Studying regionalism(s): the benefits and pitfalls of the comparative approach

It might not be easy to identify what point of the European experience is the most apposite for a comparison with today's Asia with, but comparing Asia now with Europe now is likely only to result in the conclusion that they are different. So the correct temporal basis of analysis is important if we are to make any sense of how the study of one process can help us understand what might occur elsewhere. For example, a comparative historical approach can suggest that insurmountable obstacles aren't always as insurmountable as they might appear if studied on their own. From the vantage point of the safe European home of today, it is perhaps easy to forget that the Europe of the early 1950s was characterised by fragmentation and potential challenges to regional stability and peace rather than integration and union. How many scholars in 1945 or even at the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 would have predicted the EU that existed on its fiftieth anniversary? Indeed, how many people in early 1989 would have foreseen a Europe of 27 including many that once formed part of the opposition ‘bloc’ or ‘camp’, and states that didn't even exist less than two decades ago?

Crucially, however, identifying what can be overcome, what might be overcome and how they have been overcome in one setting doesn't necessarily mean that they inevitably will be overcome in other (or all) settings – or overcome in the same way in every place. And here we return to how best to use the EU experience as one example of integration rather than the only experience and/or archetypal model identified in the introduction. And it is not just that regionalist theories have emerged from the European experience, but a narrow European experience at that. As Rosamond notes, ‘neofunctionalism can be read at one level as a theory provoked entirely by the integrative activity among the original six member-states’.Footnote ³

Ironically, even Europe fell short of expected standards of regionness for Haas through the failure of the European model to meet his expectations that the regional entity would supersede the nation state.Footnote ⁴ Despite arguing that this (along with the lack of regionalist projects elsewhere) meant that his own integration theory was obsolescent, his understanding that narrow functional arrangements such as the European Coal and Steel Community would necessarily ‘spillover’ into wider and deeper integration retains much purchase in the study of regional integration today.

Those that followed Haas from neo-functional, intergovernmental and neo-liberal institutionalist positions disagreed over many of the motivations and processes of integration. But there was nevertheless a shared understanding (of sorts) that growing internationalisation of economic activity and the resulting interdependence meant that there was an urgent need to find collective answers to collective problems in a world of ‘complex interdependence’.Footnote ⁵ Formal inter-state cooperative institutions are expected to develop at the regional level – but not just at the regional level – as a statist response to an increasingly complex world where the activities of non-state actors (primarily companies) operating beyond the national sphere mean that national level legislation and action alone cannot attain (contested understandings of) national objectives.

Crucially, later students of the ‘second wave’ of regionalism did not just compare new regional projects with the early European experience, but instead also compared different non-European examples with each other. Whilst the resulting studies contained many varied conclusions, an underlying theme was the key idea of non-state actors – particularly major transnational corporations – influencing the evolution of regional organisations. To varying degrees, government policies towards regionalism were seen as responses to the interests of transnational business communities.

One of the most important works in this tradition was Walter Mattli's ‘The Logic of Regional Integration’.Footnote ⁶ Mattli's research was very much informed by the European experience – not just the development of the EU, but earlier attempts to promote integrative projects in the nineteenth century (both successes and failures). But it also went beyond the European cases, considering the motors of integration in East Asia and the Americas. At the risk of oversimplification, Mattli argued that integration is most likely to occur and cohere when the supply of supranational institutions by regionalising political elites meets the demand for regional level coordination and action by primarily economic elites. And this understanding of the supply and demand of regions informs much of the analysis in the second half of this article – albeit in a way that departs considerably from Mattli's original observations.

Beyond rationalist approaches

Not surprisingly, the efficacy of both rationalism and intergovernmentalism have been challenged – not least by the broadly defined ‘new regionalism’ approaches to understanding regional integration. I have outlined the potential usefulness of these theories for studying China's position in Asian regionalism elsewhere, and do not intend to repeat the analysis in detail here.Footnote ⁷ Rather, I will simply draw out what seem to be the most important conclusions for comparativists and students of Asian regionalism.

