ABSTRACT
Virtually unnoticed by the rest of the world, East Asian countries are getting together to make their own economic arrangements, As a result, for the first time in history, the world is becoming a three bloc configuration,
(Bergsten, 2000)
Little more than a decade ago, commentators commonly characterized the Asia-Pacific region as 'underinstitutionalized', Writing in this vein in 1992, Fishlowand Haggard (1992, p, 30) suggested 'the puzzle with reference to the Pacific is not to explain the progress of regional initiatives, but their relative
weakness'. Developments in the last decade of the 20th century substantially undermined such assertions regarding the lack of institutionalized regional collaboration in the Asia-Pacific. In this period. the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping adopted an ambitious agenda for its member states to remove their trade barriers by the year 2010 (for industrialized economies) and 2020 (for less developed economies), ASEAN committed itself to the implementation of a free trade agreement and a regional security dialogue was initiated through the ASEAN Regional Forum. And by inviting the governments of China, Japan and Korea to a special meeting after their own summit, ASEAN members brought into being the first truly East Asian grouping - the ASEAN Plus Three forum. In the years since the financial crises of 1997-1998, proposals for regional collaboration in East Asia proliferated at multiple levels: for bilateral free trade arrangements, for sub-regional trade liberalization and, most ambitiously, for various forms of cooperation in the monetary field. I
This article examines the factors that underlie this proliferation of proposals and assesses whether we are indeed moving to a 'three bloc world'. It begins by reviewing the contribution that various theoretical approaches to the study of regionalism make to an understanding of the new intergovernmental collaboration in East Asia. 2 It then evaluates the various proposals for new regional collaboration in the fields of trade and finance. Before doing so, however, the fundamental change that occurred at the end of the 20th century in how governments in East Asia conceived of the 'region' warrants attention. It is a cliche that the definition of any region is a 'contested' concept, and another that 'regions' are social constructions. Cliches these assertions may be, nonetheless, they have had and continue to have relevance for the development of regionalism in the Asia-Pacific. A decade ago, it seemed that goveruments had accepted that the relevant 'region' on which they would concentrate their efforts at collaboration was transoceanic in scope: the Asia-Pacific. APEC at that time was the only game in town. East Asian governments, prodded by pressure from the US, had rejected Prime Minister Mahathir's proposal for an East Asian Economic Group and had downgraded the concept to a 'caucus' that would meet within APEC (Higgott and Stubbs, 1995). One of the consequences of the economic crisis, explored in more detail below, is that APEC has been marginalized. It is not currently where the action is in relation to regionalism: East Asian governments are concentrating their efforts either on bilateral arrangements or on collaboration at the East Asian (ASEAN Plus
Four decades of theorizing on regionalism by scholars of international relations has produced a rich literature. It is also one that is often characterized by hypotheses that are mutually contradictory and/or which have not stood up well to empirical testing.3 I begin by considering the relevance for contemporary developments in East Asia of three principal groups of approaches to regionalism: an overall power structure approach; liberal intergovernmentalism; and constructivism. 1 conclude this section of the paper by considering a number of other factors that have been important elements in the construction of regionalism elsewhere.
