incorporates the English School of International Relations theory, constructivism and some elements of neofunctionalism. This will allow me to show how regional security cooperation, in the context of the SCO, is influenced by the following factors: regional and national security, the identities and norms that are at work in the region and the organizational functionality of the SCO. Finally, I will conclude that China’s initiative through the SCO has ultimately influenced Central Asia by contributing to the development of a common regional identity. Every security organization creates, from Barry Buzan’s perspective, multiple layers of security management in the Central Asian region (Buzan 2000). As the result of security regionalization, these layers manage different

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types of security, and the SCO functions as one of these regional security mechanisms. National security identities, however, limit states’ participation in regional cooperation as they primarily concern national interests. Intra-regional competition between these states has made it possible for China to secure a leading role in the SCO’s regional cooperation. This chapter is divided into four parts. The first part focuses on the existing theoretical deficiencies in conceptualizing security in Central Asia. The second part shows how an understanding of security can be expanded with the introduction of the concept of identity. The third part seeks to explore how the collective security of the SCO and the resulting security regionalization affect national security identities by examining particular examples. The last part takes a closer look at China’s approaches towards regional cooperation and its efforts to build a multilateral institution at its periphery.

Taking a Fresh Look: Introducing the Concept of Security Identity The security regionalization in the Central Asian region has been primarily studied from the perspectives of realism (neorealism) and liberal institutionalism (Rashid 2000-2001; Chung 2004; Bhatty 2008; Deyermond 2009; Bohr 2004; Carney & Moran 2000; Sheives 2006). These theoretical views and approaches used for studying the security issues of Central Asia are proving to be deficient. The analyses in these two views are rather superficial and unsatisfactory, as ontological and epistemological premises do not conform to reality, and are not consistent with the expected outcomes of certain events. As they are essentially built on the modern conception of the state, this supposes that state security is a concept achieved by identifying and neutralizing objective (material) threats faced by the state; however, this is not always the case (Campos 2007). The three components of the analytical tool introduced in this chapter are designed to analyse what has been previously avoided. First is the perspective of English School, which assumes the transitional nature of security in Central Asia. Second, the perspective of constructivism, the goal of which is to illuminate the function of ideational structures (norms and collective identities and their effects on the SCO security regionalism) is brought in. The third component is the concept of a ‘spillover’ from the neofunctionalist school. It looks at the important developments in the SCO, as it is transforming itself into an organization that was initially meant to increase military and security cooperation, but has

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been capable of growing effectively and swiftly into other functional regional issues. According to Buzan (2004), the main distinctiveness of the English School lies in two core elements. These are first, the three key concepts that include the international system, international society and world society (Little 1995: 15-16), and second, a theoretically pluralist approach. The second component – the pluralist approach, which includes constructivism – is the reason for my interest in the English School. According to Andrew Hurrell, the constructivist approach ‘focuses on regional awareness and regional identity, on the shared sense of belonging to a particular regional community, and on what has been called “cognitive regionalism”’ (1995: 353). I would argue that the ideas and ideational constructs do not only produce such a reality but also define and guide actors and their behaviour within the organization. The SCO, from the constructivist perspective, is a result of social interaction. Therefore, it is not fixed, and the organization must be viewed as a product of transitional processes of security regionalization that has certain temporal characteristics. The ideas and values of the ‘Shanghai Spirit’ are crucial to understanding and explaining the SCO security regionalism in Central Asia, as they are a basis for the SCO’s collective identity. The development of a shared sense of belonging (i.e. collective identity) is regarded as a significant part of institutionalizing regional cooperation. From the constructivist perspective, the SCO becomes something more than just security regionalism. It includes an important part of the regionalism – the socialization. Wendt (1999: 170) notes: ‘socialisation is in part a process of learning to conform one’s behaviour to societal expectations’. Paying attention to norm-sharing, exchange of ideas and the formation of identities provides a broader understanding of the character and the emergence of regional security cooperation, such as the SCO. The process of cooperation started in the limited functional area of security and, having gathered momentum, led to further rounds of integration into other areas (economy, development and trade). This ‘spillover’ effect explains current developments in the SCO. The political spillover is expressed in the creation of a supranational governance model and here, it is the SCO. This also helps to explain the interconnection in economic sectors or issue areas, by means of the cooperation in one policy area ‘spilling over’ into another. In other words, this is an inevitable process rather than a desirable state of affairs that could be introduced by the political or technocratic elites of the states involved (Arora 1988: 15).