First, there is a rejection of the inevitable functional spillover into single political regional units – indeed, if the world has a future of regions, it is likely to be one where states are members of multiple regional organisations rather than members of single exclusive bodies. Often building on Coxian approaches to World Order,Footnote ⁸ the real world of new regionalisms is characterised by multiple forms, layers and levels of integration. For example, the security region might not be the same as the region of production, investment and trade – as was the case in Europe with a disjuncture between the European member states of the NATO and the European Economic Community respectively for much of the second half of the twentieth century. In this respect, the fact that China, for example, seeks regional security cooperation with neighbouring states to the north and north-west through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) whilst simultaneously promoting economic cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan and South Korea does not seem particularly atypical.

Diversity is also a result of different levels of ‘region’. For example, much of the real integration that is taking place between economies is not between the economies of two or more nation states. Rather, it often occurs between sub-national entities across national boundaries. Thus, for example, Tijuana becomes integrated with San Diego across the Mexico-USA border to a much greater extent than the Mexican and US economies become integrated as a whole.Footnote ⁹

Add scale and function together, and a country like Malaysia is involved in cross border ASEAN growth triangles, in ASEAN itself, in the fast track for the ASEAN Free Trade Area liberalisation (as opposed to the slower track for the new members), the ASEAN regional forum, ASEAN Plus Three (APT), the China ASEAN China Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the East Asia Economic Caucus, the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Asian Development Bank, the Colombo Plan and probably others that I have forgotten here.

Regional integration as form and process: isation and ism

Perhaps more forcefully, the variety of new regionalism approaches were largely inspired by a desire to move away from the concentration on creating formal regional bodies as the defining feature of regional integration. Clearly the creation of these organisations – what was typically termed as ‘regionalism’ (as form) – was a major element in regional integration. However, for a number of scholars, the focus on what governments did to and with each other was not the only benchmark against which regional integration should be judged – and indeed no guarantee that real integration or ‘regionalisation’ (as process) would take place.Footnote ¹⁰

Taking the latter first, there were examples of the creation of formal regional bodies – sometimes inspired by the emulation of earlier regional projects – that had come into being through inter-governmental dialogue and treaty, but where little or no real integration had subsequently occurred. For example, Manoli has shown how the creation of the Parliamentary Association of Black Sea Economic Cooperation in 1993 did little to spur actual economic integration with member states looking instead to relations with extra-regional economics (particularly the EU).Footnote ¹¹

Perhaps more important for this study, the example of East Asia in particular showed that national economies (or at least parts of national economies) were becoming integrated with each other even though formal regional bodies did not exist. This is not to say that governments in the region had been passive or even irrelevant – on the contrary, integration had been facilitated by numerous government initiatives to facilitate integration into the global economy. As such, while there was no formal EU style union, there was actual regionalisation.

There was also a form of regional ‘governance’ (if not regional government) in that integration was being driven by the increasingly shared acceptance that neo-liberal capitalist globalisation was the best (indeed, the only) way of promoting economic growth. To be sure, this did not entail a complete transition to laissez-faire free market capitalism and of course many different forms of national economies persist. But the primacy of using the market as a means of promoting transnational investment and trade linkages had become the accepted orthodoxy.

The idea that the desire to lock national economies into the neo-liberal global economy via regionalisation was at the core of many new regional interpretations. However, both the logic of this interpretation and the logic of the policy were challenged by the financial crises that hit East Asia, Latin America and Russia in and after 1997. For those that saw the cause of these crises in excessive liberalisation that removed states' abilities to control their own financial affairs, the way to prevent future shocks was to restore regulation. With the international financial institutions seen as reflecting the neo-liberal preferences of the West, and most individual states seen as lacking the power and resources to do things on their own, then regional solutions became increasingly attractive. As Katzenstein noted, regionalism was attractive because it was the right fit – neither ‘too hot’ nor ‘too cold’ but ‘just right’.Footnote ¹²

Although the idea of ‘regulatory regionalism’ was largely a response to what happened in the late 1990s and particularly the Asian, Russian and Latin American crises,Footnote ¹³ Katzenstein's ‘Goldilocks’ principle actually preceded the crises. It also has much in common with those understandings of European integration as providing a bulwark that allows the European social welfare model to persist despite the liberalising and privatising edicts of neo-liberal globalisation,Footnote ¹⁴ and Helen Wallace's conceptions of Europe as a ‘filter for globalisation’.Footnote ¹⁵

At first sight it might appear that these understandings of regionalisation as a means of ensuring participation in the global capitalist economy and regulatory regionalism as a means of constraining the impact of the capitalist global economy contradict each other. But we can reconcile them by pointing to the learning process that many state elites actually went through in the 1990s – the first two thirds of the decade characterised by massive growth through regionalisation and globalisation based on liberalisation and deregulation; the last third characterised by crises, perceptions of ‘western’ bias and hegemony, and lessons learned. Just as neo-functional theorists argued that their innovations were based on observations of what was actually occurring in Europe (in particular the regionalising initiatives of people like Jean Monnet), so their successors have adapted theoretical positions in response to actual events in other parts of the world.

