Much analysis of Asian regional relations and institutions is written in an historical and cultural vacuum. The impression is often given that security or economic arrangements are comparable with physical structures — creations of engineers rather than social scientists (or even architects). The writings of Amitav Acharya, now Professor of International Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, are a distinguished exception. Already the author of major books on security architecture and community identity in Southeast Asia – including his Constructing a Community in Southeast Asia, which has just come out in a new editionFootnote ¹ – Acharya has produced a careful study of the diffusion of security ideas and norms in the Asian region, particularly Southeast Asia. He concentrates in particular on the establishing in Asia of the norm of ‘cooperative security’ (as against ‘common security’) and the institution of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). It is a study – dealing especially with the last half century or so – which draws not just on the historical record of Southeast Asia but also on the theoretical insights of historians of that region. Acharya is genuine in his cross-disciplinary endeavour, and, in my view, has developed a methodology that invites a response from historians as well as practitioners in his own field of security studies.

Constitutive localisation

Acharya focuses on the history of ideas – which continues to be a relatively neglected field in the study of Southeast Asia – and draws attention in particular to the role of local, Asian (especially Southeast Asian) actors in bringing about change. These local ‘norm entrepreneurs’, he suggests, are not mere ‘passive learners’ (p. 169) but take part in a creative process of ‘constitutive localisation’ – a process in which ‘foreign ideas about authority and legitimacy’ are borrowed and then ‘fitted into indigenous traditions and practices’ (p. 15). The ‘localisation’ perspective, which gives weight to cultural analysis, is actually drawn from the writings of historians about the spread of ideas in an earlier period in Southeast Asia — in particular the import of ideas from India from about the fourth to fourteenth centuries. Acharya cites (among others) Georges Coedes, Ian Mabbett, J.D. Legge and Milton Osborne, but it is O.W. Wolters who is most strongly associated with the concept of ‘localisation’ in Southeast Asian historical studies. Localisation, as Acharya sees it, is a more useful concept than ‘adaptation’. The idea of ‘adaptation’ can ‘subsume all kinds of behaviours and outcomes.’ As formulated by Wolters, localisation does not shirk the question of ‘where, how and why foreign elements began to fit into a local culture’. From the localisation perspective, the local agent takes the initiative to secure change, and ‘local beliefs (are) always responsible for the initial form the new “wholes” took’ (p. 19). I will return to Wolters's definition which, in my view, needs some significant qualification. Acharya's analysis, I think, helps in this task.

Developing the concept of ‘constitutive localisation’ – the term ‘constitutive’ referring to the way even the identity of the norm takers tends to be embroiled in the process – is critical in the contribution which Acharya seeks to make to the study of ‘normative change in world politics’ (p. 169). By contrast, what are termed ‘realist’ analyses stress the role of power in international relationships. From the realist perspective the diffusion of the idea of cooperative security in Asia, for instance, would be seen as a result of certain Asian governments seeking ‘to ensure the continued engagement of the United States in regional security affairs’; or perhaps as a consequence of larger ASEAN countries imposing preferred norms on smaller countries (pp. 135–6). Similarly, realists attribute Asia's ‘lack of strong institutions’ to a dependence on ‘the U.S. security umbrella’ (p. 150).

In Acharya's approach, the role of ‘ideational forces’ is highlighted, and in a way that reaches beyond constructivist scholarship. Constructivism, he says, ‘is heavily concerned with establishing that norms matter’ (p. 146) and concentrates on the ‘global normative environment’ and ‘Western norm entrepreneurs’ (p. 169). In constructivist perspectives, ‘norm diffusion is the result of adaptive behaviour in which local practices are made consistent with an external idea’ (p. 19). Constructivism tends to ignore ‘local historical and institutional contexts’ (p. 5). Acharya, influenced by Southeast Asian historiography, insists that the way norms are received is not a one-way process: he stresses that ‘the initiative belongs also to local agents’ (p. 169). Taking a constitutive localisation approach, he says, helps to determine which norms matter — explaining why certain norms are potent and are likely to continue to be so (p. 29). This approach has the added advantage that, by focusing on the local in Asia, it helps to make international relations theory ‘less ethnocentric and more representative of non-Western, including Asian ideas and experiences’ (p. 167).

