Professors Kazuko Mori and Kenichiro Hirano have compiled a thought-provoking volume on recent developments and debates about “East Asia.” The volume is the product of an ongoing project of Waseda University's Center of Excellence for the Creation of Contemporary Asian Studies (COE-CAS) led by Professor Mori, with funding from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science. Both the larger project and this volume's nine chapters add to an ongoing and increasingly complex debate about East Asian community and regionalism, as well as the study of East Asia. As their opening preface explains, the Waseda project has been motivated not just by a desire to make sense of the driving forces and tensions of the “New East Asia,” but also by more than a little dissatisfaction with the ways that the subject has been thus far approached and studied.

The strength of this volume lies especially in an approach that may be best characterized as outside-in – that is, it is an approach that (mostly) speaks from the periphery. For example, the authors highlight actors, perspectives, and issues that are often marginalized by politics, power, and scholarship. In this sense, the volume is not just about East Asia's internal tensions and dynamics but also its relationship with a larger world structure and system. In particular, this reader is reminded of a point also made in Peter Katzenstein's A World of Regions (2005). While themes and emphases notably diverge from some of Katzenstein's, the authors in varied ways make clear the point that the “New East Asia” has very much been shaped and constrained by the material and knowledge structures that have characterized the “American Imperium.”Footnote ¹

Indeed, this theme is repeated across otherwise diverse topics. Whether the topic is Asian scholarship, Asian nationalisms, Japan's role in the regional order, Korea's predicament as a middle power (in more ways than one), China's public diplomacy, capitalism, globalization, “non-traditional” security, or Asian values – most chapters highlight efforts to define and construct both East Asia and the roles and identities of individual states and actors in relation to those established structures. With one or two notable exceptions, chapters also tend to contain an implicit, if not explicit, critique of the incentive structures, value systems, and “institutionalized academic knowledge”Footnote ² that have been especially shaped by American power and scholarship.

Appropriately, the volume begins with Kazuko Mori's chapter on “Asian Studies” as it sets up key ideas and points of debate that become centralizing points for the rest of the volume. In tracing the history and significance of both “Asia” and “Asian Studies,” his chapter highlights two points that are repeated in other chapters. The first is the challenge of understanding “Asia” given the diverse and often competing national perspectives within it. Mori, like most of the volume's contributors, sees unity and value in “Asia” as both topic and approach, but it is a unity that must also reconcile and accommodate the many different perspectives and experiences within it. As Rozman's concluding chapter especially makes clear, established wisdom is that these conflicting nationalisms tend to render any talk of “Asia” or “Asian regionalism” incoherent. However, for Mori, there are also important commonalities in political culture and developmental experience that can provide the basis for East Asian community. Those commonalities moreover combine with the strong and competing nationalisms to contribute not just to a different kind of region and regionalism than Europe's (for example) but also a different perspective that “will help enrich conventional social science from the non-Western world” (p. 11). This point is also made especially strongly in Jun Nishikawa's chapter and critique of established (Western) understandings and approaches to “development.”

One of the more interesting arguments contained in Mori's chapter is the value of Asia or of region as a distinct perspective and critique of established approaches on regional integration in general and East Asian politics in particular. This is also a point made in Jang In-Sun's chapter that traces the genealogy of Korea's “Changbi discourse.” Similar to the Waseda project, the Changbi group is moved by a desire both to explain and promote an understanding of East Asian development and integration patterns on its own terms. As a reflective and reflexivist approach, the Changbi group at the same time avoids and critiques ethnocentric approaches in favor of an approach that makes “East Asia … a fluid subject of introspection and the practice based on this thinking” (p. 50). Even more than Mori's chapter, however, Sun highlights how “region” and “East Asia” offer a self-consciously distinct and “independent” “perspective” and “method” by which to “criticize and overcome” extant approaches that reify the nation state and the powerful.

Like Mori, Sun's chapter also highlights the ways that East Asia is both product and reaction to internationalization and globalization forces, though the Changbi discourse is also arguably much more critical of globalization (though less so of internationalization) and nationalization processes. The themes of marginalization and domination are also much more prominent in Sun's chapter, not least because the Changbi perspective is also a distinctly Korean (as opposed to Japanese or Chinese) perspective as well as being a Korean-interpreted East Asia approach that is highly conscious of the danger that East Asia presents for a middle and lesser power like Korea (namely, the danger of Chinese and Japanese hegemony). That means that, even while it presents and promotes region as a critique of global structures and processes, it also sees in the concept of region itself similar problematic structures, as illustrated most notably by Imperial Japan's version of regionalism. For the Changbi group, Korea's experience as one that was once colonized by Japan-led regionalizing forces provides the basis for a different kind of regionalism and regional thinking, whereby “the roles and perspectives of marginal beings help resolve the issue of the vertical space existing between global capitalism and nation-states” but also between states of East Asia. That perspective, for example, lends itself to a Korea-particular argument for “horizontal thinking” and “the concept of horizontal solidarity” that can address not just the internal (mostly nationalist) tensions that so many see in “East Asia,” but also the hierarchical tensions that are characteristic of “Chinese” and “Japanese” interpretations of East Asia.

