ABSTRACT
An exploration of the role of institutions in the Asia-Pacific necessitates some preliminary discussion that other volumes in this series may not. Some readers might reasonably want to know whether regionallybased institutions of the sort that will be discussed in the following pages are actually “global” institutions at all. This objection need not detain us for too long: the boundaries of the “regional” and the “global” are not as precise as they sound, and regional institutions play a key part in the operation and constitution of the overall international system. Few would dispute that the European Union, for example, is a powerful and influential actor on the world stage, even if there are continuing debates about its ability to represent effectively the region as a whole.1