Cooperative security and the ARF

How does Acharya apply the constitutive localisation approach to the emergence of cooperative security and the ARF in Asia? In analysing these issues, he is concerned to explain why a multilateral security institution was not created in Asia after World War II, and why Asian regionalism ‘remains underinstitutionalised’ (p. 144, n. 1). His analytical approach identifies ‘external ideas’ – the novel norms or concepts brought into the region – and then shows how they are localised when they meet the domestic ‘cognitive prior’, by which he means the ‘existing normative framework’ (p. 21). The concept of ‘common security’ is an external idea — one emerging in Europe, and rejecting adversarial approaches to security in favour of confidence building, preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution (pp. 112–13, 174). It carries the notion of achieving security ‘with’ not ‘against’ potential adversaries, and is often associated with the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). In the post-Cold War period, Soviet, Canadian and Australian leaders urged a type of multilateral security organisation in the Asia-Pacific that would be influenced by the idea of ‘common security’. Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans advocated a ‘future Asian security architecture’ that would evolve ‘in Asia, just as in Europe … [a] framework for addressing and resolving security problems’ (p. 114).

On the basis of the constitutive localisation methodology, Acharya proceeds to examine the local handling of the idea of common security in terms of the ‘cognitive prior’ already in place. In Cold-War Asia, the ASEAN organisation had determined to avoid military cooperation – fearing that Vietnam and China would be provoked – and wanted the major powers not to interfere in the region. ‘Non-intervention’ in the matters of a sovereign state had emerged as a principle constantly invoked. Also, ASEAN had become committed to ‘organisational minimalism’ and ‘non-legalistic approaches to cooperation’ (p. 115). This ‘cognitive prior of regionalism without a sovereignty-eroding regional organisation’ (p. 145) was the basis for contest over the external idea of common security. With help from the Track 11 (non-government) regional network, ASEAN-ISIS, much reformulation took place and the concept of ‘cooperative security’ now gained salience. In discussing cooperative security, the then Malaysian defence minister, Najib Tun Razak, suggested that ‘“One man's security should lead to another's assurance” should be our motto’ (p. 119).

The ‘institutional expression’ of the localisation of the idea of common security was the ARF (p. 146) — a ‘cooperative security institution’ which includes the Northeast Asian states, the United States and Australia (among others), and promised ‘a new and enhanced role for ASEAN in the Asia-Pacific region’ (p. 118). Creating the ARF involved a real expansion in the ASEAN organisation's security role, and a move away from the ASEAN determination to keep foreign powers out of the region. But the ARF was consistent with ASEAN principles — for instance, in its support of the doctrine of non-intervention and its very limited institutionalisation. It is more of ‘a dialogue forum, rather than a multi-lateral institution’ (pp. 120–1). The ‘local agents’ – in this process of localisation – had worked on the ‘external idea’ (common security) and created a new institution influenced at least in part by the ASEAN ‘cognitive prior’ (pp. 134–5).

In the period 1997–99 another new external idea was urged, and rejected: the idea of ‘collective intervention’, which incorporated the possibility of ‘humanitarian intervention’ (p. 123). This idea gained a measure of support from regional norm entrepreneurs (in particular, Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia and Surin Pitsuwan of Thailand), but it directly contradicted the strong ASEAN principle of non-intervention. The Malaysian foreign minister, for instance, said he was wary of philosophies that might ‘compromise sovereignty’ (p. 125) and the Singapore foreign minister declared that it was because of the principle of non-interference that military conflict had not broken out between ASEAN members (p. 131). In Acharya's view, success in localisation ‘depends on the insider proponents being seen as upholders of local values and identity’ (p. 132): in fact, the supporters of collective intervention were viewed locally as pushing a Western agenda.