For Sun, especially, the solution lies in thinking about East Asia as an “international society.” In that such a conclusion is highly suggestive of an established European approach (namely, the English School of international relations), Sun's conclusion does sit somewhat at odds with a perspective that is trying to differentiate itself from (if not reject) the approaches and interpretations of the established and powerful. Nevertheless, for Sun, at least, East Asia as an international society not only avoids the constructed opposition between “the West and East Asia in favor of a correlative model oriented toward an autonomous image of East Asia,” but also makes internal diversity an important feature or value of regional unity (p. 59). Concurring with that basic point are Ippei Yamazawa, Toshikiko Kinoshita and C. H. Kwan, in their chapter on the domestic and material constraints facing individual states, and especially Japan, in exercising a leadership role in East Asia, given both its history of domination there and its relationship with the global system, especially the United States. As they put it, East Asia does offer a model of development and regionalism different from the “Anglo-American model as it is” but if East Asia is to be a viable alternative, “due attention” will have to be paid to East Asia's internal diversity (p. 98). For Yamazawa, Kinoshita, and Kwan, therein lies the challenge and opportunity of East Asia as “a new standard.” If it is to effectively compete with the “Anglo-American standard,” “it must have maximum flexibility to allow for the coexistence of the various East Asian systems, yet still produce the minimum homogeneity necessary to be competitive” (p. 98).

Subsequent chapters provide other specific examples of interacting and connected patterns of domination highlighted by Sun's chapter on Korea. Ken'ichi Gotō's chapter focuses on Indonesia that once was dominated by the West, only to go on to dominate neighboring East Timor. Tsuneo Akaha's chapter on non-traditional security, like Sun's on Korea, highlights the importance of perspective, that is, who defines and who does the “securitizing” matters in terms of who is protected and “secure.” For Akaha, traditional, state-centric views of security have protected governments and privileged elites at the expense of “ordinary citizens, particularly the underprivileged classes” (p. 186). Highlighting also the lack of trust within East Asia, Akaha also sees a move towards non-traditional security as an opportunity for East Asian actors, as it can provide less politicized, functional starting points for building new confidence and “habits of cooperation.”

Of all the chapters, Jun Nishikawa's chapter on “development” and “happiness” – ultimately, a pointed critique on capitalism as an exploitative system – may offer the sharpest critique of existing global economic and political structures. Nishikawa joins Yamazawa, Kinoshita, and Kwan in seeing an egalitarian and cooperative economy as a better basis for happiness and development than the narrow “wealth creating” definitions that have dominated Anglo-American models – models that moreover reinforce inequality and marginalization, weaken social and societal bonds, and that have distracted Asians and obscured from view the value contained in their own traditional and indigenous philosophies.

Last but not least, Shujiro Urata's economic analysis of East Asia's changing trade patterns and conclusion in favor of conforming (not challenging) existing norms, rules, and thus values, of the GATT/WTO offer particular points of contrast to Nishikawa's chapter in both his conclusion and approach. Nevertheless, in highlighting intensified intra-East Asian trade and complementarities (including critically those between Japan and China), Urata further substantiates the volume's larger argument in favor of thinking of East Asia as more than a set of individualized economies and competing polities. Urata also joins Rumi Aoyama in highlighting how China – for all the fears and concerns surrounding its growth – is also importantly constrained. For both, China is not as dominant as it may sometimes seem. While Urata focuses on China's economic complementarities and interdependencies, Aoyama's chapter on the development of the Chinese media at the intersection of domestic-global and economic-political demands sees in China's “public diplomacy” and its defensive efforts to counter negative images of China abroad a particular example of the ways that China's role and identity will also be the constrained product of its intensified interactions with global structures and normative expectations.

In sum, these chapters collectively offer a thoughtful and nuanced argument for a “New East Asia” practically, theoretically, and normatively. As all chapters make clear, East Asia is challenged, to be sure, but as both empirical phenomenon and a distinct approach, East Asia is also a worthwhile project with potentially significant payoffs for East Asian security, development, and scholarship. Criticisms are minor: some individual chapters might have benefited from some reorganization; one or two chapters might have tried to integrate main themes more explicitly and prominently; and at least one additional chapter featuring a perspective from Southeast Asia might have added strength and additional nuance to the volume's outside-in perspective. Indeed, for this reader at least, her primary concern is that more people may not have the chance to benefit from the project's more critical provocations and insights.