Michael Haas has been one of the most prolific and respected progressive scholars of international relations (IR). Over the past half-century he has written or edited over fifty volumes in the IR field. Throughout his career, Haas has retained an avid interest in the Asia-Pacific region, and his latest work on regional cooperation there showcases his basic theoretical insights and empirical orientations. The book has much to offer for those convinced that cooperation and conflict avoidance in any region is best secured via the broadening and deepening of institution-building. It may be felt by some, however, to fall short by insufficiently acknowledging the magnitude of those security challenges now threatening to overwhelm institutionalism as a viable approach to realizing the Asia-Pacific region's stability.
The book presents two major arguments. The first is that the “Asian Way” and the “Pacific Way” infuse a set of shared norms and values into the Southeast Asian and Pacific sub-regions that work to mitigate conflict (pp. 21–22) in ways that have not been experienced in other regions. It posits that “cultural pluralism” works to transform common traditions and values into intensified social communication and, in turn, enhance institutional development. A second argument flows from the visible effectiveness of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in turning what were actual or potential zones of conflict into “arenas of peace” (p. 135).
Haas applies a myriad of theories—mostly drawn from liberal-institutionalist and constructivist approaches to IR—to substantiate his theses. He also nominates a wide array of “dependent variables” and “independent variables” (in the book's concluding chapter) to measure the relative success of twenty-two different politico-security organizations in the Asia and Pacific. He notes that the most successful ones—ASEAN and the PIF—have survived and prospered with task-oriented approaches to resolve economic and technical issues that are important to their members and that interpersonal consensus-building among member-states' elites has allowed both institutions to address key political issues in their sub-regions.
Absent from this discussion, perhaps, is a systematic effort to grapple with the realist critics of institutionalism and their skepticism about ASEAN in particular. Some realist works by Hans Morgenthau, Robert Jervis, and others are cited in the book's inaugural chapter as constituting an “intergovernmentalist” approach that reconciles institution-building with state-centric interests that realists believe actually shape the world. There is, however, no effort to address one of the most important issues confronting Asian security politics today—ASEAN's seeming ineffectiveness in reconciling its own members' sovereign claims in the face of China's great power challenge for control of the South China Sea. Neither is there any extensive discussion on how relevant the “Asian Way” is to overcoming other East Asian regional security dilemmas in the East China Sea and on the Korean peninsula, or growing Sino-American regional tensions. Critics may note that ASEAN is increasingly compelled to balance or hedge against the Asia-Pacific's great power a fundamental strategy of institutional survival.
There is, of course, no shortage of ASEAN critics. Two of its most prominent skeptics have insisted that ASEAN's image as a successful order-builder in Southeast Asia is nothing more than a “fashionable delusion” that emerged at “a time in which theories of multilateralism, constructivism and strategic culture proliferated . . . [but which] misread [ASEAN's] past, overestimated its capacity to manage the region's affairs and ignored or underestimated new threats and challenges to the regional order.”Footnote 1 Haas has not responded to such devastating critiques.
Haas acknowledges the schisms that have arisen between the Polynesian and Melanesian member-states in the Pacific. He appears to believe, however, that the PIF's 2000 Biketawa Declaration and 2005 Pacific Plan for Strengthening Regional Cooperation are decisive instruments for reinforcing a “shared [Pacific] culture” and for cultivating a democratic sub-regional security community (pp. 104, 160). This approach downplays such trends as Fiji's sustained flirtation with authoritarian politics; the Melanesian Spearhead Group's quest to establish its status as the most viable Pacific institution with a decidedly anti-Western bent; and Pacific island-state susceptibility to intermittent episodes of external power competition, such as the recent China-Taiwan rivalry in the sub-region. The extent to which Australia and New Zealand are part of the sub-region's political culture is unclear.
Asian and Pacific Regional Cooperation is dedicated to the memory of Karl W. Deutsch and Ernst B. Haas, two of the early postwar era's greatest advocates for European community-building and regional integration. Both of these scholars grappled with alternative postulates to their own for explaining regional order-building. While providing useful and extensive lists and chronologies of institutional development in the sub-regions under review, this work does not quite match their legacies.