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The SCO has attempted to enhance regional security cooperation through increasing the level of self-restraint. For example, the SCO sought to promote regional confidence and security-building measures (CSBMs) by placing an emphasis on reinforcing transparency and openness in the region (Marketos 2009). As the primary interest of states is in ‘cooperation’ between national states, liberal institutionalism seems to have relevance for the SCO in explaining the mechanisms of security, but it is limited in its explanatory power when it comes to the SCO security regionalism. The SCO states are more inclined towards retaining informal and non-legalistic norm-based rules. The framework of cooperation in the SCO represents a fusion of formal methods and informal (non-legalistic) methods of the ‘Shanghai Spirit’, such that members do not necessarily push the organization towards a legally binding security architecture. The SCO developed this concept of multilateralism on the self-identified normative and value base that is known as the ‘Shanghai Spirit’. The functional form of the SCO – multilateralism – presents a symbiosis between informal relations between member-states and formal legalistic structures of cooperation, that makes the SCO ‘the main regional organisation in Central Asia, reassuring the Central Asian Republics that the SCO will not undermine their national sovereignty, but leaving it inherently limited in terms of functional impact’ (Aris 2009b: 460). As a result, the SCO, despite the criticism of its ineffectiveness, has been persistent in its existence and promoting its norms and principles in Central Asia. Central Asia is a region which has multiple definitions, depending on which regionalization is being used. The boundaries of the ‘region’ are rather pragmatically defined and regional action is temporary (Hveem 2000: 72). This idea suggests that the existence of multiple security organizations with different membership in parallel to the security complexes overlay is likely to involve different processes of regionalization. And as a consequence, these regional security organizations are likely to envision different dimensions of regional security. By Buzan’s definition security complexes are about the relative differences between states, historical aspects of their relations and the distribution of power (Buzan 2000: 4). Buzan’s expectation implies that changes in any of these elements would cause a change in the security complex. The change in Central Asia from the Cold War to post-Cold War security environment meant a change in power distribution in the region guided by the historical relation the region had created. This in turn drove the SCO into its distinctive regional pattern of security cooperation. It can also be argued that the SCO is a product of that security overlay, where China had involved itself

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with the region in terms of plurality and consensus of security interests. This plurality is a precondition for creating a security community. States no longer expect, or prepare, to use force in their relations with each other (Deutsch et al. 1957: 1-4). It is also possible to argue that Central Asia in the post-Cold War era, at least in the SCO, is moving towards being a pluralistic security community. These multiple layers of security, which are produced as the result of security regionalization, are at work in order to manage different types of security through the SCO. These are the drivers that have an incremental effect on regional integration. In the social aspect of the English School explanation, there is yet another set of drivers that have diverse effects on the process of integration. It is composed of a complex of identities (ethnic, ideological and other group identities). At first glance, it may seem as if the Central Asian states are tangled in opposing forces divided by ethnic, linguistic and national identities. Maybe regional integration, according to Bohr, ‘will remain a chimera and regionalization in the narrowly defined Central Asian region is unlikely to move’ (2004: 502). However, I argue that regional collective identity has been conceived successfully within the framework of the SCO. It is a process by means of which its member states try to counter their fears. In order for the SCO to create such an identity, it was f irst started in the form of the ‘Shanghai Five’ as a forum for interactions between states, particularly Russia and China and Central Asian states. This indicates that the member states of the SCO are considered to be the primary actors in addressing any regional security problems. But as is almost always the case, the security concerns on the domestic, regional and extra-regional levels are highly cross-linked, meaning that the interface of these connections is particularly important for understanding the security practice of the countries. In the current regional security environment, in spite of instability in Afghanistan, the threats to regional security are regional, or more local. The painstaking process of nation-building, the legitimacy crisis, rapid social and economic transformation, decolonization, ethnic diversity, border disputes and a catalogue of other issues are all sources of instability in the post-Soviet republics (Sajjadpour 1994). Yet, another factor that affects the dynamics is the presence of intra-regional competition for dominance between some Central Asian states. Smith (1996) points to the fact that geographic, political, financial, religious and ethnic factors affect the ability of each nation to achieve its security goals and promote its hegemonic aspirations.

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As the SCO sees it, Central Asia’s security is also closely linked to the state sovereignty of regional states. As Allison explains: Regional structures in Central Asia have come to offer the role of ‘protective integration’ – a form of collective political solidarity with Russia against international political processes or agendas that are interpreted as challenging politically incumbent regimes and their leaders. This type of political ‘bandwagoning’ on the international stage is accompanied by an emphasis in the domestic politics arena on the statist principle of ‘constitutional order’ and ideologies of national sovereignty. (2008: 186)

This fact is also emphasized in the SCO Charter where member-states, Central Asian republics, China and Russia, chose to confirm juridical sovereignty by committing themselves to principles of the modern Westphalian state system (SCO 2010a). The SCO membership allows governments to retain their sovereignty by the provision of safety and identity for the people while striving to establish their own legitimacy. Sovereignty, in its application to Central Asia, is an integral part of security. Furthermore, Allison (2008: 186) notes that sovereignty in Central Asia is not just a ‘legitimacy tool’, the use of which allows ‘local governments [to] face three principal domestic challenges, namely: creating a national identity, building effective political institutions, and coping with late economic development’ (Menon & Spruyt 1999). However, as Allison continues, sovereignty for Central Asian leaders: is not merely a feature of the search for national identity. It also characterises their approach to political power more generally, which helps explain their disinclination to cooperate deeply on a regional basis, except as a form of mutual reinforcement of the political status quo. In essence these leaderships maintain centralised state institutions and focus on political control rather than political negotiation. (2008: 186)

