ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the political and intellectual debates that have been involved in the contemporary construction of regional identity, especially through the prism of culture. In Pacific Asia, these have very often been expressed in the form of a 'new Asianism' which includes, but is not limited to, the familiar 'Asian values' debate. Both globalization and regionalization are processes that have been around for decades, if not longer. The end of the Cold War, superpower rivalry and bipolarity in international politics, however, has seen a strengthening of these processes, especially in Pacific Asia. The formation of regional identity is multi-faceted. It usually requires at least some superficial commonalities across a range of social, political and economic dimensions. A key feature of the integrative processes is the effective ceding of certain aspects of state sovereignty to the larger supra-national organization. This is what distinguishes regional integration in Europe from any other regional integration movement in the world.
