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Power, leadership, and hegemony in international politics: the case of East Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2010

DIRK NABERS
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Abstract

The article inquires into the conditions of effective leadership of states in international politics, and develops a framework for the study of so-called (new) regional powers such as Brazil, China, India, and South Africa in processes of regional institution-building. Various theoretical strands will be discussed as to the requirements of effective leadership in international affairs. Most importantly, the relationship between power, leadership and hegemony will be outlined. It is argued that the connection between leadership and hegemony is one of co-constitution. Leadership is necessarily based on hegemony, while hegemony can only be sustained through leadership. Furthermore, it will be shown that both leadership and hegemony are essentially political in character, whereas power has no such insinuation but has to be translated into leadership and hegemony through discursive means. Finally, the analysis asks for the preconditions of leadership in East Asia, using China's and Japan's roles in East Asian regionalism as an illustration.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 2010, pp. 931 - 949
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

Introduction

‘(New) regional powers’ such as Brazil, China, India and South Africa have become ubiquitous as a topic in the global media as well as in the social sciences.Footnote 1 Sooner or later, it is argued far and wide, these economies will outclass those of the currently richest countries in the world.Footnote 2 All too often, however, it seems as if their future political clout is directly inferred from their growing economic capabilities. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of China. While the US-based Time magazine had already in the mid-1990s presaged that it is high time for ‘Waking Up to the Next Superpower’,Footnote 3 the German weekly Der Spiegel augurs the ‘Birth of a New Global Power’.Footnote 4 In China's neighbouring countries in East Asia, it is the People's Republic's growing demand of resources on the world market, its escalating share in intra-regional imports and increasing attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) that is routinely emphasised.Footnote 5 No surprise, high domestic growth rates over more than two decades have led observers to the conclusion that China will be the next superpower in the region and beyond.Footnote 6 Some of these observers recommend that other countries might serve their own purposes well by changing their policies from balancing to bandwagoning China.Footnote 7

In contrast, it is maintained in the following that this kind of reasoning obscures the conceptual distinction between mere power and actual leadership in international politics. The article asks for the broader conditions of effective leadership of states in international politics. As a first step, different theoretical strands will be presented as to the requirements of leadership in international politics. Referring to Steven Lukes'Footnote 8 three-dimensional view of power as a starting-point for the following discussion, it will be maintained that leadership – in contrast to brute power – is a genuinely political phenomenon that is effective and sustainable when foreign elites acknowledge the leader's vision of international order and internalise it as their own. It is often disputed and constituted by shared ideas about self, other, and the world, relying on the inter-subjective internalisation of ideas, norms, and identities. Ultimately, the exercise of leadership takes place within the broader structural confines of what will be conceptualised as ‘discursive hegemony’ in this article.

To exemplify the value of the developed framework for the study of (new) regional powers such as Brazil, China, India, or South Africa, the analysis inquires as to the prerequisites of effective leadership in international institution-building in East Asia, using China's and Japan's roles in East Asian regionalism as an illustration. It will be argued that while China has taken several initiatives in propelling regional free trade agreements (FTA) and economic development of the Indochina region, Japan has promoted region-wide institutions such as ASEAN+3 and the East Asian Summit, playing the role of ‘Asia's odd man out’Footnote 9 quite productively. Sino-Japanese antagonism and aspirations for leadership on both sides have, in consequence, been a major source for structural change in the region, resulting in a dynamic interplay between bilateral FTA and multilateral institutions.

It should be noted at the outset that the kind of argument developed here is in need of substantial theoretical elaboration, since leadership theory in IR still lacks a coherent approach. The bulk of what follows is thus theoretical in nature. Two intellectual sources are of primary relevance in this context: Firstly, new theories of leadership developed in political theory, management studies, and psychology will be employed to outline a general concept of leadership that seeks to differentiate between power and leadership. In that context, it will be emphasised that ‘to lead’ is not a fixed state of being but rather an act that has to be unveiled by looking at political processes. This perspective seems necessary as traditional accounts of International Relations (IR) theory, such as various versions of rationalism, centre on the distribution of material capabilities, while constructivist and post-structuralist approaches in IR have only recently started to approach process-related concepts such as power and hegemony in international politics. Secondly, post-structuralist insights about how a leader becomes a leader will be delineated, or – to use the term most aptly developed by Ernesto Laclau and his numerous followers in the Essex School of Discourse Theory – how a hegemonic discourse develops and what role a ‘leader’ can play within the structural confines of hegemony. As will be shown, leadership is necessarily based on discursive hegemony, while hegemony can only be sustained through leadership.

After delineating the three relevant concepts and their interrelatedness in the next section, an integrated model of power, leadership, and hegemony will be developed. Sino-Japanese antagonism and the two countries’ quest for leadership in regional institution-building serves to exemplify the argument. The conclusion will summarise the most important implications for research on regional powers institutionalisation.