These nuances of Central Asian security exist outside of the theoretical frameworks of neo-realist and liberalist perspectives. They are unable to explain them; they simply cannot perceive these nuances. The SCO, as an institution, represents regional integration, which is expressed through states’ membership in the organization. But regional integration is a process that is constantly being transformed and retransformed by the member

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states. That is quite the opposite if the process of integration is seen through the fixed structural rigidity of realism and institutional normativity. The obvious need for better understanding demands a different theoretical approach. This is where constructivism can help us to grasp more of the complexity by introducing the concept of national security identity. The interest is in knowing how China’s influence is extended via the SCO over the Central Asian member states in security cooperation. For that, it is necessary to take a closer look at security itself. The International Relations field has made multiple attempts to redefine, expand and sometimes narrow down security from a number of different theoretical perspectives.3 Constructivism-based approaches frame security as a social construct that has specific meaning only in a particular social context. Therefore, the task of conceptualizing security is bound by the discourse which is applied in the particular region. In other words, studying the ideas about security and their development on the first stage, then their ascension to the sphere of public policy (political debate and domestic bargaining), and their eventual institutionalization as an organization (norms, roles and practices) will help us understand the complexity of security in a particular region (in this case, Central Asia). The focus taken in this chapter is on particular conceptualizations of security (pre-policy and practice stage). As we may see, the SCO security formulation revolves around two main discourses: sovereignty and regional cooperation. Therefore, it is possible to see that the security conceptualization is the interplay between the two discourses mentioned in the SCO. This security conceptualization influences the political discourses of the state by processes of socialization. The premises offered by Daniel Katz in regards to the functionalist notion in regards to cognition is that an individual’s ‘standard for making judgments about international matters or even national issues may be too vague and too fragmentary for decisions of discrimination and wisdom’ (Katz 1959: 32). This leap of cognition, from individual through national onto the international level, is based on individuals involved in international relations. The importance of such individuals involved in international organizations is becoming incremental by processes of socialization. According to Checkel, socialization is a process of inducting actors into the norms and rules of a given community. Its outcome is sustained compliance based on the 3 The discourse between three metatheoretical perspectives (constructivism, rationalism, and reflectivism) distinguished by academicians is not completely resolved.

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internalisation of these new norms. In adopting community rules, socialisation implies that an agent switches from following logic of consequences to a logic of appropriateness; this adoption is sustained over time and is quite independent from a particular structure of material incentives or sanctions. (2005: 804)

Goodman and Jinks (2004) identify three different mechanisms that influence socialization on states: coercion, persuasion and acculturation. The first two are calculated and weighed actions taken by a state in response to the external environment, whereas the process of acculturation takes place in a different, internal organizational setting. 4 In the case of the SCO, I argue, it is likely that the process of acculturation has the strongest influence on individuals and groups representing states. As it was pointed out before, the main political method for deciding over the issues in the SCO is a consensus-seeking mechanism. Members are shielded from the immediate coercion and persuasion of other members, larger or smaller, by the power of anonymous voting. Properly considered, persuasion-like coercion is more likely to occur outside international organizations (Goodman & Jinks 2004: 665). Therefore, it is possible to conclude that acculturation is the primary process of socialization in the SCO that influences the members. The effects of acculturation are complex as they influence the two other processes, persuasion and coercion, to ‘help to produce behavioural conformity’ (Goodman & Jinks 2004: 681). Here I argue that acculturation is the core process that takes place in the organization. According to Doty, a discourse is ‘a relational totality which constitutes and organizes social relations around a particular structure of meanings’ (1996: 239). Therefore the themes on which the SCO is built are an attempt to organize regional relations around the conceived meaning of security. Let us turn our attention back to the national security identities. Katzenstein argues that ‘the identity of states emerges from their interactions with different social environments, both domestic and international’ (1996: 24). Katzenstein, however, is not explicit about the concept of identity. The 4 The definition of acculturation used in this chapter is taken from Cultural Anthropology and is as follows: ‘Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups … [U]nder this definition, acculturation is to be distinguished from culture change, of which it is but one aspect, and assimilation, which is at times a phase of acculturation’ (Redfield, Linton & Herskovits 1936: 149-152).

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argument is that as there are various identities, there are also security identities that are created by states in relation to the perceived national security. These are sometimes distinct and sometimes intermixed with other identities states might have, as they are formed from the logic of the domestic and international security environments. The main distinction of security identity from other identities is its goals, given that it is being constructed intentionally to achieve security. For example, nationalism may be used as a tool by a government to achieve unity between the government and the governed social groups. In the sense of security, it may be used in order to preserve the nation by creating a perception of threats from other states. On the basis of the mentioned propositions, I distinguish between the multiple identities that states have. These identities vary from environment to environment, from institution to institution. Some of these identities may be created purposefully and sometimes unintentionally. A state may choose to present itself as a developing nation in some organizations, while at the same time, should the situation require it, the state may place itself into a group of developed nations. The same logic applies to a state’s behaviour in the sphere of security. The national security identity is a multifaceted sociological construct that may be created intentionally and unintentionally. States may choose to align their other identities with a security identity, which may magnify the importance of one identity over the other. In this view, it is obvious that the construction and reconstruction of the problems of security play a major role. The way security is conceptualized and institutionalized is the most critical point in constituting a national security identity. Using the definition by Pernille Rieker (2006: 9), the nationstate security identity can be identified by uncovering the dominant security discourse undertaken by the political leadership in a given nation-state. The discourse over security in the political circles of the four Central Asian states may in fact be the only discourse. Hence the national security identity is defined as the set of shared beliefs taken by the current leadership in the sphere of national security. The process of change in national security identity, however, may happen as a complex of the interconnected intended and unintended actions by the government that relate to security. As Zehfuss explains, ‘excluding the process of construction of the state as a bearer of the identity and of domestic processes of articulating state identity are part of the problem. This reduces identity to something negotiable between the states’ (2002: 89). This can also be observed in the search for identity by newly independent states in Central Asia, which are different from those states with colonial

