ABSTRACT
Global and regional governance in the contemporary period are both attuned to a policy agenda requiring a certain convergence in behaviour among states around the goals of a liberal world economic order. As is pointed out in the introductory chapter, this implies a certain universalist orientation. Gilson points out that regionalisation and regionalism, taken together, involve overlapping processes and pressures on regional entities which serve to shape ideas of self and others as ‘regions’ and which are thrown into sharper relief in region-to-region interaction. In Southeast Asia, the ‘ASEAN Way’, understood as a specific set of diplomatic and security norms, has been strongly oriented to cultural regionalism. Although the cultural component has lost some of its edge, especially in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the later 1990s, implicit culturalist assumptions still underpin important ideas about identity and governance in the region.