1. Power, leadership and hegemony

1 .1 Lukes’ three dimensional view of power

Power and leadership are all too often conflated in the relevant literature.Footnote 10 The dominant power definitions in IR still rest on strictly material definitions, while leadership can be regarded as an epiphenomenon. To transcend this materialist view, Steven Lukes'Footnote 11 famous definition of the term power provides us with a helpful starting point. With Lukes, power has to be understood as having three dimensions:Footnote 12 First, power is exercised if A can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do. This dimension refers to the means of securing another person's compliance in favour of one's own interests. The second face of power looks at the de facto power of the members within a group in the decision making process. Lukes maintains that the rules within any decision making system naturally bias the mobilisaation of resources for competing for agenda formation against some individuals and groups versus others. It incorporates coercion, influence, authority, force and manipulation, and can also rest on the suppression of collective decisions, so-called non-decisions which aim at keeping issues off the agenda. The second dimension can also be called the covert dimension or the restrictive face of power. Third, a state exercises power over another state by influencing, shaping or determining his wants, beliefs and understandings about the world. Lukes argues that power is most effective in its unobservable form, that is, when willing compliance to the powerful is secured by means of influencing others ‘perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things’.Footnote 13 Subtle forms of power, such as the control of information and the process of socialisation, fall into this category. It is an essentially social view of power, which may involve thought control and the indoctrination of people's wants. As LukesFootnote 14 has maintained, power does not necessarily have to be exercised. As a capacity, it can be turned into leadership, hegemony, or domination,Footnote 15 but this is not necessarily so.

In the last two decades, various realist or neo-institutionalist accounts in IR have attempted to transcend the rationalist IR perspective. Recent examples of novel perspectives on international institutions include Peter M. and Ernst B. Haas, who argue from a pragmatic constructivist standpoint that international institutions might indeed be ‘wilful actors on their own, but are also the venue in which reflexive new practices and policies develop’.Footnote 16 From a realist perspective, Michael WilliamsFootnote 17 demands a return to the theory's anthropological foundations and a focus on the constructive relational processes of Self and Other. His work is an intriguing deconstruction of – in his view – false dichotomies between classical realism and critical and post-structuralist thought. It is, however, questionable whether the proposition of such a kind of richer realism does not put the whole realist project into question, or – as Stefano GuzziniFootnote 18 has shown – whether defining the core of realism does not mean abandoning a lot of what IR has to say today.

Writing about bargaining power in multilateral negotiations, for example, Gerald Schneider complains that ‘[it] is, moreover, nearly impossible to obtain indicators that sufficiently approximate the demanding concepts advocated by social constructivism and related approaches’.Footnote 19 Sheer brute power has not only been more fascinating for IR theorists than complex social relationships, it has also been easier to handle conceptually. As Lukes’ definition exceeds even most constructivist approaches in terms of complexity, its manifold methodological implications might hinder many scholars from transcending traditional IR rationalism. In essence, Lukes’ work is a forceful critique of methodological individualism and behaviourism. In the following, it will thus be maintained, contrary to the rationalist position, that successful leadership in international affairs must take Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power into consideration and develop it further. Power has to be internalised in the inter-subjective understandings of relevant actors. Ultimately, this is the basis of what will later in this article be called a hegemonic project.

(a)1.2 Leadership and competition

Emphasising the necessity of a more process-based conception of power, a second question to be addressed here refers to the conceptual distinction between power and leadership. What is it that differentiates leadership from power? Why does one leader lead and not another? What material capabilities does one need to become a leader? What characterises the relationship between leaders and followers? To date, James MacGregor Burns’ definition of the concept of leadership is still the most sophisticated and functional, as it puts the complex relationship between leaders and followers at centre stage. It involves persuasion, exchange, and transformation. It is a form of power, but it implies mutuality. To quote Burns:

Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers. This is done in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers.Footnote 20

What is significant in this definition is that leadership is competitive; potential leaders have to appeal to the motives of potential followers. It must hence be distinguished from domination and coercion. Leaders might be able to get potential followers to see the world through their eyes. In contrast to mere power holders, leaders are effective because they induce change. Leadership, again in contrast to brute power, is inseparable from the wants and needs of followers, but these wants and needs may be changed through social interaction.

