EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 11

Author

T. J. Pempel (Ph.D., Columbia) joined Berkeley"s Political Science Department in July 2001 and served as director of the Institute of East Asian Studies from 2002 until 2006. There he held the Il Han New Chair in Asian Studies. Just prior to coming to Berkeley, he was at the University of Washington at Seattle where he was the Boeing Professor of International Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies and an adjunct professor in Political Science. From 1972 to 1991, he was on the faculty at Cornell University; he was also Director of Cornell"s East Asia Program. He has also been a faculty member at the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin. Professor Pempel"s research and teaching focus on comparative politics, political economy, contemporary Japan, and Asian regionalism. His recent books include Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region (Cornell University Press), Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific (Stanford University Press), The Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis, Regime Shift: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy, and Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes (all from Cornell University Press). Earlier books include Policymaking in Contemporary Japan (Cornell University Press), Trading Technology: Europe and Japan in the Middle East (Praeger), and Policy and Politics in Japan: Creative Conservatism (Temple University Press). In addition, he has published over one hundred scholarly articles and chapters in books. Professor Pempel is Chair of the Working Group on Northeast Asian Security of CSCAP, is on editorial boards of several professional journals, and serves on various committees of the American Political Science Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Social Science Research Council. He is currently doing research on various problems associated with U.S. foreign policy and Asian regionalism.

 This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia," supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

East Asia is becoming more regionalized. But it is doing so in fits and starts: two steps forward and one step back. Indeed, skeptics might suggest that even such a tentative description imputes unjustified clarity and speed to the process of regional cohesion. At present Asian governments share no overarching regional vision, nor have they demonstrated the political leadership and will needed to create robust institutions aimed at deepening and regularizing state-to-state interactions across the region. Yet even with its many missteps, Asia has, beyond question, become a far more regionalized neighborhood than it was one or two decades ago.

During the Cold War ideological divisions, bilateral alliances, and the legacies of colonialism kept the attention of most governments focused on nation-building and domestic matters. The result was a series of formidable barriers against widespread regional cooperation. True, Southeast Asian countries had forged ASEAN as early as 1967 but their counterpart countries in Northeast Asia were neither invited to join nor predisposed to forge any comparable body of their own. Additionally, cross-border production networks had begun to leaven previously tight national economic boundaries resulting in deeper regional economic integration (Katzenstein and Shiraishi, 1997; Pempel 1997; inter alia). But as John Ravenhill (2008: 43-44) has correctly pointed out, the very climate that allowed individual multinational corporations to operate across national borders throughout much of East Asia served to reduce, rather than accelerate,business pressures on governments to create new regional institutions. In short, East Asia saw a bottom-up, corporate-driven regionalization, but very little top-down, governmentsponsored regional institutionalization (Pempel, 2005a)

Global politics and national politics both continue to spur developments across East Asia and national governments, rather than regional institutions, continue to be the ultimate repositories of power and the primary building blocs in international affairs (Katzenstein, 2005: 105). Nevertheless, regionalism and regional institutions are becoming ever more frequently utilized tools in the arsenal of East Asian governments as they seek to mediate the extremes of globalization and to search for solutions to intraregional problems that defy solution by any one government.

At the same time, even as regional ties become stronger and more institutionalized, there remains an uneasy relationship between East Asian ties in economics where they have been deepening and ties in the security realm where they are far less advanced. As I have argued elsewhere (Pempel, 2005a), the East Asian security condition suggests to most realists and neo-realists a region that, in the words of Aaron Friedberg (1993) is “ripe for rivalry” despite the fact that economic linkages suggest a region “ripe for cooperation.”

This paper assesses this deepening regionalism across East Asia, examining the mixed picture of regional ties in these two different functional areas—economics and security. It also analyzes the changing character of regional ties in both fields. It makes the argument that deeper regional links result from a combination of exogenous and endogenous forces. Forces from both directions provide opportunities as well as threats. But it has been largely extra-regional threats that have spurred the most recent moves particularly those toward economic regionalism, whereas regionalism in security matters has been in response largely to intra-regional threats. The paper concludes however by examining briefly how some security issues are being treated regionally, but with regional economic integration as a key “carrot” to change unwanted security behavior by the DPRK. It closes with a brief look at the East Asia Summit which potentially offers a regional forum that would fuse economic and security matters...(Continued)