The constitutive localisation approach to examining the process of norm dissemination, as I understand matters, makes a serious theoretical contribution in the field of security and international relations. It can be argued as well that Acharya has addressed a genuine weakness in the localisation literature of the historians from whom he borrows. Reading Whose ideas matter? encourages my view that although the localisation concept has important explanatory value in the study of Southeast Asian (and other) histories, by employing it we tend to foreground continuities where change needs to be acknowledged and explored. Let me explain further.

Localisation in historiography

When Wolters defines ‘localisation’ as the process by which foreign ideas (specifically Indian ideas) are ‘fractured and restated and therefore drained of their original significance’,Footnote ² he leaves little room for the possibility of transformative change. Thus, Sheldon Pollock – writing of the spread of Sanskrit – has warned against interpreting localisation as little more than ‘ancient and persisting indigenous beliefs’ being brought into ‘stronger focus’. In the case of Sanskrit being brought to South and Southeast Asia, Pollock explains that it did not merely articulate a lifeworld already in place — rather, it was ‘one element’ in a ‘continuous process of becoming’; it participated ‘in the very creation of these cultures’.Footnote ³

I have been puzzling over the implications of both Wolters's and Pollock's insights in some of my own recent historical work dealing with Malay ethnicity. It has seemed to me that the early-nineteenth century propagation of the idea of ‘race’ by Europeans was a transformative episode in Island Southeast Asia: people who had defined themselves primarily as subjects of a ruler, or inhabitants of a particular geographic location, now were increasingly categorised (including by themselves) as members of a race. Loyalty began to be expressed to the race (rather than, or as well as the ruler); histories of race began to be written to replace (or supplement) the chronicles of specific royal houses. The past – as well as the present and future – was restructured around the idea of ‘race’. Race or ethnicity, of course, is now taken for granted. When people speak today, for instance, of a ‘Malay people’ or ‘traditional Malay culture’ transcending individual Archipelago sultanates it is unlikely that they are aware of the extent to which this is a recent formulation. In Pollock's terms, the impact of the idea of ‘race’ has been such that it has begun to be understood as integral to the ‘Malay’ and other cultures of the region.

Having insisted on the real transformative significance of ‘race’, where I have found Wolters's insights most valuable is in helping to discern the way the dominant European understanding of ‘race’ was ‘fractured and restated’ in the local context. In particular, the idea of blood ties – of descent – which was so important in European thinking about ‘race’ tended to be downplayed in local thinking about ‘being Malay’. It seems to me that a cultural, or civilisational, understanding of ‘Malayness’ – which had developed within the sultanate of Melaka from at least the fifteenth century – became a critical ingredient in the pan-Archipelago idea of a ‘Malay race’, the idea that emerged as increasingly influential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Melaka sultanate the term ‘Malay’ was used to describe dress, music and other aspects of culture — and when ‘Malay’ was used with reference to the subjects of Melaka, it was understood that people coming from other regions (including Java) could also be accepted, if they so desired, into the local ‘Malay’ community. The incorporation of this type of openness – this sense of ‘Malay’ as a civilisation rather than a family – has been critical to the localisation of the modern concept of ‘race’, particularly in the way that it has been developed on the Malay Peninsula.Footnote ⁴

The development of the idea of the ‘Malay race’ or ‘Malay ethnicity’, therefore, entailed far more than ‘ancient and persisting indigenous beliefs’ being brought into ‘stronger focus’. It was a rupture, a turning-point, in the history of the Archipelago. Yet, having said this, older beliefs did remain influential and contributed to a significant restatement of the concept of ‘race’. In analysing this episode in Southeast Asian history, therefore, it is necessary to combine the insights of localisation with recognition of radical change.

