ABSTRACT
The War on Terrorism has highlighted the threat to Southeast Asia posed by Islamic extremists bent on waging 'Holy War' against the West and Western ways, and creating fundamentalist Islamic states. But neither these militants nor their pan-Islamic ideology have much of a future in East Asia. Demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental pressures will shape East Asia's economic future. Given East Asia's accelerating economic integration, one might conclude that it is only a matter of time before a self-conscious 'East Asian Community' emerges and acquires formal institutions. The post-1990 campaign to establish an East Asian Community based on Asian Values is thus the latest in a series of pan-Asianist movements that stretches back for more than a century. Jihadism is a West Asian phenomenon that grew out of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan in the 1980s waged by Afghan, Pakistani, and Arab 'mujahedeen', or holy warriors of who bin Laden was one.