In sum, several dimensions which make it possible to link leadership with traditional concepts of power can be extracted from the literature:Footnote 21 Firstly, leadership must essentially be conceptualised as an activity. Brute power does not necessarily entail leadership, nor does power always help to achieve the desired outcomes, as Christopher Layne elucidates quite appositely with regard to the US: ‘There is a paradox between the magnitude of American power and Washington's inability to use that power to always get what it wants in international politics […] hegemony is not omnipotence’.Footnote 22 Instead, leaders have to make decisions, gather resources, use incentives and threats, formulate visions, and build coalitions. This might be called a form of power, but surely transcends materialist accounts. Secondly, leadership requires an institutionalised context. It is seldom ad hoc. On the contrary, it rests on continuity, stability, and repetition. In many cases, potential leaders actively engage in institution-building to create the environment in which leadership can more effectively be exercised. Leaders must pay attention to different institutionalised contexts at the same time, be it at the bilateral, regional, or global level. From this follows, thirdly that leaders act under constraints when they use their power; they are not entirely free to choose their options, for their actions are shaped by followers and by circumstances to a changing degree. As Burns emphasises in his groundbreaking monograph, leadership is always relational:Footnote 23 Acting under constraints requires coalition-building. Subordinates are enlisted to fulfil certain roles in the leadership game; tasks are delegated. Finally, leadership has a normative dimension. It plays an imperative role in tackling internationally relevant problems such as terrorism, trade facilitation, climate change, humanitarian aid, and institutional cooperation in general. Strong leadership seems to be essential for guiding and directing a group of countries towards collective action. Members of an international institution will delegate functions of agenda management, brokerage, and mediation to more powerful countries. Leaders might have the capacity to solve collective-action problems that might otherwise paralyse decentralised negotiations.Footnote 24

Several authors in IR theory have tried to develop a more comprehensive, interactive model of leadership and power in the last two decades. Oran Young has explored the concept of leadership from a behavioural perspective, differentiating between three forms of leadership – structural leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, and intellectual leadership – proposing a way to understand leadership in international bargaining that can be of great help when analysing states as leaders in international affairs. Young's contribution with regard to the role of leadership in international politics is considerable. He makes three basic arguments: Firstly, leadership is essentially relational; structural leadership aims to translate relative power capabilities into bargaining leverage by making use of material threats and promises. Forming effective coalitions can be crucial in this process. Secondly, a leader will be able to act as an agenda setter, showing innovative solutions to overcome deadlocks or operating as a broker to gain support for salient solutions. Thirdly, leadership is a reflective process, necessitating a deliberative process of exchanging arguments. It implies the ‘power of ideas to shape the intellectual capital available to those engaged in institutional bargaining’.Footnote 25

In a similar vein, Ikenberry and Kupchan argue that there is a need for a reflexive, discourse-based conception of power, allowing for a complex reformulation of interests and identities.Footnote 26 Acquiescence is the result of the socialisation of leaders in secondary nations. Elites in secondary states buy into and internalise norms that are articulated by the hegemon and therefore pursue policies consistent with the hegemon's notion of international order.Footnote 27 While this argument resembles Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power, it does not answer the question how to engage potentials followers in the debating and contesting of ideas and meanings. In an intriguing analytical step, Burns distinguished transactional from transformational leadership. While ‘leaders approach followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another’Footnote 28 in the former case, the follower is more fully engaged in the latter scenario: ‘The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual simulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents’.Footnote 29 As we will see, it is in this kind of elevation of followers into leaders that the theoretical strands of leadership theory and Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power converge. Leadership is always contested by challenges from those who are left out of what we will call a ‘hegemonic project’, and sometimes from those who find themselves in a subordinate position to the leader. The central question of the next section refers to the strategies that actors employ to present their particular visions as universal, so that they become acceptable to relevant others. In many respects, this understanding of power transcends the three-dimensional view. While interests can be potentially identified and attributed to certain actors in Lukes’ framework, hegemony refers to a form of power that is less actor-related. Instead, it is deeply implanted in the structure of meaningful practices of a society.

(b)1.3 Leadership and hegemony

In this section, the concept of leadership will be linked with the post-structuralist notion of hegemony. Both concepts refer to the essence of politics. Their conceptual foundation consists in the highly contingent and incomplete character of society – be it at the domestic or the international level. In this perspective, politics is about the competition of different, particular, groups for universal representation. Political leadership is the sphere of the decision in and for a society, in that it transmits and disseminates certain particular meanings of the social as universals. Political theorist Ernesto Laclau calls this hegemonisation or hegemonic universality. In his view, hegemony is first and foremost about the tension between universality and particularity. It has to be distinguished from domination, which denotes the (often juridical) command that is exercised by a state or government.Footnote 30 Rather, as we will see in the following, (democratic) politics has to be understood as contestation and interrogation between competing social logics.

The concept of hegemony as developed here is not to be conflated with the concept of hegemony put forward by hegemonic stability theory in the field of IR.Footnote 31 Rather, it originates in Antonio Gramsci's post-Marxist theory. While Steven Lukes relies heavily on Gramsci's work on hegemony to develop his three-dimensional view of power,Footnote 32 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – in their seminal work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Footnote 33 – reformulated Gramsci's notion of hegemony in a way that takes discourse as constitutive for politics.

