Institutionalization of security cooperation in East Asia

This chapter examines the institutionalization of region-wide security cooperation in East Asia, with particular focus on its evolutions, features, and factors. ¹ By “East Asia,” I refer to the region encompassing Southeast and Northeast Asia. By “institutionalization,” I refer to a process in which a group of sovereign states seek to regularize and harmonize their cooperation in their pursuit of shared goals, through the adoption of certain formal mechanisms or informal practices, which, once in place, shape the states’ expectations and actions. ² To regularize means to fix or increase the frequency of the cooperative endeavors among the states, whereas to harmonize means to improve the qualitative aspects of the cooperative endeavors. Harmonizing cooperation is an effort where egoistic sovereign states with divergent interests come into agreement about what constitutes their shared goals and how best to pursue them collectively. The wider the scope of the shared goals and the stronger the collective action among the member states, the higher the degree of harmonization; the higher the degree of harmonization, the higher the degree of institutionalization. Different institutional arrangements – across sectors and across time – often exhibit different degrees of harmonization (and by extension, different degrees of institutionalization), for factors at various levels.