ABSTRACT
Observers of East Asia’s economic and political transformations over the past few decades are often puzzled by an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, considerable regionalisation-the intensification and deepening of economic, political and social ties-has taken place. In the two decades to 2012, intraregional trade between the East Asia 15 group increased tenfold to US$5.316 trillion,2 and regional partners now account for 50 percent of Asian countries’ trade and 48 percent of their foreign direct investment inflows (ADB 2014). As a result, many regional production networks-transnationally organised manufacturing systems where production is spread across different countries linked through trade and investment ties-have emerged in the East Asia textiles, electronics, consumer goods and automotive industries (Yeung 2009). But, on the other hand, East Asian regionalism-the construction of intergovernmental multilateral institutions to manage cross-border ties-remains relatively
*Shahar Hameiri is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Research Fellow in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University. <S.Hameiri@murdoch.edu.au> Jeffrey D. Wilson is a Lecturer in International Political Economy and Research Fellow in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University. <j.wilson@murdoch.edu.au>
Vol. 69, No. 2, 115-125, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2014.978742
underdeveloped and weak (Breslin and Higgott 2000; Narine 2008; Pempel 2005). Attempts to institutionalise binding forms of cooperation within the region’s principal multilateral bodies (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN], Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation [APEC] and the East Asia Summit) have been generally unsuccessful. As Ravenhill (2009) has put it: intergovernmental regionalism in Asia is, to a large extent, ‘much ado about nothing’. The special issue this article opens stems from our observation that the study
of actual forms of economic governance in East Asia has been impeded by the dominance of this ‘regionalism problématique’. In essence, the literature has tended to focus on the strength of formal regional multilateral institutions, seeking to evaluate these institutions’ respective capacities to enforce cooperation and collective action between East Asian states. When these capacities have failed to materialise, scholars have concluded either that there is something distinctive about East Asian states that makes them less willing to cede sovereignty to regional organisations than those in other regions (Acharya 2009; Katzenstein 1996; Narine 2008) or that Asian regionalism is still in its infancy and the capacity of multilateral institutions will grow as rising economic integration demands greater policy and regulatory coordination (Mattli 1999; Munakata 2006; Pomfret 2011). However, observers have generally neglected analytically prior and more
salient issues regarding the causal determinants of regional economic governance which animate the contributions to this collection. For us, the issue is not the comparative development of formal East Asian institutions, since this focus obscures the emergence of variegated modes of regional governance that do not take a formal multilateral form but, nonetheless, involve the rescaling of economic governance beyond the national level. These are uneven across East Asia and different economic sectors, reflecting fundamental shifts in the region’s political economy over recent decades (Hameiri and Jayasuriya 2011). For example, the Chiang Mai Initiative currency-swap arrangement of 2000, and its recent ‘multilateralisation’ through the development of a common regional liquidity pool, cannot be understood solely in terms of the proclivity of Asian governments to engage in regional cooperation. Rather, its establishment and subsequent expansion are closely related to changes in global financial governance-particularly financial liberalisation, the Asian (1998) and global (2008) financial crises, and the declining capacity of the International Monetary Fund to underwrite currency stability in the region (Amyx 2008; Ciorciari 2011). Indeed, rather than pooling sovereignty, the Chiang Mai Initiative works through the transformation of domestic governance structures in East Asia and their regional networking. Similarly, many economic regional governance initiatives in Asia are not top-down and state-led, but bottom-up and driven by business, including provincial state capital and societal interests. Examples include most projects in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) (Glassman 2010), the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (Schouten and Glasbergen 2011), and the private governance arrangements in regional production
116 Shahar Hameiri and Jeffrey D. Wilson
networks for electronics (Ernst 2006). These developments indicate that scholars must investigate how modes of economic governance creatively interface with the diverse forms of regionalism emerging in East Asia, rather than simply measuring the functions of regional organisations against underlying patterns of economic interdependence between countries.