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experience. Whereas postcolonial states gain their independence through the search for symbols of physical power and the capacity to defend their sovereignty in order to reassure and strengthen their statehood, the Central Asian states do not seek to increase their military strength vis-à-vis their neighbours. Instead, their strength lies in something else, in their identities. The core part of national identity is sovereignty. Sovereignty discourses in Central Asia are complex and have a direct relation to state power and the need to maintain control and strengthen the leaders’ legitimacy. Allison points out, ‘the sovereignty in the thinking of Central Asian leaders is not merely a feature of the search for national identity but a form of mutual reinforcement of the political status quo’ (2008: 186). Security discourses, however, include a multitude of facets. Kirill Nourzhanov suggests: The official security narrative in Central Asia is quite robust and covers a broad range of issues. It must be noted, however, that: it is heavily influenced by themes, concepts, and terminology coming from abroad (externally induced securitisation); its domestic audience is limited; the verbalisation of certain threats does not necessarily mean that the regimes perceive them as such; interactions among individual states in the region are almost never securitised. As a result, the discursively produced picture of threats and challenges is skewed, incomplete and does not offer reasonable guidelines for cooperative action. (2009: 96)

The modern state system is built on the organizing principle of sovereignty which seeks coherence between the concepts of the state, the nation and territoriality. But this coherence has not been successfully achieved, as the Central Asian leadership has adopted nationalism as a tactic to avert a crisis of legitimacy (Akbarzadeh 2004: 691). So, Central Asian states find themselves in competition to create the most adapted and modernized national identity, which would differ drastically from identities of neighbouring states. As mentioned earlier, the national security preferences must indicate a change or modification beyond simple influence from external or internal factors. Then the actors will be receptive to the social influence from the SCO under acculturation processes. These processes include orthodoxy, mimicry and status maximization and mobilize internal and external pressures impelling actors, under the right conditions, to adopt socially legitimate attitudes, beliefs and behaviours (Goodman & Jinks 2004: 643). Evidence suggesting a modified national policy and regionalism in national approaches to the SCO would indicate a change in national traditional security interests and preferences through the emphasis of the SCO and

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SCO-developed concepts. This also implies the contestation of sovereignty as a core of national security identity against the prioritization of Central Asian regional interests over national interests. Here I will show how that has happened in Central Asian member states.

Kazakhstan For Kazakhstan, it was impossible to use nationalism after the break-up of the Soviet Union. In order to accommodate its Russian-speaking population, and to keep a lid on the nationalist resurrectionists’ pressure in the south, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has, with a full understanding of the possible consequences, been looking for a solution. Indeed, one of the reasons for assuming the fiscal burden of relocating the capital from the southern city of Almaty to the country city of Astana in the geographical centre can be said to rest equally with other reasons, such as being ‘uncomfortably close’ to China. And there was also a desire to achieve logistical control over the large national territory. The terminology increasingly used in the security discourse amid the SCO confirms that particular influence. In the SCO, Kazakhstan’s interests became broader as they went beyond its national borders (Auelbayev 2010). The identity change is also confirmed by Tajin’s comment in 2000: By and large and especially in comparison to the previous years, national security today depends on processes of national integration into regional and global systems of security, on provisions of stability, on economic growth, on the preservation of stability in internal political processes, on responses to threats from the sphere of information and the environment, as well as others. (Tajin 2005)

Kazakhstan has resented Russia’s new ‘vector’ terminology as one that would have put Kazakhstan in an inferior position if Kazakhstan had accepted it. In regional diplomacy, ‘each vector of Russia’s foreign policy presupposes the solution of specific tasks’ in the different regions (Lavrov 2006: 70). After the SCO summit in 2008, it was expected that President Nazarbayev would play a more crucial role in the upcoming CIS (the Commonwealth of Independent States) summit. Kazakhstan became increasingly independent in constructing its discourse from external influence. It accepted, internalized and confirmed the role of being a peace guarantor in the region. In a

