ABSTRACT
Formal multilateral regional institutions in Northeast Asia are rather recent phenomena. Moreover, until the late 1980s the few embryonic efforts at structured regional cooperation were rarely comprehensive in their memberships while remaining narrowly focused in their action agendas. Since the last years of the twentieth century, a number of bodies have been created that have more comprehensive memberships; however, most remain thinly institutionalized, narrowly specific in their agendas, and limited in their capacity to shape the policy choices of their members. Most importantly for the purposes of this volume, regional multilateral bodies have rarely been empowered to address issues in both the economic and security areas. Only recently have scholars begun to appreciate the potential for such regional institutions to exert much significant influence over the intersecting economic–security relationships in Northeast Asia (see, for example, Ravenhill 2009; Calder and Ye 2010; Pempel 2010).
