ABSTRACT
This chapter denaturalizes the idea of East Asia as a region. On the one hand, its very existence is often premised on its putative opposite. To quote the historian Victor Koschmann, “Without the West, there is no East.” Particularly in the 1990s, the region’s putatively unifying “Asian values” were usually described as resistance to the supposed “universal” values emanating from North American and Western Europe. But on the other hand, East Asia is also shaped by various soft-power projects designed to emphasize the attractiveness and uniqueness of national cultures, which are then projected as regional in nature. In making this case, the chapter builds from the “world polity” perspective, especially the global processes of isomorphism that dictate legitimate forms of participation in global politics, including through regional organization and institutionalization. It departs, however, from recent accounts of regional institutions from within the world polity literature, suggesting instead that the framework may be able to provide important clues to not only the existence of regions but also the distinctiveness of their content. It suggests that we should consider how the construction of regions may be specific and deliberate challenges to the supposed universality of rules and norms embedded in international organizations, even as these challenges are best understood as the contested and unstable outcomes of an increasingly universal demand that states offer something uniquely attractive and appealing to the outside world (see also Soysal and Wong in this volume). In other words, the political tensions involved in the definition of regions may result from the same transnational processes that militate toward their formation in the first place.