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joint declaration after the summit, the SCO member-states indicated the need to respond faster to the security threats in the region. For example, President Putin, in the meeting of the heads of the SCO member-states, proposed regular antiterrorist drills, similar to those that took place in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia on 11 August 2007. The discourse was enriched by a new terminology to accommodate the security needs of the members. For example, terms such as narco-aggression and narco-threat were circulated for the first time at the meetings. A new term was introduced: belts of antidrug security, an abstract concept that symbolized efforts to strengthen antidrug cooperation and bring together the international efforts of different states surrounding Afghanistan (Izvestiya 2007). The change in the security discourse is also supported by two events that took place in that year. First, the tactical antiterror drills that were held in the framework of the SCO under the name ‘Peace Mission – 2010’. In 2010, the SCO held its first large-scale military drills, successfully executed on the territory of Kazakhstan that included military forces from six states (each SCO member committed at least one operational-tactical group, 5,000 soldiers in total). This indicates the level of trust between the members, especially Kazakhstan, that allowed foreign forces (ground and air) to be present on their sovereign territory (Ministry of Defence PRC 2010). At the 2010 SCO summit in Tashkent, where Kazakhstan was taking its turn to chair the organization, the discourse was shaping a new role of Kazakhstan as a security promoter. The main topic at the summit was to link regional security and stability to the social and economic spheres. And the priorities of Kazakhstan as the chair of the SCO were set to support peace, security and stability in the Central Asian region (Kazakhstan News 2010). Second, Kazakhstan took an unprecedented step by sending an airplane to evacuate the former Kyrgyz President Bakiev from a conflict zone in the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan. By doing so, Kazakhstan’s image and its role as a regional peace promoter in the region were significantly boosted. Another substantial evidence of change in security can be read in the National Strategic Plan of Development until 2020, signed by President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2010. It states: The system of national security will be oriented towards actions to form a constructive and safe environment, and the utilisation of all resources for the stable development of the nation and complex advancement of Kazakhstan in the region and in the world. The basis of national security will be constructed on preventive maintenance to identify and address emerging threats. Special attention will be

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dedicated to cooperation in the sphere of international terrorism, religious extremism, international drug trafficking and illegal migration. (Ministry of Economic Development and Trade 2010)

As we see, the security discourse in it is a word-by-word vocalization of the SCO security approach. Moreover, the security discourse in Kazakhstan has moved beyond its national orientation and is strongly tied to the security in the context of the Central Asian region. The starting point of the change in security discourse is reflected in the process of creating a legal mechanism to prevent terrorism by the enactment of the Criminal Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan on 1 January 1998. The next step in the change was the enactment of the ‘Fight against Terrorism’ law on 13 July 1999. These defined the legal and institutional foundation in the fight against terrorism. The laws also defined the subjects of terrorism and the roles of government and non-government subjects in the process. The roles of the government branches and the National Security Committee (KNB) were further clarified when President Nazarbayev signed the decree ‘On Measures to Prevent and Eradicate Terrorism and Extremism Threats’ in February 2000. Finally, the national security discourse was fully paralleled with the SCO security approach when the KNB’s ‘National Programme to Fight Terrorism, Extremism and Separatism’ was signed by presidential decree in 2003 (but it was eventually extended to the 2004-2006 period). As we see, the themes that were introduced to the SCO in different periods were absorbed into the programmes and policies of the Kazakh government.

Tajikistan Tajikistan, in spite of being a majority Muslim country, avoided turning itself into an Islamic state. Concerns at time of the outbreak of the civil war, which the leadership feared would bring the country back to a pre-Soviet condition, led it to remain secular. The search for a national identity had stopped at a unique, hybrid semi-ideological and semi-national image, as ‘Tajikistan’s production of ideology based on historical narrative became a highly strategic issue after the end of the civil war in 1997’ (Marat 2008). The main characteristic of Tajikistan’s security discourse is that it is dominated by the theme of defending the nation’s political and territorial integrity. It is similar, to some degree, to the security discourse in Kyrgyzstan. However, if compared to Uzbekistan, the priorities in the discourses have

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obvious differences. Tajikistan’s attitude towards territorial defence has reverted to its former state and the political unity between the elites and opposition is the core part of it. In the early 1990s, the scepticism towards the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) and the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) was replaced by strong support for the process of institutionalization, as it offered a more promising future for the country. The SCO, however, stood more in line with Tajikistan’s priorities in terms of security. Despite a large Russian military presence in the country, the central part of the security discourse is linked to the SCO. This connection is considered to be in the context of socialization and eventual regionalization through the SCO. As mentioned before, some authors have argued that Tajikistan’s security approach is largely influenced by Russia. The tendency, however, seems to be in favour of Tajikistan’s free-rider behaviour, which is reinforced by its further alienation of the Russian-speaking population living there, and in the use of somewhat insulting rhetoric towards Moscow. During the past decade, Tajikistan’s membership in the SCO has served a spectrum of national interests. After the disillusionment with the CIS and the CSTO, there was an acceptance of the political dimension of the SCO processes. The key focus has been on the economic part of cooperation. Influenced by the SCO, in the second half of the last decade, the political elite began to utilize the non-traditional security theme as a main security discourse. The political leadership had always played the role of being very pragmatic by incorporating a national security approach into the Central Asian regional dimension, and even beyond. In order to fulfil its security needs, Tajikistan engaged Russia on several fronts. Such engagement took place at the levels of traditional security and the SCO. At the organizational level, the focus was on non-traditional security, economic development, and on extra-regional foci, such as fighting drug trafficking and illegal migration. The theme of linguistic and ethnic (non-Turkic) differences from other Central Asian states (including Xinjiang in China) in the national attitude has been increasingly dominated by the tone and terminology of the security discourse offered by the SCO: ‘the three evils’ (terrorism, separatism and extremism), sovereignty and peaceful coexistence with neighbouring states. Tajikistan is most likely to further its own security through linking and strengthening its statehood and the development of the country. Considering the relations with the superpowers and other countries in the region, Tajikistan supports an open-door policy. So far this strategy has been quite effective, as it has prevented the government from making any significant