Moreover, for Marxists, there is no contradiction at all. Capitalism needs to be seen to be legitimate, and regionalism, just like nationalism, is about constructing a space that allows capitalism to flourish and become widely accepted as the best (or only) economic system.Footnote ¹⁶ The organisation of capitalism thus tends to be reformulated as a result of crises to ensure that the system does not cause so many problems that it becomes illegitimate and is therefore challenged. Thus, we can see a dual process of facilitating and legitimating in the second wave of regionalism in the 1990s (and will perhaps see a similar process as the repercussions of the 2008 crises in the West unravel). With unfettered capitalism not only often blamed for the crises but also in large parts of the world seen as representing the preferences of others (‘the West’ or the USA through its power in the financial institutions) the need to re-legitimate through regulation was doubly important.

Competing explanations and over-stark dichotomies

Whilst new approaches have done much to move the comparative study of regionalism forward, the attempt to construct new and innovative ways of thinking has sometimes ironically muddied the divisions between old and new and between different theoretical positions. For example, starting from a position of challenging the conceptions of actors in neo-functionalism, intergovernmentalism and neo-liberal institutionalism, new regionalism placed an ever greater emphasis on the role of non-state actors (largely fund managers and companies) in creating new regional spaces of economic activity, and driving real processes of regional economic integration.

But in light of the regional crises of the late twentieth century and the global crisis of the early twenty-first (or should that be a transatlantic crisis with global implications?) the focus changed to a renewed emphasis on policy coordination and cooperation at the regional level to regulate. So whilst the rationalist basis of analysis has changed and the predictions for the evolution into an EU-type future may have gone, in some respects we are back in a position that people who espouse variations of ‘older’ approaches would be happy to sign up to – regional regulation is seen as a statist response to shared market/(neo)liberal/economic concerns. Add to this an emphasis on how government policy is based on a balance of domestic demands from groups that have benefited (or suffered) in different ways from the spread of neo-liberalism, and we are close to a liberal (if not neo-liberal) institutionalist position.

We might also question the apparent division between an emphasis on function-rationality as explanation for region and constructivist understandings. If state elites decide that it is in the national interest to work together to solve common problems (in the national interest), then they need to decide who they are going to work with – who is in and who is out. In this sense, then rationalist/functional understandings of region – indeed, all understandings of region – are based on the construction of a conception of the parameters of that regional activity. It's just that in the neo-functionalist tradition, it's only a small group of elites who ‘construct’ the region and have a shared ‘regional identity’ rather than the broader conception of who might develop a regional identity that some constructivists have focussed on. Or perhaps put another way, in terms of establishing regional integration, shared constructed regional identity amongst finance ministers' matters more than the conceptions of the general population.

What type of region?

Demand for regional governance: changing perceptions in ASEAN and ChinaFootnote ²¹

In an era when some are suggesting (and perhaps fearing) a new regional order built on China's engagement of Southeast Asia, it is worth reminding ourselves until fairly recently, this relationship was characterised by distrust and sometimes outright hostility. China didn't even have diplomatic relations with a number of regional states until the early 1990s,Footnote ²² perceived ASEAN as a natural ally of the USA and therefore a potential challenge to Chinese interests, and had the occasional military stand-off with regional states over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Moreover, China shied away from engaging in multilateral organisations. Of course, Beijing was more than happy to join the UN in 1971 and take the China seat from the Republic of China on Taiwan. But membership of the UN did not threaten Chinese sovereignty – indeed, through the veto power on the Security Council, sovereignty was in many ways enhanced. But it was a different story when it came to those organisations that established norms and rules of global governance; organisations that China could not participate on from the same position of power it had on the UN. For example, China only joined the World Bank and IMF in 1980,Footnote ²³ and even then Chinese leaders were wary of organisations that were considered to largely represent Western (for which usually read US) interests. So in combination, it was not surprising that participating in a regional multilateral organisation in Asia was not on Chinese agendas until very recently. In searching for an explanation in this change in approach, there is a clear distinction between those who study security on one hand, and (international) political economists on the other.

