Institutions and the great power bargain in East Asia ASEAN’s limited "brokerage" role
Abstract
During the 1990s, ASEAN played a critical role as the foundation for the expansion of regional security dialogue frameworks to include the major powers, particularly China and the US, but also Japan, India, and Russia. In this wave of new regional institutionalization, the “ASEAN Way�? – which emphasizes informality, consensus, non-intervention in internal affairs, and moving at a pace that is comfortable for all members – was projected as a means of multilateral engagement that was acceptable to all participating states in the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEAN-Plus mechanisms. ASEAN’s occupation of the “driver’s seat�? in key regional institutions is a mark of the institution’s dexterity in exploiting its benign role as intermediary among the great powers, and an important means of ensuring the Association’s continued relevance in the post-Cold War context. ASEAN’s model of “brokering�? great power relations turns on the institution providing unique fora for great power dialogue and con�?dence-building, and for acting as demonstration precincts from which great powers can demonstrate their commitment, benign intentions, and restraint to the region. ASEAN’s comparative advantage is that it is universally acceptable as the “driver�? of regionalism in a situation in which the great powers are suspicious of each other. ASEAN’s relative success in leading the creation of expanded regional institutions during the 1990s has led policymakers and analysts to claim a “brokerage�? role for the Association; it is not only a middleman bringing together contending great powers, but also a facilitator of deal-making among them. Some scholars of the constructivist persuasion tend towards ambitious claims not only about the Association’s special role in norms propagation, localization, and entrenchment in the region (see especially Acharya 2001, 2004), but also about how it has thereby captured and helped stabilize an expanding “region�? by the force of its norms (Eaton and Stubbs 2006; Busse 1999; Acharya 2005). These claims to a sort of “normative power ASEAN�? – as a counterpart to the popular idea of “normative power Europe�? (Manners 2002) – are intuitively attractive; yet, it is worth asking: what are the types of norms and what are the contents of the normative claims that ASEAN has managed to win widespread acceptance about among the great powers? How, in turn, have these normative agreements affected the nature and limits of the process of institutionalizing great powers in East Asia? In the analysis that follows, I begin by outlining my conceptual framework, which approaches the question of institutionalizing great powers from an English School perspective of re-negotiating regional order after the end of the Cold War. Regional institutions are critical not only to great power dialogue but mainly to the process of constructing a great power bargain that must underpin the new order. The next sections then assess the empirical record of ASEAN’s strategies for institutionalizing the great powers using its expanded multilateral institutions. Briefly, my argument is that while ASEAN has successfully brought the great powers into sustained dialogue, it has only helped to create a minimalist bargain among the great powers. This falls well short of the kind of sustained cooperation and normative agreement needed for a new regional order. Moreover, ASEAN has provided the great powers with a minimalist normative position from which to resist the more difficult processes of negotiating common understandings on key strategic norms, and from which to treat regional institutions as instruments for mutual balancing, instead of negotiating and institutionalizing regional “rules of the game�? that would contribute to a sustainable modus vivendi. The �?nal section considers the ways forward and advances recommendations for institutional development that would facilitate the negotiation of the regional great power bargain.