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tactical blunders. Tajikistan realizes that the development of stable bilateral relations with other countries is likely to take time and effort. Therefore, in the preservation of national interests in the Central Asian region, it is relying on the framework of the SCO, and less on the CSTO and the EurAsEC (Eurasian Economic Community). But while we can note all the changes that are taking place in the security dimension in Tajikistan, the greater impact of the SCO on instrumental changes in Tajikistan’s security approaches must be reflected in a more proactive way on the regional level. However, this is yet to be seen.

Uzbekistan Uzbekistan did become an Islamic state. This immediately led to internal polarization between the democratic parties and the non-Uzbek population, whose opposition to government policy has forced the government to implement authoritarian measures. These authoritarian policies have earned Uzbekistan criticism from its neighbours, and forces of opposition to government rule within Uzbekistan have sought support from similarlyminded people across Uzbekistan’s borders. Uzbekistan’s neighbours perceive it as the most aggressive state in the region in advancing its territorial interests. Today, Uzbekistan actively participates in the work of many international security organizations (the UN, the Islamic Conference Organization, the Eurasian Economic Community, the SCO, the CSTO, the CIS and others). But its orientation in resolving problems of regional security has gradually gone from contribution to prof it-seeking. It began with the re-creation of a nuclear-free Central Asian zone, switched to illegal drug traff icking and other problems, and it is currently focusing on push-and-pull tactics vis-à-vis its neighbours. Karimov’s adherence to the principle of national sovereignty and non-interference has been viewed as being ambivalent, particularly since 2005, when Uzbekistan restored its membership in the CSTO. There has been a complex and contradictory relationship between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan over the last fifteen years. This deteriorated very soon after the current leadership of Tajikistan came to power. This has resulted in a move by Uzbekistan from Russia to rapprochement with the West. The hope that Tajikistan would take on an intermediary role in improving relations between Russia and Uzbekistan at the end of 2010 cooled. Relations have become more difficult as Uzbekistan has continued

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its aggressive policies towards its neighbour. As a result of these developments, Tajikistan has considered engaging in cooperation with those nations that can help it to counter such an unreliable neighbour. Despite these facts, Uzbekistan’s security discourse has always been regionalized, and under the impact of the SCO it became distinctly obvious. The traditional security is tightly interlaced with the new security discourse. However, it is not the same as in the case of Kazakhstan, which has experienced more profound change. That is, we are yet to see Uzbekistan’s commitment as a member. Uzbekistan’s scepticism, and even dissatisfaction in some cases, also indicates at the national level that interest-driven constructs of security considerations and membership in the SCO are becoming more instrumental to its domestic policy of strengthening its political power. In Uzbekistan’s view the SCO helps to create a perception of the region and each player’s interests (Okhujonov 2009). Uzbekistan has been trying to become a central player in the region. However, it’s ‘zigzag’ behaviour added to the unpredictability of its actions in the CSTO and the CIS and kept them from achieving respect and recognition from other states. But ultimately, it is the SCO that made Uzbekistan’s security discourse more regionalized and allowed it to safely vent its grievances and complaints against its neighbours. Uzbekistan’s behaviour in the organization became more temperate. Moreover, the organization itself, in the words of Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, became ‘a vital necessity for Uzbekistan and the region’ (SCO 2010b). However, the regional dimension of Uzbekistan’s security concept has yet to be fully regionalized, as some fears remain hard to overcome. The ways that Uzbekistan would try to strengthen its security identity are likely to be introduced on the regional level and the SCO would be first place to look.

Kyrgyzstan A decade of membership in the SCO has influenced Kyrgyzstan’s security identity rather subtly. It is mostly due to the changes in its current approach to security, which is primarily driven by the domestic political situation. In reality Kyrgyzstan’s ruling elites find it difficult to define its national interests. Two rather volatile regime changes have not been helpful in building a national security identity, as it was not properly articulated to the public and the region. Russia’s influence in the traditional security of Kyrgyzstan continues to be defined by the lack of national resources. Kyrgyzstan still has to rely