A shared demand for regional governance? Identity and hegemony

Fourth, the policy responses of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF were largely perceived within the region as representing Western (for which again read largely US) preferences and interests. Governmental direction, control and ownership had been important features of economic growth in Southeast Asia. This was not the state ownership, planning and distribution of communist party states that replaced the market, but rather strong state intervention to regulate and direct the market in pursuit of government defined developmental objectives. When added to the developmental successes of other ‘capitalist developmental states’ like South Korea and Taiwan, this strong state and interventionist model of development seemed to provide a powerful alternative to the neo-liberal strategy of privatisation and the withdrawal of the state from as much economic activity as possible.

When the miracle turned to crises in 1997, it was not surprising that much attention focussed on the very same issue of government intervention. To be sure, some focussed on whether there had been too much liberalisation in the region – whether financial liberalisation had gone too far too quickly allowing ‘hot capital’ to be withdrawn from crises states with incredible ease (and at incredible speed). But for others the focus was on governments that distorted free economic flows through such practices as managing exchange rates, governments that interfered in the economy to benefit government officials their families and their economic contacts, and on banks that lent money to those with the right personal connections. In short, the basic problem was depicted as ‘crony capitalism’ – the evolution of opaque decision making processes where a group of insiders from government and business ran the country and the economy to primarily benefit themselves.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking in terms of a single Western response to the crises – the idea that ‘the West’ responding by imposing Western neo-liberal prescriptions as the way out of the problem. The reality is that the response was much more diverse. For example, there was considerable concern from Japanese and some European authorities that imposing far reaching liberalisation on Indonesia might result in political collapse and possibly even civil conflict. Furthermore, it is not even possible to talk of a single IMF response to the crises as policy changed once the impact of original reforms became clear. And ironically the IMF was accused in some quarters of not being neo-liberal enough by using public funds to support rotten and bankrupt Asian financial institutions, and by nor forcing through fully liberalising reforms of exchange rate and banking structures. But despite the reality of diversity and a degree of pragmatism (and the fact that only Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea asked them for help) the IMF came to become something of a symbol of neo-liberal reform – financial bailouts would only be forthcoming in return for privatisation, deregulation, budgetary cutbacks and ever greater transparency in all financial affairs.

Although many would point to the domestic cause of the crises, a focus on the external rather than the internal was common across the region. The response of the IMF to the crises was in part seen as the ‘West’ finally getting its own back on recalcitrant East Asian developmental states through the promotion of ‘proper’ Western forms of capitalism.Footnote ³⁵ Perhaps more important, it was seen as a symbol of how the US defending its interests and projected its power via the major IFIs.

In short, through its own bilateral actions and through its proxy Bretton Woods agencies, the US hegemon was able to impose its preferences across the world. And these preferences were perceived as damaging the region – damaging the economy through inappropriate IMF conditionalities, but also for Godement challenging Asian identity – forcing the abandonment of a distinctly different and Asian model of development.Footnote ³⁶ As such, rather than subject themselves to the US dominated global organisations, many in the region began to think that regional solutions and regional level organisations were increasingly attractive alternatives. This desire to resist US hegemony in parts of Southeast Asia and in some sectors of South Korea chimed with long standing Chinese concerns over the nature of the unipolar world order. This shared position has been an important component in the move towards greater regional cooperation – but so too has Japan's stance on US hegemony and the potential of a rising China.

The supply of region: towards ASEAN plus three

So the crises generated a demand from state elites for regional institutions – and regional institutions that went beyond existing ASEAN arrangements. This was manifested in the relatively early days of the crises in Japanese proposals to construct an independent Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) largely bankrolled by Japanese money inspired by a sense of Asian ‘solidarity’.Footnote ³⁷ But although the AMF proposals gave way to the Manila Framework that actually strengthened the IMFs position (in the short run at least) the demand to go beyond the ASEAN framework to build new mechanisms of regional governance was not simply abandoned.

