ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to compare drivers and barriers in regional integration in traditional security fields in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, thereby paying particular attention to the role of big powers in the integration process (or the lack thereof ). Regional integration in Asia appears to be centred on economic integration, with the emergence of multiple free trade areas negotiations. However the increasing tensions over competing territorial claims on the Korean peninsula shed increasing light on the (non-existing) security architecture in the region. In recent months, the situation in Asia-Pacific has been likened to Europe in the early twentieth century. Former Australian prime minister and foreign minister Kevin Rudd compared the complex strategic environment in East Asia to the Balkans 100 years ago, which were ‘riven by overlapping alliances, loyalties and hatreds’ (Rudd 2013), increased militarism and nationalism, leading eventually to a major war that could be triggered by a single event, as was the case with the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. In addition, Yoon Young-kwan, a former South Korean foreign minister, draws parallels to European history by pointing to the impact of great powers’ relative decline vis-à-vis an emerging new actor, comparing Great Britain’s relative power decline in the late nineteenth century and Germany’s rise to today’s US and Japanese relative power decline vis-à-vis China (Tharoor 2013). In recent debates Europe pre-World War I has been alluded to with increasing frequency by politicians such as Japan’s Prime Minister Abe and Filipino President Aquino as a cautionary tale of power competition and miscalculations that can lead to war by comparing the ongoing frictions between Japan and China to those between Britain and Germany a hundred years ago, referring to the assessment that the intense economic
and trade interactions in 1914 between both sides did not stop both countries going to war with each other (Takenaka 2014), while also comparing the frictions between China and the Philippines to Germany and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s preceding the Second World War (Phillips 2014). Yet, there is also increasing interest in how the Europeans have managed to keep peace in Europe despite the bipolar superpower confrontation during the Cold War, a re-emerging great power, Germany, after 1989 and continuing territorial disputes such as the Spanish-British dispute over Gibraltar. In the academic literature, studies on comparing the European integration process with regional integration in Asia, and particularly in East Asia, have been blossoming, with scholars increasingly focusing on the diffusion of European integration outcomes to other processes of regionalism such as the diffusion of EU norms to organisations like ASEAN or the Andean Court of Justice (Chen 2003; Clark 2003; Berkofsky 2005; Eichengreen 2007; Jetschke 2010; Saldías 2010; Jetschke and Murray 2012; Stumbaum 2012: Murray and Moxon-Browne 2013). While many speeches and articles of Asian decision makers and scholars alike have emphasised the differences between Europe and Asia, and hence the non-applicability of the European ‘model’, with the tension in the region heating up in on-going escalation of the disputes in the South China Sea, opinion leaders like the former ASEAN general secretary Surin Pitsuwan have called European integration a ‘source of inspiration for the East Asian integration process’ (Stumbaum et al. 2012). This chapter focuses on regional integration in traditional security fields, and compares drivers and barriers to regional integration in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. It thereby pays particular attention to the role of great powers in the regionalisation processes in the security field as well as their perception and lesson-drawing from the European experiences. It aims to identify drivers and barriers for integration to set out the framework within which further analysis can be undertaken, to find out if a possible diffusion or intentional adoption of European integration has or has not taken place. It will conclude with an assessment of ongoing developments and the most likely areas of future cooperation in the realm of nontraditional security fields such as humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and military medicine.
