Asia’s New Regionalism

Abstract

Part 3 Sizing Up the Asian Integration Movement 10 Assessing the Promise of Integration 11 Current Obstacles and Potential Threats 12 Looking to the Future List of Acronyms and Regional Definitions Bibliography Index About the Book v Contents Something significant is pulsing through Asia. Not for centuries has that region been so fluid, so open, so cosmopolitan. Never has communication been so inexpensive and widely available, nor transport so rapid and efficient. Cross-border business-old and new, legal and illegal-flourishes. Newly laid roads connect megacities with spanking new suburbs and chockablock shanties. Integrated production networks span far-flung manufacturing hubs. Sleepy ports lined with tumbledown warehouses are waking up, and airlines offer a starburst of new routes. City and local governments are setting up new offices to handle record numbers of tourists and entrepreneurs. Environmental, health, and human rights groups are forming information networks and patchy cross-border coalitions. Sensing new prey, transnational criminal gangs have stepped up their activity. Nowhere is this regional pulse more palpable than in what I call Maritime Asia, the vast sweep of coastline and water connecting central and southern India, Southeast Asia, China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. In maritime communities, integration is spontaneous and tangible. A visitor to Asia's major ports and coastal communities is likely to jostle against people from all over the region: a Malaysian official, an Indian engineer, a Chinese tourist, a Japanese banker, a Filipino bar hostess, a Korean professor, and an Indonesian businessman, perhaps. Most of them carry cellular telephones equipped with the latest devices and talk on them frequently-often in English, the region's lingua franca. The visitor's day might include a dim sum lunch, a stroll along a waterfront packed with cargo ships, a shopping trip to a mall packed with Asian products, a sushi dinner, and a Bollywood film. Westerners, no longer stared at, are lost in the crowd. This quickening to life is highly uneven. In Asia's remote rice paddies and dry plains, in the highlands and hill country, in the more distant islands of the archipelagos, in countless villages and small towns, lies a slow-moving, more 1 1 Asia's New Momentum isolated, less cosmopolitan Asia. Foreign visitors are rare. Nevertheless, in local markets one might find "Hello Kitty" dolls, American T-shirts made in China, and pirated CDs featuring a Korean pop singer. 1 The sons of the wealthiest families in Cambodia ride Honda motorcycles imported from Vietnam and wear trendy clothes copied from Japanese fashions. A customer in Sri Lanka was amused to spot a can labeled "Mongolian Seafood," because Mongolia is landlocked; the contents were processed in Malaysia. 2 Meanwhile, Asian government officials are promoting a different version of integration. Motivated primarily by reasons of state, members of the tennation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN 10) are the drive...

In Defence of Southeast Asia: A Case for Methodological Regionalism

“…ASEAN, its history and pre-history, are an exemplary case study of this process. To summarize the case that others (Acharya 2000;Frost 2008;Narine 2002;Tarling 2006), have mapped out in great detail, the early national leaders of Southeast Asia spent more than two decades in trial-and-error attempts (to some degree still in progress) forging frameworks for international relations. In the early, heady days of independence, the charismatic Indonesian president Sukarno launched an effort to create a geographically grand AfroAsian alliance, the highpoint of which was the 1955 Bandung conference (Tan and Acharya 2008).…”

Multilateralism and Regionalism from an American Perspective: Parallels and Contrasts with the Langhammer Vision

“…This is illustrated by his article referenced in Box 3. Other scholars (Frost 2008) have since picked up on Rolf's theme that market forces led the integration process in Asia, while trade pacts essentially followed arrangements already concluded between enterprising firms.…”

The Baltic Sea and South China Sea regions: incomparable models of regional integration?

“…Subnational integrative actors have been argued to play a role in the Asian integration process, in the form of subgovernmental, at times individual or smallgroup protagonists with particular economic, ethnic, and cultural interests in cross-border collaboration (Frost 2008). This kind of integrative process has difficulties to set up transnational structures on a governmental level.…”

“…This issue is therefore grouped around papers delivered at a February 2010 workshop in the Asia-Europe Workshop Series on "The Baltic Sea and South China Sea Regions: Incomparable Models of Regional Integration?," 1 which address the above issues under hopefully several interrelated lenses: cultural memory, energy, and maritime history and economic development. The Baltic Sea Region has often been overlooked as a core area of European Integration, one which shows an intensive intertwined process of transnational but, more importantly, subnational and subregional integration within the EU efforts for a common European community (Berkovsky 2005;Frost 2008). Furthermore, the integration processes of the Baltic Sea Area have been determined by the maritime experience of the adjacent nation states and regions.…”