Most crucially for our purposes, the social structure in which leader-follower relationships are embedded is defined as discourse. This does not deny the argument that power may rely on certain material circumstances. However, whether atomic weapons are constructed as a threat or as a nuclear umbrella to protect a certain country depends upon the nature of the discourse in which they are embedded. Meanings are entirely constituted by discursive practices. The question is which meaning is able to prevail in the end. The notion of hegemony rests on the assumption that any discourse tries to dominate the field of discursivity. Power and the ability of regional powers to transform their material capabilities into leadership will thus depend on an actor's ability to present his own particular worldview as compatible with the communal aims. This works best in a situation of disintegration and indeterminacy in articulations of different identities,Footnote 34 or in a situation of dislocation. While crisis is a constant political phenomenon, the same is true for societal dislocation. As Norval maintains, ‘if the structure is dislocated und thus incomplete, an intervention by a subject is needed to re-suture it’.Footnote 35 This is the logical basis of all leadership, and basically of all politics. Previous political logics are put into question by a crisis, while more and more actors have to open themselves up to innovative discourses, and hegemonic strategies can be successful. A crucial question, then, is what a political project has to look like to be successful. Why does one prospective regional country carry more weight than another in assuming the role of a leader? To answer this question, let us scrutinise the hegemonic process more closely. The transition from one dominant discourse to another is a highly complex venture, encompassing a fundamental reconstruction of existing subject positions. As an ideal type, it can be summed up as follows:Footnote 36

  1. (1) At the beginning there is a crisis, visible through a disintegration of popular identifications with institutionalised subject positions and political imaginaries. This could either be an external catastrophe such as a major war; a grave financial or economic crisis; humanitarian catastrophe or terrorist assault; or merely a necessary political decision in ‘undecidable terrain’ that might weaken dominant discourses, that is, prevailing concepts of reality, opening up cultural borders.

  2. (2) Competing political forces will attempt to hegemonise the political space, that is, to exercise leadership in that situation. Alternative discourses start to compete in their interpretation of the crisis and their attempt to resolve the ‘lack’ triggered by the crisis. Empty signifiers like ‘Asia’, ‘justice’, ‘community’, and ‘order’ function as horizons, as a ‘surface of inscription’ for a number of specific political articulations.

  3. (3) Sooner or later, one predominant interpretation will evolve – often visible in the strengthening of communal bonds – which institutes the framework that determines what action is appropriate, and what action is inappropriate, to end the predicament. This dominant interpretative frame is due to its linkages with residual institutions.Footnote 37

  4. (4) In due course, these identifications will become more and more routinised. The discourse becomes what Laclau calls an imaginary: ‘not one among other objects but an absolute limit which structures a field of intelligibility and is thus the condition of possibility for the emergence of any object’.Footnote 38 As it becomes an imaginary, the discourse will generate new kinds of political action along the lines of the dominant interpretative framework.Footnote 39 Specific cultural forms such as norms, rules, (political) institutions, conventions, ideologies, customs, and laws are all influenced by this process. This is an exercise of power in its purest form, as it categorically excludes alternative institutional frameworks.

It has to be emphasised that this is an ideal-type version of the hegemonic process. An ‘international order’ is never fully constituted and hegemonic interventions are possible at any time. Hegemony-based leadership is issue specific, culturally embedded, historically contingent, and never to be understood as a once-and-for-all decision.Footnote 40 To be sure, leadership requires some kind of hegemonic process. It has to be conceded, though, that the battle between discourses to become the leading interpretative structure also reveals the configuration of power relations in a given historical moment. It would be naïve to think that the material capabilities of regional powers do not play their part in a discourse. However, they do not pre-determine the path towards leadership. For example, Singapore – not Japan or China, as materialist IR research would probably suggest – took the lead in East Asia with regard to bi- (keep as hyphen) and multilateral trade liberalisation after the Asian Crisis. Power is uneven,Footnote 41 not stable or static, but is rearticulated continuously.Footnote 42

To make this clearer, we have to introduce Laclau's notion of credibility. The ideal type of a hegemonic process presented above emphasises that one predominant interpretation will evolve due to its linkages with residual institutions. While leadership has to be based on certain political traditions that subjects identify with, this argument will lose weight with the extent of the crisis.Footnote 43 The more far-reaching the dislocation of a discourse is, the fewer principles will be still in place after the crisis. While colonialism worked on a historical ground that had been already set up for it and drew on established interpretative frameworks of a ‘leading race’, ‘subhuman beings’, xenophobia and imperialistic nationalism, it was still possible to terminate.

In a nutshell, hegemony is indispensable for the exercise of leadership, for it circumscribes the domain of intelligibility in which leadership processes occur. Both hegemony and leadership are essentially political; both rest on power, but not necessarily on the observable form of material power alone. Leadership must hence not be misunderstood as dominance or coercion. It is to Laclau's merit to have reintroduced the term hegemony in contemporary debates concerning problems of political power and authority. Hegemony means nothing more than the discursive struggle between political actors over the assertion of their particular representations of the world as having a universal significance. Ultimately, it is only through hegemony that leadership can be established.