At times, reading Acharya, I am concerned that under the influence of localisation he too tends to obscure the degree of change that was taking place — though one important aspect of the methodology he develops does help to cope with Pollock's concerns. My anxiety arises, for instance, when Acharya suggests that localisation ‘describes a process in which external ideas are adapted to meet local practices’ (p. 19) and ‘without supplanting’ an extant institution's ‘original goals’ (p. 25); or when he observes that norm diffusion fails ‘when it competes with a strong local norm’ (p. 16), or that an ‘existing set of ideas’ actually ‘determine(s)’ a group's ‘receptivity to new norms’ (p. 21). The stress on continuity in these statements is too strong.

Innovating upon an established discourse

I would also like to see more foregrounding of critical points of transition: what J.G.A. Pocock has referred to as strategic ‘moves’ — ideological acts which ‘modify or innovate upon’ an established discourse.Footnote ⁵ Examples of such transitions would include the adoption of Westphalian principles of sovereignty ‘which had no prior equivalent in (the Third World) traditional indigenous setting’ (p. 23) and the creation of ASEAN. Acharya tends to focus on why ASEAN rather than other, competing schemes succeeded. But we should perhaps be surprised at the creation of any regional organisation at that stage, and give closer attention to how its proponents prevailed against the odds. The observation from Singapore Foreign Minister Rajaratnam (which Acharya quotes) makes the point succinctly: there was a need to develop a sense of ‘regional existence’ even if that involved ‘painful adjustments’ in national interests and policies (p. 85). The successful creation of a regional organisation, like the forging of sovereign nation states, was a decisive point of departure in the region — a clear innovation upon ‘established discourse’. The problem with the localisation approach is that in seeking to demonstrate the local ‘fit’, it can (sometimes unintentionally) conceal the degree of dislocation that the acceptance of new norms may require.

At first glance, a similar bias toward continuities characterises Acharya's discussion of the ‘cognitive prior’ in the localisation process — but this is deceptive. Describing the ‘cognitive prior’ as the ‘existing normative framework’ does carry an implication of stasis, but in fact Acharya's discussion of this concept is far more interesting. True, he portrays the ‘cognitive prior’ as ‘conditioning’ or ‘determine(ing)’ the creation of new institutions and norms (pp. 5–6, 21), but he also makes clear that it is a concept in motion, in a ‘continuous process of becoming’ (in Pollock's words). The ‘sources of cognitive priors’ may include ‘traditional or historical practices of statecraft and diplomatic interaction patterns’ (p. 22), but they can also draw upon norms that have been ‘accepted and institutionalised from outside because of prior choices’, that is to say, are the results of earlier acts of localisation (p. 23). At one stage Archarya describes ‘cognitive prior’ as ‘a more dynamic, agent-driven process of congruence building’ (p. 23): at times the movement through successive reformulations seems to me to be almost dialectical.

An example is the ‘cognitive prior’ that was so influential in the post-Cold War period, when ‘common security’ was being advocated in the region. A ‘cognitive prior’ that included a stress on non-intervention in the sovereign state and a commitment to organisational and legal minimalism, it was itself the product of a decade of experimentation following the World War II (p. 28). This period included deliberations at the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947 and the Bandung Conference of 1955 — deliberations which Acharya examines with care. The idea of non-intervention, he explains, clashed with the earlier pan-Asianism, but the latter was a relatively weak norm, and in any case non-intervention was advocated by the prestigious norm-entrepreneur Nehru and ‘resonated strongly’ with previously established norms of ‘anti-colonialism and anti-power politics’ (p. 61). The norms of organisational and legal minimalism also emerged in the post-war decade. In Acharya's words, the roots of the ASEAN-way approach to regionalism – with its stress on informality, consensus seeking and an avoidance of legalistic procedures – ‘cannot be understood in isolation from the wider Asian conferences held between 1947 and 1955’ (p. 81). The ‘cognitive prior’ for the later, post-Cold War challenges, therefore, was itself an emerging cluster of ideas — and by no means a primordial ‘normative framework’.

