ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the argument that open and inclusive regionalism is a more desirable order for the twenty-first-century Northeast Asia, and explores the possible connection between the efforts of structuring this new order and the realization of maintaining lasting peace and stability in the region. The world of interstate relationships is an atomistic universe of self regarding and caring units whose identity is primarily given and fixed. The period of the Western-power-centered system rarely saw peace in the region, and instead was replete with episodes of wars and conflicts, colonization, invasion and resistance, occupation, and divisions. National development is a political and strategic agenda that has been taken as a priority by almost all governments in Northeast Asia. During the Cold War, China conducted its foreign policy based on the principles of self-independence and non-alliance, and was suspicious, for much of the period, of conceptions such as multilateralism and international institutions.