(c)1.4 The case of East Asia

It is argued here that any hegemonic process can be traced along the lines of the ideal-type model delineated in the previous section: (1) starting with a particular political crisis (of lesser or greater extent), (2) moving to the competition between different political forces to hegemonise the political field and (3) the acceptance of a certain interpretative framework of identification (actual hegemony), to (4) its eventual routinisation and political institutionalisation. As illustrated in Figure 1, this final act of institutionalisation causes feed-back effects on the discursive representation of the crisis, new interpretative frames start to compete, and politics continues. Theoretically, this circle never ends; if it did, politics would have reached its final purpose. Most significantly, however, it is possible to analyse different kinds of leadership processes on the basis of this framework. In the East Asian case, which can be drawn on to illustrate the argument, it was the Asian financial crisis that triggered new complex correlations between power, leadership, and hegemony. In the years following the crisis, a dialectic and fundamentally contingent quest for leadership developed, mainly involving China and Japan, but also including some members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)Footnote 44 and South Korea.

Deeper integration and community building can be identified as the dominant interpretative framework used to overcome the predicament, with the institutionalisation of ASEAN+3Footnote 45 and the East Asia Summit (EAS)Footnote 46 representing the institutional materialisation of the hegemonic process.Footnote 47 In brief, the development can be recapitulated as follows:

Crisis

The Asian crisis is widely considered as the primary source of a new Sino-Japanese struggle for leadership in the region.Footnote 48 The resulting institutionalisation of the region was successful due to its linkage with an ongoing debate over the institutional shape of the region. The seeds for a genuine regional cooperation process combining both the northeast and southeast Asian sub-regions had already been sown by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir in his proposal for an East Asian Economic Grouping (EAEG) in the early 1990s. Although the initiative was instantaneously torpedoed by non-East Asian countries, it lingered behind the scenes and was reinvigorated after the crisis.Footnote 49 This finding offers preliminary, though still provisional support for a central theoretical argument outlined above: The ideal type cycle developed in the previous section emphasised that one predominant interpretation will evolve due to its linkages with residual institutions. Put differently, if the new political project clashes with the ‘ensemble of sedimented practices constituting the normative framework of a certain society’,Footnote 50 it will likely be rejected.

A second argument put forward above refers to the normative dimension of leadership: Leadership is essential in politics in general, and in crises situations in particular. In the East Asia case, this argument has gained salience in the years after the crisis. It was through increasing competition between the old and the new economic powerhouses of East Asia that ideas of regionalism gained new momentum. While some observers argue that ‘China and Japan possess the most significant “regional leader actor” capacity in East Asia’,Footnote 51 these two countries also played a major role in the single stages of our theoretical model (interpretation of the crisis, competing interpretations, hegemony, institutionalisation).

Although East Asian and Southeast Asian countries for the first time operated as a unified actor in the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), which was established in 1996, significant collaboration first evolved during the crisis. The domino effect of that financial quandary highlighted the ‘reality of the inter-connection of East-Asian's Economies’.Footnote 52 Interdependence and external shock are widely seen as the main trigger for alternative discourses on regional cooperation and region-building. The most prominent voices in this discourse emanated from Beijing and Tokyo,Footnote 53 and in the years that followed, an intensive quest for leadership in different political fields started to develop.

All in all, the financial crisis compelled many Asian countries to re-evaluate their place in the world. ‘The crisis has stimulated a new sense of East Asian regionalism and brought the countries closer together’, says Tommy Koh, chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore.Footnote 54 Early one, Chinese president Jiang Zemin reassured neighbouring countries that his government would ‘adopt a positive attitude towards strengthening financial cooperation in Asia and [be] ready to participate in discussions on relevant mechanism for cooperation’ and promised that certain ‘practical moves on our part will promote the development of economic and technological cooperation as well as trade and investment liberalization in the Asia-Pacific region’.Footnote 55 Similarly, Japan announced it would play an active leadership role to counter the crisis.Footnote 56 The starting signal was given for a quest for leadership in the region that turned out to be the dominant feature of East Asian international relations in the years to come.

Competition

It was argued above that, firstly, competing political forces will attempt to hegemonise the political space to exercise leadership, and, secondly, that leadership is always relational. Leaders have to please the motive bases of potential followers to be successful. Sticks and carrots play their part in such an endeavour, but they, too, are part of a discourse over the right political path to follow. Such a discourse started immediately with the outbreak of financial turmoil in East Asia in the Summer of 1997. At the height of the crisis, Japan came up with an initiative to set up an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF), which was not realised, though, due to opposition from the West, especially the USA. But it was also immediately rejected by other Asian countries, most loudly by China. Contending that such an institution would be redundant given the presence of the IMF and that it would foster a split between Asia and North America, the proposal was buried for the time being. However, Japan subsequently announced bilateral assistance plans such as the New Miyazawa Plan, worth $30 billion, and special yen loans, amounting to 650 billion yen.Footnote 57 Consequently, ASEAN members seemed to uniformly appreciate assistance by the biggest economy, as can be seen from remarks by Ali Alatas, former Foreign Minister of Indonesia:

I look forward to its [Japan's] playing an important role in our common endeavours to soften the social impact of the financial and economic crisis upon our peoples, and eventually to overcome that crisis altogether.Footnote 58