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on Russia to equip its military. In order to strengthen its political power, Kyrgyzstani leaders have looked to the CSTO as well. Kyrgyzstan has requested help from the organization several times in the critical moments of its history. However, even though it may have been successful in achieving the moral support of the members, it has never led to any military help from the organization. The fact that Kyrgyzstan is yet to fully stabilize politically makes it difficult to claim that Kyrgyzstan has a well-defined national security identity. But it also remains a fact that Kyrgyz elites have consistently been using major themes borrowed from the SCO to build national security discourses. Kyrgyzstan’s membership in the SCO has not only been successful – it has been essential. Membership has played an important role for the development of Kyrgyzstan. The regional level of cooperation between Kyrgyzstan and China is defined by the relations through the SCO. It is the open format of the relationship that guarantees Kyrgyzstan’s national interests. The participation of two regional superpowers – Russia and China – in the complex Central Asian region was yet another reason why Kyrgyzstan increased its activity in the SCO in the period from 2004 to 2007. The hope for fair and equal participation in the state projects within the region is shaping Kyrgyzstan for future cooperation in the economic, energy and financial spheres. The fight against ‘the three evils’ in the SCO satisfies Kyrgyzstan’s needs in the sphere of security (Aris 2009a: 456). All of this creates the necessary conditions for Kyrgyzstan to achieve its political stability. According to Ednan Usubaliev, the vice president of the Institute of Strategic Analysis and Prognosis, a key think-tank adviser to the president on security issues: The norms of the SCO, such as ‘equal participation and fair treatment’, must be the key tasks in Kyrgyzstan’s foreign policy in the Central Asian region, and between all the SCO members. We already mentioned that relations of ‘good neighbourliness’ in the region are simply words; in reality, relations in the region are built on the principle of ‘might makes right’. Therefore, guarantees of fair treatment from Russia and China are vitally essential to Kyrgyzstan. (Usubaliev 2009)

There is one more important trend. The elites in Kyrgyzstan are receptive to the ideas proposed in the SCO. The Kyrgyz national security discourse, though not fully def ined, in its themes often echoes those that are raised in the SCO. On every possible occasion the government

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projects itself through the SCO collective identity. This tendency goes even further. For example, Kyrgyzstan has been actively developing and implementing a Food Security Strategy and has tried to introduce the idea to the member-states of the SCO (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of PRC 2008). Maybe it is too early to speak of an identity change in Kyrgyzstan due to the influence of the SCO, but here we see that the country has taken the initiative in accepting some policies proposed at the SCO forums. Then, by re-evaluating and expanding them domestically, Kyrgyzstan tries to benef it from them by proposing these ideas again in the SCO venues. As we may see, whenever we talk about states in Central Asia, we must remember that their identities are bound together in at least two aspects of the identity of ‘Central Asia’. First, they share similar characteristics with other states in the region; second, they are connected with the identities of the neighbouring states through history, geopolitics and economic dependence. The same logic can be traced in conceptualizing the security identity of the Central Asian states. That is, when we speak of the security identity of Kazakhstan, for example, it must be understood in the context of the region. With the end of the Cold War the quest for a well-developed national identity became a pressing issue for all actors in Central Asia. This also meant it would affect the security not only of the region itself, but also of China and Russia. Conceiving themselves as the meeting point of Eastern and Western civilizations or as the outskirts of the West, the Central Asian states began with constructing their narratives of the ‘Silk Road’, ‘Shanghai Spirit’ and others as their counteraction to any threats to their sovereignties.

The ‘Shanghai Spirit’: China’s Delicate Steps in Central Asia The method which China employs in devising its approach to the region is based on its long-term goals coupled with a clear pragmatic calculation; this method seems to be working. The explanation for the rising influence of China in the Central Asian region is easily understood by analysing what each state incorporates into its own security identity as it is eventually reflected in the actions of each state. Securitizing China’s economic rise and paralleling it with state patriotism was a critical state action in creating China’s security identity. As Zhao explains regarding China’s security identity construction:

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Chinese nationalism has thus become one of the most important domestic forces behind Chinese foreign policy, including China’s approaches toward East Asian regionalism. It both motivates and constrains China’s participation in regional cooperation. China has recently embraced a more multilateral strategy to achieve three nationalist goals: (1) to create a stable and peaceful peripheral environment for economic growth and political stability, on which the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now depends; (2) to suppress ethnic nationalism among the minorities in its border areas and maintain its frontier security and prosperity; and (3) to enhance its position with other major powers in the region, particularly Japan and United States. (2009: 1x)

The continued relevance and primacy of China remains the focal point of cooperation in the SCO. The complex of security ideas that are conceived by China are based on these main issues and dimensions across three different levels of security (extra regional, intra-regional, domestic). The persistent tendency of Central Asian states to conform to general patterns of the security thinking created by China is due, first, to geopolitical similarity and physical proximity, and, second, to the organizational acculturation occurring in the SCO. The Central Asian states by themselves are insufficient promoters of security primarily due to the lack of resources. But they still remain the primary agents of security. This fact can be attributed to China’s activity within the SCO. Consequently, the definition and creation of ideas (concepts) in the SCO, initially introduced by China, finds its expression in choices consciously made by central decision-makers within the organization. The hierarchy of the levels and importance of issues in regional security varies from state to state. The domestic roots of the security issues that are at the front of the stage in the regional arena, however, are eventually reframed to fit the security mechanisms of the SCO. The first evidence is the organizational maturation of the SCO, i.e. the creation of a collective security identity. This has also been confirmed by Haas: The developments in military security and energy security display the growing importance of the security dimension as part of the SCO framework in the international arena. Also, they can be regarded as at least a partial maturing of the SCO as a security organisation. The SCO has developed itself from (originally) a border arms control-oriented