Taking account of the presence of transformative dynamism – of real change – in episodes of localisation would appear to be a major gain in Acharya's work, and one which historians themselves will appreciate. The phrase ‘constitutive localisation’ remains a little unclear to me, but it seems to carry the possibility of fundamental change in behaviour, along with a change in the identity of the actor. As such, I find this concept helpful in thinking about the impact on Archipelago Southeast Asia of the transmission of the idea of ‘race’. It captures both the way in which the idea of ‘race’ was reformulated, and the fundamental social reconfiguration that took place at the same time.

Four challenges

Where next, however, can Acharya's use of constitutive localisation take us in discussing Asian regionalism? In my view, it opens up at least four types of challenge. First, the insistence that localisation is ‘seldom a final act’ (p. 21), and that the ‘cognitive prior’ is more a process than a given, reminds us that the Asian region will almost certainly experience further transformative change. Acharya, in fact, lists the type of circumstances that may bring this about: they include the appearance of a crisis serious enough to ‘discredit existing norms and practices’ (p. 21); and we've noted his further suggestion that novel ideas can gain potency when an insider proponent is portrayed as an upholder of ‘local values and identity’. Discussing the introduction of new norms, Acharya refers as well to the role of ‘creative ideas’ about ‘pruning and grafting’ (p. 210). Here he seems to comes close to the type of concern Pocock expresses in his examination of strategic, ideological ‘moves’ — and doing so leads to a second challenge.

Whether speculating about future or past developments, it seems to me that a closer examination of the precise rhetoric and vocabulary of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ would be one way of deepening the study of the diffusion of ideas and norms concerning the international system. Such a study of ideological virtuosity – which may well have to focus on the subtle redefinition of a single word as well as ‘pruning and grafting’ – is likely to require the examination of local writing in local languages, as well as in English.

A third issue concerns the need to move back in time in such a study of norms. A strength of Acharya's book is that he does not treat the adherence to sovereignty as a given in the Asian region: it was well after the immediate post-war decade, he says, that non-intervention became ‘a key demand of Asian leaders’ (p. 34). He is aware too that in Europe the 1648 Westphalia Treaties by no means immediately led to the principle of non-intervention in sovereign states. What would seem to be called for here is a history of ‘sovereignty’ in Southeast Asia, and it must go back into the colonial period and earlier. It would take account, for instance, of the way the Dutch invoked a concept of sovereignty when they upheld the authority of Asian rulers ‘on whose survival the Dutch case for unimpeded commercial access (to Southeast Asia) ultimately rested’.Footnote ⁶ In some of the polities with which the Dutch were dealing there was no sense of a sovereign state, defined in territorial terms and administered by its own government: seventeenth-century Pahang, for instance, was described as having ‘only one city and that carries the same name’.Footnote ⁷ The localising of ‘sovereignty’ would appear to have taken place over centuries; and one purpose of a careful historical investigation would be to identify ways in which older ideas of authority and community – and of relations between polities – may have played a part in forging the specific type of sovereignty norms operating in Southeast Asia today.

Finally, Acharya's book raises questions for me about identity and community in the Asian region. When discussing the clash in the post-war decade between the ideas of ‘pan-Asianism’ and ‘non-intervention’, he dismisses the former as ‘weak to begin with’ (p. 61). Although ‘part of a regional cognitive prior’ at that time (p. 33), he argues that pan-Asianism was no match for ‘non-intervention’. This may well be true, but Acharya also introduces material that suggests pan-Asianism may have continued to be potent as an idea in thinking about other matters. Consider his discussion of the fate of certain Pacific or Asia-Pacific regional endeavours — endeavours that were in one sense or another in competition with pan-Asianism. The story of the Asia and Pacific Council (ASPAC) (founded in 1966) is of immediate interest. It included Australia and New Zealand, along with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, but was perceived to be ‘a front for Western powers against China’ (p. 84), a ‘Pacific community dominated by Western nations and Japan’ (p. 145). A British assessment of the time compared ASPAC unfavourably with ASEAN, established in 1967. The origins of the latter, the report explained, ‘revealed unsuspected depths of common interest in the participating countries …’ (p. 85). A Malaysian official also noted that ASEAN had ‘an identity of Asian-ness which the other grouping had not’ (p. 86).

