ABSTRACT
The last decade in East Asia has been characterized by two key pivotal moments. One is a neoliberal moment that unravelled the policies, coalitions and state structures that underpinned the Asian economic miracle; the other is the post-9/11 War on Terror that led to a much more assertive and coercive role for the USA in East Asia. In each of these moments, of course, the role of the USA has been of central importance in pushing for more neoliberal economic reform and in seeking to reconfigure regional relations under the rubric of September 11. Most explanations of the role of the USA in East Asia are, however, resolutely focused on a ‘realist’ understanding of this relationship between the USA and East Asia. It is this realist ‘state-centric’ view of the USA in East Asia that can be framed either, in benevolent terms, as the country’s exercise of a balancing and a restraining influence on an otherwise potentially dangerous region, or, more in terms of dependency, as the unequal relationship between a state with a preponderant economic and military capability and more marginal and peripheral states. In contrast to this ‘outside-in’ perspective, I argue in this chapter that we need to adopt an ‘inside-out’ analysis that focuses on the way the structures and modalities of governance are exercised within the state rather than on how they are imposed from the outside. In this context, I argue that the relationship between the USA and East Asia be analysed in terms of a new space of regulatory governance that – and this is really the nub of the argument – domesticates US influence within the very structures of East Asian states.