It becomes obvious that leadership is inseparable from the wants and needs of followers. Leadership is about giving and taking in specific situation, and different forms of power and leadership are required in different situations. Considering Japan's economic stagnation during the 1990s, China has also been deemed more significant in generating regional economic growth. However, a widespread concern has persisted in Southeast Asia that investment flows into China may reduce those into the ASEAN states and that China will aim at expanding its leadership role in the region.Footnote 59 As Alice Ba has pointed out, similar development paths do not automatically lead to a greater receptiveness to another's message or even to the formation of a collective identity.Footnote 60 To reassure potential followers, China time and again tried to downplay its economic size, emphasising the spirit of cooperation and mutual trust that ASEAN expects in its relations with Beijing. In his keynote speech to the Boao Forum in April 2002, Premier Zhu Rongji underlined that China's growing economy posed no threat to Asia, and stressed that China was ready to work with its neighbours to build ‘a thriving new Asia’.Footnote 61

Subsequently, both China and Japan have tried to produce innovative proposals to overcome the financial predicament. In the first years after the crisis broke out, Japan quickly embraced a leadership role that included material incentives as well as vision and entrepreneurial skills.Footnote 62 By the turn of the century, Japan had contributed some US $80 billion in financial aid to overcome the crisis,Footnote 63 while China has opted to intensify trade relations with ASEAN.Footnote 64 As an indication of the increasing readiness to accommodate the region materially, in 2001 China offered ASEAN to open up its sensitive agricultural market. At the same time, China and ASEAN agreed to implement a free trade agreement by this year, which encouraged Japan to come up with a broader plan for an East Asian FTA in 2002.Footnote 65 Mounting rivalry can be seen as a source for structural change in this context.Footnote 66

There are other examples of intense rivalry that can be quoted to underline the argument made here. The Mekong River region is one such instance.Footnote 67 While Beijing hoped that the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area would be supported by infrastructural links between China and the ASEAN states and indicated in November 2000 at the informal ASEAN+3 summit in Singapore that it would fund the construction of a Lancang-Mekong development project in Myanmar and Laos, Japan proposed two big projects for the countries in the region. One was supposed to facilitate the use of high-technology wireless tags to ease trade, and the other is advancing know-how on electrical power development.Footnote 68

As a result of these numerous competing proposals, followership in East Asia also remained divided, with some countries following Japan, some others supporting China. For example, a Vietnamese government official commented that Japan's vision of an Asian-wide FTA seemed to be ‘all show and little substance’ and that its main rationale was to counter the FTA idea floated by China to ASEAN.Footnote 69 In contrast, some ASEAN members have underlined Japan's continuing impact on Southeast Asian development. As Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister George Yeo put it:

Japan is ASEAN's largest source of imports and our second largest export market. Japan is one of ASEAN's largest sources of FDI. Southeast Asia can be Japan's alternative manufacturing base to China. We have energy and other resources, which Japan needs. The benefits of an FTA between Japan and ASEAN would be of even greater benefit to South East Asia than an ASEAN–China FTA in the short and medium term.Footnote 70

Still, all these comments converge around the widespread acceptance of the idea of regional cooperation as the dominant interpretative framework after the crisis. It will be shown in the next section that this interpretation gained ground to a considerable extent in the years that followed.

Dominant interpretation

As posited by the ideal-type cycle developed above, one predominant interpretation often evolves – also due to its linkages with residual institutions – which institutes the framework that determines what action is appropriate and what action is inappropriate to end the quandary. In the East Asian case, two factors seem to be of particular importance in this regard: Firstly, a dominant view quickly evolved that existing institutions like ASEAN, APEC and the IMF would not be able to clean up the mess; secondly, and related to the widespread criticism of the IMF, countries in the region consented on the opinion that a regional solution was preferable to one that looked for help in the ‘West’. Hence, in the first phase of the institutionalisation process, political leaders in the region considered regionalism as a form of self-help mechanism in times of crises,Footnote 71 and this dominant interpretation finally paved the way for the institutionalisation of the Asian idea.

With regards to ASEAN, it looked as if the institution's self-esteem had already been low on the peak of the Asian crisis. It's expansion in the 1990s to include such economically weaker and democratically immature countries as Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had undermined consensus.Footnote 72 And the new diversity had made political goals more difficult to accomplish. Singapore, a founding member of ASEAN, thus repeatedly spoke publicly of the need to ‘leapfrog’ Southeast Asia to further economic growth and investment.Footnote 73 What is more, ASEAN, together with South Korea, had been the most seriously affected by the financial crisis. Particularly important was the effect on Indonesia, which had in the past provided much of the guidance in the group. Paralysed by the severity of the economic turmoil, ASEAN contributed little to alleviating the crisis, which is commonly seen as diminishing greatly its value.