In the 1970s there were further ‘Pacific’ proposals in the economic sphere — again strongly supported by Japan and Australia, and arousing suspicions about a pro-Western agenda. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir insisted that such nations as the United States, Australia and New Zealand (which were all to be included) ‘consider themselves more European than anything else’ (p. 106); a Philippine minister was anxious that a Pacific community not ‘submerge ASEAN's cohesion and identity’ (pp. 106–7). Much ideological work had to be undertaken – such as enhancing the norms of ‘non-intervention’ and ‘soft institutionalism’ – before a real foundation was set for ‘the Asia-Pacific regionalism that emerged in the 1990s’ (p. 111). As it turned out, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) (which was established in 1989) never met with ‘wholehearted’ acceptance from ASEAN (p. 154); and after the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997–98 – which seems to have discredited APEC – ASEAN came together with the Northeast Asian states of China, Japan and South Korea as ‘ASEAN Plus Three’ (APT). This APT set up an East Asian Vision Group which (in Acharya's words) drew attention to the ‘need for developing an East Asian, rather than Asia-Pacific, regional identity and community’ (p. 157). In this narrative, a form of Pan-Asianism appears to have retained a degree of potency — certainly in comparison with ‘Pacific’ ideals.

The development of pan-Asianism, of course, is a complex story in itself. It cannot be summed up as an indigenous, traditional value, whatever precisely that might mean. As Cemil Aydin has explained in his careful intellectual history of Japanese Pan-Asian and Ottoman Pan-Islamic visions of the world order, contradictions in the European imperial project played a part. ‘The West’ – itself partly a non-Western concept – was seen to have violated ‘its own proclaimed standards of civilisation’. Europeans moved away from the vision of a universal civilisation to one which would exclude Asians and others.Footnote ⁸ Japanese intellectuals, on their part, insisted on their own civilisation's equality with Europe; and Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 provided an illustration of that equality. During World War I proponents of pan-Asianism in Japan and India called for ‘the revival of Asian values and culture’ (p. 196), but even here they were influenced partly by ‘self-reflection and self-critiques within the West rather than by a general rejection of Western modernity’ (p. 196).

Aydin's investigation could probably be sharpened by drawing upon elements of the methodology of constitutive localisation that Acharya employs. But for me both Aydin's and Acharya's books are also reminders that we need a closer investigation of pan-Asianism in the Southeast Asian context — one that will provide a necessary background to the deliberations in the Asian Relations and other conferences following World II. Such a study would assist in the interrogation of the succession of ‘cognitive priors’ that informed thinking about security and regional relations over the next half century. It may help us as well to determine the specific role pan-Asianism could play in the future, including how flexible it may prove to be in contest with competing norms, in particular the Asia-Pacific region concept. The issue is of current importance to those who, like former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia — with his proposal for an ‘Asia-Pacific community’ — have been seeking to develop enhanced forms of Asia-Pacific regional architecture.

The general observation should be clear by now: in developing his ‘constitutive localisation’ approach to the study of the diffusion of ideas and norms, Amitav Acharya establishes a productive, methodological dialogue with Southeast Asian historians as well as with his colleagues in international relations and security studies. He has borrowed from the historiographical insights of Southeast Asian historians, but in return he enhances our capacity to analyse episodes of genuine, transformative change. He contributes to the history of ideas in Southeast Asian studies, and at the same time insists on its relevance to academic and policy analysis concerning the future organisation and security of the Asian region.