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organisation, via a regional counterterrorism body, to a truly international entity. (2007: 57)

Second, the change happened on a broader scale, confirming that the socialization spurred by the SCO is expanding. On that, Haas continues: The sequence of annual summits shows a steady expansion of topics on cooperation, as is also displayed by the increase in deliberations of ministers and agencies. At the same time there seems to be a tendency that more and more vital decisions are not taken at the summits but in other forums … This development of decision-taking outside the summits can be considered as evidence of the growth of the SCO as an organisation with intensive cooperation, which nowadays encompasses more activities than the Heads of State can handle during their annual meetings. (2007: 58)

The security identity change becomes evident when decade-long changes in the military doctrines of the four Central Asian states are compared. One could argue that the changes may have come from another major factor – the participation in the CSTO – but the general trend points to the influence of the SCO. In regards to this, Babadjanov asserts: As is visible from the analysis of the doctrines of states-members of the CSTO, their similarity is only evident in the structure of the documents. All seven doctrines have relatively equivalent chapters and sub-chapters. However, the content and accents are different … Standardization remains necessary for the fight against transborder threats such as international terrorism, illegal drug trafficking, illegal arms dealing, separatism and extremism in various directions. (2008: 66)

Moreover, the expansion and transfer of the security narrative on the SCO members, according to Bailes et al. (2007), provides even more evidence of such influence. The SCO, as they argue, achieved some degree of coordination and interoperability among its members’ armed forces and security services in regard to potential antiterrorism deployments. China’s push behind the SCO leads it to the development of joint policies in security, and extends them to economic security, such as energy cooperation and infrastructure.

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Given everything mentioned above, it is clear that China has emerged as a new influence in Central Asia. Its influence lies in the sphere of ideas and perceptions. Being selective in its methods of engagement, China has been prudent in applying them within the framework of the SCO, and it has been relatively successful in achieving its goals in cooperation when compared to other members. We can see that the regional security discourse in Central Asia is comprised of discursive practices and meanings that are primarily related to cooperation processes of the SCO and that are eventually extended into the domestic security narrative.

Conclusion The SCO has engaged in a sustained effort to revise the traditional organizational model of cooperation with bordering regions. China, in supporting the securitization processes in the SCO, has also aimed at creating a common security space. It has done so not only within the territories of the organization’s members, but also outside of this, in bordering regions, by means of granting observer status to certain states. The majority of the Central Asian political elites still hold that Central Asian states are part of Russia’s sphere of influence. The Central Asian states also prefer that problems with Russia be resolved on a bilateral basis, without direct or indirect interference by third parties. The ‘Central Asian dilemma’, or the attempt at reconciling differences and sometimes the conf licting interests of the Central Asian states, Russia, and China, f inds its reflection in Central Asian states’ security conceptualizations and security policies. Their security conceptions, based on the idea of nation-state-building, are dominated by an instrumental interpretation of the construction of statehood, such as their sovereignty, national identity and security identity in relation to regional security. In parallel to the interplay of regional states in Central Asia, there is an emphasis on the role of various actors, such as elites and ethnic clans, whose influence often reaches beyond state borders. This points towards the inevitability of increased growth of regional issues and agendas, and most likely the emergence of new kinds of actors involved in the process. The SCO is attempting to project itself as a regional security community in post-Cold War Central Asia. China effectively utilizes the methods of diplomatic negotiations and consensus-seeking in the SCO in order to maximize its benefits not only in the areas of security or energy security,

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but also in relation to its economic development. Through effective use of its concepts, it is able to find a common language to use with member states. This eventually leads to the incorporation of these concepts into the national security identities of the Central Asian states. The institutionalization of norm-based security management and the creation of a Central Asian collective regional identity as ‘an exclusive membership’ in the SCO is also an interesting aspect that plays a role in strengthening its collective identity. Primarily, the process of cooperation in the region is proceeding via the creation of norms and rules of regional socialization. The result is that the Central Asian states have been moving ever closer to each other. Their membership in the SCO has substantially boosted the importance of the SCO as an exclusive body. The analysis of SCO cooperation has been reviewed from a constructivist perspective in international relations. The focus has been centred on regional security cooperation in the SCO versus the Central Asian states’ nation-state-building. The process of security cooperation has affected the continuous search for security and the construction of security identities by the members of the organization. The impact of the constructivist perspective on explaining a regional security community such as the SCO is undeniable. The hope is that future research will reflect on sociological or ideational, rather than power-based or material, approaches to regional security community-building in Central Asia. In doing so, one may discover the role of the constructivist perspective in forming security communities. Despite ongoing cooperation, the sovereignty of the Central Asian nations is still mostly associated with the nation-state, and it is likely to remain so. However, although the state still remains central in the security arena, it no longer dominates it, nor is it the exclusive object of any particular threat. The altered and different contexts of security dictate that attention must be also given to a range of new aspects of security and sources of threats. This is where constructivism permits the possibility of state transcendence by including non-state actors as important players in affecting international perspectives. In fact, by doing so it leads us to a better understanding of the mechanisms of contemporary security regionalism.

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