In the wake of the collapse of the AMF idea, leaders of ASEAN states met with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea in an ‘informal’ forum in Malaysia in December 1997. This first meeting of what became the APT marked an important watershed in East Asia's regional governance.Footnote ³⁸ In the subsequent finance ministers' meeting in 2000, the idea of a regional bulwark against unregulated capital flows re-emerged in the form of the ‘Chiang Mai Initiative’. Building on existing ASEAN arrangements, this set in motion the creation of a network of currency swap arrangements whereby regional states agreed to support each other in any future crises by using their financial resources to help their neighbours. Given that Japan and China were the two largest holders of foreign currency reserves in the region (and indeed, not just the region) the logic of going beyond ASEAN and including the ‘plus three’ members is not difficult to grasp.

Integration through competition? ASEAN plus one(s)

APT remains an important mechanism for bringing regional elites together. Most of the focus is on the high level leaders' summits, and the finance ministers' meetings. But alongside these high profile summits, there is also extensive collaboration on a range of issues such as transnational crime, social welfare and development, and after the SARS epidemic, infectious diseases. But in some respects it has been eclipsed in terms of meeting demands for regional institutions by individual ASEAN+1 processes with China, Japan and South Korea.

The promotion of integration through a multiplicity of bilateral processes is an important feature of regional integration in East Asia. For example, although the Chiang Mai Initiative institutionalised meetings of APT finance ministers and established a framework for agreeing currency swaps, the swaps themselves are negotiated bilaterally. Country A negotiates with country B, country B with country C, and country C with country A. APT creates a region-wide umbrella for action; the result is that the countries of the region are all linked together, but the processes are bilateral. As with financial regionalism, trade regionalism is similarly driven by bilateral Free Trade negotiations between ASEAN and each of the Three individually, and bilaterally amongst the Three. Once complete, these agreements will provide what Dent has called ‘lattice regionalism’ – a network of bilateral ties that crisscross and combine to integrate economic activity across the region.Footnote ⁴¹

The preference for bilateral processes is in many ways simply a reflection of the difficulties of coming to agreement in bilateral fora. The failure to reach agreement at the WTO might be an extreme example of the pitfalls of seeking multilateral consensus, but nevertheless hints at how negotiations become more complex the greater the number of actors (and interests) involved. We might also suggest that there is an element of competition involved as neither China nor Japan would be wholly happy to see the other forge ahead with regional arrangements while doing nothing themselves.

Of the various free trade negotiations and agreements, the CAFTA has garnered the most attention – largely because it reinforces the fears of those who think that China will inevitably come to assert itself over the region and establish a hegemonic position. At first sight, CAFTA appears to be a classic example of Mattli's supply and demand type region.Footnote ⁴² The creation of a free trade area is promoted as a means of generating growth in both ASEAN and China by allowing greater market access and reducing transaction costs to stimulate investment and trade. The resulting economic growth might benefit market actors, but should also if the theory goes to plan help to legitimate the political elites involved by ensuring sustainable long term economic growth.

China and ASEAN: beyond (current) economic rationality

There is concern in some parts of Southeast Asia over the logic of integrating with and engaging China too closely – for example, that the CAFTA will actually lead to enhanced competition from China.Footnote ⁴³ Creating a Free Trade area will give Chinese consumers easier access to Southeast Asian markets and allow cheaper Chinese imports to undermine local producers. Furthermore, for those who are trying to export to the same markets that China exports to, China is a problem not the solution. As such, from the ASEAN side, CAFTA initiatives are actually contra the demands of some business interests (and prejudices).

So why have ASEAN leaders nevertheless sought to establish the CAFTA and more generally deepen relations with China? The answer is partly that they have privileged the views of those who want to export to China over those who fear Chinese competition. The answer is also partly because they are thinking about the future – and a longer term future that sees China's continued rise as an inevitable fact of economic life in Asia. If China is going to become increasingly economically dominant in the region, it makes sense to do whatever is possible to ensure that regional economies get as much as they can out of this rise. Hitching yourself to the regional engine of growth is thus considered to be the sensible thing to do – even if some in the region might lose out in the short run.

So the negotiations over CAFTA, and wider policy towards China is not just driven by considerations of economic rationality today. Rather, they are also built on conceptions of China's economic future, which are in turn built around (and feed) assumptions of China's future regional power (and as we shall see below, China actively promotes this vision of its future). Just as financial markets discount future economic shocks – for example, oil price rises – by dealing with them before they occur, so ASEAN leaders have discounted China's future economic rise.