Concerning global institutions, critics have argued that the IMF's demand for taut monetary policy and structural reforms as a condition for its loans failed to restrain the crisis and actually aggravated it.Footnote 74 Summarising the critique of the IMF during the Asian crisis for the Japanese government,Footnote 75 Tran Van Tho argues that the institution is generally unable to contribute to the strengthening of the supply side of the countries it supports, while its major task is stabilising the macro-economic environment. It can help by providing liquidity; yet, it fails when asked for support for real economic activities such as export financing or buttressing banks’ lending capability. Moreover, the financial resources of the IMF are rather limited since it is an institution with global responsibilities. He concludes that:

In a word, there is a need for a new institution that plays a role complementary to the IMF's. Such a framework cannot be established on a worldwide scale, though, because forming a consensus among a large number of countries will be difficult and require considerable time. In addition, crises are often a matter of regional concern, and it is perhaps only natural that deeply interdependent countries should help each other out.Footnote 76

Many analysts agreed that the IMF reform measures were too abrupt and too harsh.Footnote 77 Furthermore, deeper analysis of documents released by East Asian governments show widespread and open criticism. While the Japanese government points out that the ‘crises in Russia and Brazil demonstrated the need to look at the risks inherent in the global financial system itself’,Footnote 78 the South Korean government directly addresses the need of ‘reforming the international financial architecture, and enhancing self-help and support mechanisms in East Asia through the ASEAN+3 framework’.Footnote 79 Agreeing with this view, politicians such as the Japanese Finance Minister Miyazawa Kiichi and South Korean Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil had from the beginning encouraged an alternative approach to bringing the crisis to an end, advocating that the IMF is incapable of treating poorly performing Asian economies. Instead of IMF-lead reforms, especially Miyazawa promoted an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) as an alternative solution to the financial upheaval.

The idea of a regional community featured prominently in the discourse and served as a dominant interpretative framework to overcome the financial turmoil. The idea was very well reflected in a statement by Thai Deputy Prime Minister Supachai: ‘We cannot rely on the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, or the International Monetary Fund but we must rely on regional cooperation’.Footnote 80 Others openly called for the leadership of JapanFootnote 81 or China.Footnote 82 These findings suggest that the community idea had been widely accepted by the countries in the region at the turn of the century. In other words: The dominant interpretative framework that was set by the community discourse had become hegemonic. It is an act of power because it makes the world intelligible: ‘The power of discourse to materialize its effects is thus consonant with the power of discourse to circumscribe the domain of intelligibility.’Footnote 83 In a final step, the discourse produces specific practices and institutions. It acquires material objectivity by becoming institutionally fixed.

Institutionalisation

The proposals put forward by Japan, China and other countries in the region after the crisis led to the institutionalisation of the Asian idea within the framework of ASEAN+3, comprising the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, Japan and South Korea. ASEAN+3 has developed rapidly since the outbreak of the crisis, which is a hint at the validity of one of the central arguments of this article, that is, leadership requires an institutionalised context. As Chris Dent observes in his analysis of East Asian regionalism: ‘For there to be regional leadership, there must be some sort of coherent regional entity to lead.’Footnote 84 Through continuous and repetitive leadership, institutionalisation is further strengthened. Although neither China nor Japan were able to control the field of intelligibility in East Asia and among Asian governments completely, the community idea has gained considerable ground after the Asian crisis, with Sino-Japanese rivalry being its primary driving force. Institutionalised summitry can in this sense further reinforce leader-follower relationships. In the region, a process of steady institutionalisation soon developed, including ministerial rounds, senior official meetings (SOM) and proposals to establish an East Asia Vision Group. It was in Hanoi in December 1998 where the heads of state or government of the ASEAN members plus China, Japan and South Korea decided that regular meetings be held among them. The next summit meetings took place in Manila in November 1999 and in Singapore in November of the following year. Other meetings of the forum included those of the finance and foreign ministers of the 13 countries.

The adoption of the so-called Chiang Mai initiative (CMI) in May 2000 set a framework for cooperation in the areas of capital-flow monitoring, self-help and support mechanisms, and international financial reforms.Footnote 85 The 13 countries involved in the process agreed to execute a series of currency swap arrangements between their central banks, consenting to lend each other part of their hard currency reserves if any of their currencies came under speculative pressure. As a result of the CMI, in May 2001 Japan announced bilateral deals with South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia. Together with the US $1 billion announced by the ASEAN countries in November 2000, the mutual central bank support comprised more than US $700 billion in reserves. In July 2001, Japan and the Philippines reached a basic agreement to set up a US $3 billion-peso swap facility as part of the envisaged Asia-wide currency safety net.Footnote 86

The CMI was seen as a first step of monetary integration in East Asia, finally resulting in a monetary union.Footnote 87 On that basis, long-term goal of a cooperative monetary regime in East Asia has repeatedly been outlined by Japan. In an interview in January 2000, Sakakibara Eisuke, former state secretary of the Japanese finance ministry, strongly advocated that kind of collaboration.Footnote 88 In line with the Japanese position, other Asian countries also encouraged expanded cooperation in social and cultural fields. As Malaysian Minister of Industry and Foreign Trade Rafidah Aziz sees it, integration in areas like youth, academic and media exchanges should begin right away. Building on further exchange in these fields, the minister says officials of the 13 participating countries can begin work on a customs compendium for the region.Footnote 89 Accordingly, politicians from China, Japan, and South Korea reached agreement at the Singapore summit in March 2001 to begin a study to examine the feasibility of creating an East Asian economic community of the ASEAN plus three members.Footnote 90

