Europe as a model of regionalism in the Asia-Pacific
May 6th, 2009Guest Author: Tomoko Okagaki, National Institute of Defence Studies, Japan
The study of regionalism has resurged since the 1990s, invigorated by the developments in the real life of international politics; European integration and regional arrangements in other parts of the world. In recent years, studies have included security issues, and taken a more sceptical look at the applicability of the European model to the world.
Regional cooperation in Europe is extensive in scope and intensive in formal institutions and legal norms. Formal treaties or negotiations precede increased interaction in Europe – making regionalism in Europe politics-led or policy-induced. Asian regionalism, in contrast, has been driven by informal interaction and the growth of economic transactions (through the operation of multinational corporations and Chinese networks) without policy coordination or state-based negotiation.
These differences in regional strategy are a product of several factors.
One is the way the U.S. has engaged in designing post-WWII regional institutions.
The U.S. preferred multilateral organizations in Europe and committed itself to collective defense, whereas it preferred hubs-and-spokes bilateral arrangements in Asia.
These differences in US strategy stemmed from disparities in national capacity and the cultural diversity in Asia, and the traditional U.S. affinity for Europe as well as the trust it put in the ability of Europe to rise again from the devastation of war.
Geography is another factor that affects the nature of regionalism. Europe is connected by land whereas Asia is divided by oceans and seas, making multilateralism difficult to develop.
The key regional players are very different between Asia and Europe. The role that Germany has played as a tension-releaser in the benefit distribution among the member states and as an adjuster of national interests, for example, was essential in European integration. And, as a promoter of regional cooperation, Germany wedded its national interest to the regional interest. No equivalent country exists in Asia.
Lastly, methodological efforts have been hindered by a small sample size. Europe as the first and most successful case of large-scale integration and of thick layers of formal institutions that extend to political and security spheres of regional cooperation has always been regarded as a reference point in thinking about regional arrangements. But as we observe the nature of regionalism in Asia and elsewhere, European regional institutions could turn out to be a special case rather than a universal model.
The Asia-Pacific region may have the potential to deliver regional arrangements that are more grounded in the realities of international politics than the idealistic European model, for which special circumstances created a virtuous cycle of institutional development.
The clash of national interests that can be expected in the Asia-Pacific region, makes the process of developing multilateral institutions more likely to be slow.
The development of the multilateral European institutions is a product of the combination of many fortuitous factors that reflect historical and geographical circumstances: factors that are rarely likely to be shared by other regions. Asian security institutions and their functioning logic need to be analyzed in their own right, not in terms of a European model which more than often is like to confuse progress with the creation od constructive arrangements in our part of the world.
Dr Tomoko Okagaki is Senior Research Fellow, National Institute of Defence Studies, Japan. This paper was originally presented at the Australia-Japan Security Relationship & New Regional Security Architecture: Opportunities and Obstacles, which was held at the ANU in March.
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These dimensions of comparison provide some critical issues to think of regarding how regional integration should be performed in different regional and global contexts. However, in my viewpoint, there is a danger in focusing on regional integration through the mirror supplied by the European integration model. Particularly, the specific geopolitical and historical context in the late 1940s and early 1950s yields a very particular and peculiar model of regional institution-building in Western Europe that simply cannot provide a template for the analysis of other regional projects.
From the outset the EU model implies a model of institutionalization combining a search for order mainly through legal mechanisms. Policy instruments are also used to overcome the disparities between or among member states. In contradistinction, ASEAN commenced on the basis of both national and regional uncertainties. ASEAN regional cooperation, therefore, has preferred informal and non-legalistic procedures rather than rigid institutional mechanisms like those of the EU.
When looking at the interaction between member states and the organization, it clearly appears from the outset that the EU, while delegating national sovereignty in some areas to the supranational level, disposes of deeper and more powerful mechanisms of solidarity and cooperation than ASEAN. On the contrary, even if the EU, like ASEAN, attempts to promote mutual respect and consensus-building among member states, it does so in a less overt fashion than ASEAN. Moreover, ASEAN emphasizes non-interference in the internal affairs of member states as well.
However, it is obvious that, in the case of the EU, the delegating of national sovereignty to supranational authority could bring more effective policy decision-making at the regional level than retaining sovereignty at the national level, as in the case of ASEAN. The supranational approach also fastens on the process of regional cooperation to achieve certain goals of organization other than those preferred in the intergovernmental approach. Undoubtedly, when member states prefer the supranational approach, national sovereignty is inevitably transferred to the regional level as a result.
Thanawat Pimoljinda