Nor is it just a matter of throwing in the towel and doing whatever is possible to ‘bandwagon’ the emerging regional power. Though China's rise might be inevitable, the exact nature of the China that rises is not set in stone. Engaging China through closer regional arrangements not only might bring economic gains, but might also allow the region to influence the way in which China evolves. Better to enmesh China in a regional order and try to get it to accept some of the norms and practices of the region, than let it develop independently without any regional influence.Footnote ⁴⁴

The over-supply of regions in Asia: ASEAN+3 and the East Asia summit

China's engagement of Southeast Asia has been referred to as a ‘charm offensive’ designed to ameliorate concerns about its growth, or to build a Sinocentric anti-US bloc depending on your viewpoint.Footnote ⁴⁵ The prior position has been articulated in the ‘Peaceful Rise of China’ hypothesis, first explained by Zheng Bijian at the Bo'ao Forum for Asia in 2003. Rather than being a threat, China's rise is the guarantee of regional economic stability and development – a rise that will benefit the world, but will benefit the rest of Asia most of all. But, while the ‘Peaceful Rise’ was promoted as an antidote to the ‘China Threat’ approach, for many it focussed attention on (rise) rather than (peaceful) reinforcing concerns about the implications of China's development. Ironically, the Peaceful Rise might have accentuated those very concerns about China's rise that it was meant to dispel in the first place.

As we have already seen, the idea of inevitable rise has already informed policy in the region and the evolution of China-ASEAN relations. One strategy is to ensure that regional economies are linked into this inevitable rise through economic integration. Another is to socialise Chine through the same economic integration and other forms of regional partnerships – to bring China into international society and to get it to accept existing norms. But concerns about China's rise and its implications for emerging regional orders bring us to the idea of an oversupply of potential regional futures in Asia.

The formalisation of APT collaboration and the movement towards a region-wide network of trade agreements (albeit as a consequence of multiple bilateralisms rather than a single multilateral process) led to a growing understanding that East Asia had finally defined itself. Just as long as nobody asked about the thorny question of Taiwan's status, here we had a group of states that were increasingly coming together on a regular basis in formal meetings with each other on a range of issues. Moreover, patterns of investment and trade had established an informal ‘region of production’ that more or less corresponded with the APT members – though admittedly with differential levels of activity in some of the later developing ASEAN states. The potential of a future evolution or spillover into a more formal regional organisation of some form or another was far from impossible, and indeed, policy makers began to talk about the possibility of creating an East Asian Community.

And yet when the first East Asia Summit (EAS) took place in 2005, it did not map onto the APT vision of region that the Chinese government proposed. Nor did it take place in Beijing as Chinese leaders wanted, but instead in Kuala Lumpur. Instead, the EAS represented a broader vision of region that included India, Australia and New Zealand. Not a return to the region as Asia-Pacific articulated by APEC that included those American states with a Pacific seaboard, but neither a signal of a more narrow ‘East Asian’ conception of region represented by APT. Informal economic activity and formal collaboration had appeared to create a shared cognition within the region of which countries were part of the region, and which were not. But the EAS (or ‘ASEAN plus six’) threw this ‘consensus’ out of the window and reignited debates over what the region actually was. To be sure, the EAS did not bring the USA back into understandings of what the region is (or should be) but it nevertheless resumed the debate over what or where is Asia. Deciding how to move forward is hard enough at the best of times – just ask those involved in the evolution of the EU – but it is more or less impossible if you can't agree on who should be moving in the first place.

So the promotion of the wider vision of region in the EAS seems to represent an attempt to create an over-supply of region. And just as Chinese policy towards regional integration is partly designed to neutralise the power ambitions of others, so the EAS represents an attempt to neutralise Chinese power. This new vision of Asia is essentially constructed to prevent the emergence of a Sinocentric APT regional organisation, or even Chinese domination of an ASEAN+1 region. This idea is aptly caught by the statement of Jetro Chairman, Osamu Watanabe, to an audience in Washington:

Like APEC before it, the EAS could be an ‘anti-region’ supplied in order to prevent the emergence of a regional community in Asian East Asia – Asia without Caucasians and East Asia without the Indian sub-continent. As the supply of this region is not in equilibrium with the demand for region – and not just in China – it is unlikely to evolve into a form of region that ‘works’ and evolves into a functioning regional community of any sort. It might succeed in preventing the consolidation of other regional forms for which there is a demand, but under this ‘supply and demand’ understanding, then the emergence of a new regional community from the seeds of the EAS seems less than likely.