Between 2000 and 2009, China's and Japan's quest for leadership, underlined by repetitive innovative initiatives, remained the defining feature of East Asian international relations. Over the years, Beijing became diplomatically increasingly active. For instance, on the ASEAN+3 summit in Cebu in January 2007, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made a five-point proposal to upgrade the level of regional cooperation, calling for the establishment of an Asian Bond Market, the initiation of a regional investment and credit guarantee mechanism, the improvement of the financing and investment environment in the region, strengthened cooperation in the public health sector and the enhancement of financial risk management. Moreover, Wen suggested that ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea advance security cooperation. Wen added that China will host a 10+3 symposium on corporate bond markets and a workshop on the participation of international disaster relief by the armed forces of participating countries. Finally, the premier also proposed that ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea expand social and cultural cooperation:

Poverty alleviation and women affairs are new areas for 10 plus Three cooperation. To share experience in poverty alleviation, promote regional poverty alleviation cooperation and discuss ways of enhancing women's role in promoting economic development and social progress, China will hold this year a training course for officials for poverty alleviation and another one on women affairs for 10 plus Three countries.Footnote 91

In that sense, aspirations for leadership on both sides directly led to regional institutional change. The prime example for this mechanism is the multilateralisation of the CMI that was implemented in February 2009 and served as the core of the AMF that was boldly proposed by Japan in 1997. The 13 ASEAN+3 countries agreed that they would expand the regional currency swap arrangement to up to US $120 billion. While the size of the fund stood at US $80 billion before, China and Japan engaged in a contest over which country would offer more to enhance its liquidity. In an immense effort of symbolic value, both governments decided to pay an equal amount. Both Tokyo and Beijing contributed US $38.4 billion to the pool, while South Korea supplied another US $19.2 billion.Footnote 92 This supports another theoretical claim made above: Leaders are coalition-builders; they rarely act alone. Subordinates are enlisted to fulfil certain roles in the leadership game; tasks are partly delegated.

This brief overview served to exemplify some of the most significant features of power, leadership and hegemony: First, leadership (in contrast to power) is essentially related to the idea of community-building; it is relational and dependent on willing followership; leaders do not act alone. Secondly, solving problems in international politics entails leadership; this may involve translating relative power capabilities into bargaining leverage, but this is not necessarily so. Materially weaker states sometimes act as broker to gain support for salient solutions. Thirdly, leadership involves the continuous contestation over different representations that we call politics; it requires communication and social interaction, which are sometimes difficult to analyse, but still indispensable for a proper analysis of leadership in regional contexts.

Conclusion

This study has shown that leadership by powerful states in processes of regional institutionalisation is a significant, yet still ignored topic in the field of IR. Various theoretical strands have been discussed as to the requirements of effective leadership in international affairs. Referring to Steven Lukes'Footnote 93 three-dimensional view of power, it was argued that leadership is effective and sustainable when foreign elites acknowledge the leader's vision of international order and internalise it as their own. Drawing on James MacGregor Burns'Footnote 94 work, leadership was differentiated from power. In contrast to power wielders, leaders might be able to get potential followers to see the world through their eyes in a hegemonic struggle. Moreover, leaders are effective as they induce change. Leadership, again in contrast to brute power, is inseparable from the wants and needs of followers, but these wants and needs may be changed through social interaction.

Finally, analysing Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's political theory, the process of how to engage potential followers in the debating and contesting of ideas and of meanings was further investigated under the heading of discursive hegemony.Footnote 95 On the basis of the empirical case that was introduced in the previous section, it can be concluded that the struggle over meaning is central to an understanding of leadership. Meaning has to be internalised in the inter-subjective representations of other relevant actors. In East Asia, a strategy of ‘complex engagement’Footnote 96 of Southeast Asian countries forms the main pillar in China's and Japan's leadership strategies: this kind of engagement is in constant need of attracting potential followers, of interacting in different issue areas, of ‘argumentative persuasion’Footnote 97 and its support by material incentives.

In conclusion, hegemony-based leadership means nothing more than the discursive struggle between political actors over the assertion that their particular representations of the world have a universal significance. This is what leadership boils down to at the end of the day: The leader is the initiator, creator, and director in a struggle over meanings. It is the leader who makes communication and social interaction possible in the first place. While absolute power wielders tend to be objectified and dehumanised, leadership has to be seen as one of the essential and omnipresent features of social life in general and of international politics in particular. Of course, hegemony-based leadership is issue specific, culturally embedded, historically contingent, and never to be understood as a once-and-for-all decision. Once a particular political force becomes hegemonic, however, it might be able to prevail for some time. This allows us a view into the future of East Asian regionalism: It looks as if the institutionalisation of the region had gained ground to an extent that it is irreversible for the foreseeable future.

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