Seminars Series: Abstract

1.30pm
July 30 2009
APCD Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor, Hedley Bull Centre, Bldg # 130, Garran Road, ANU

The Economic-Security Nexus and East Asian Regionalism
Professor T.J. Tempel, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

East Asia is becoming more regionalized. But it is doing so in fits and starts: two steps forward and one step back. At present, few Asian governments are bonded through an overarching regional vision; many are highly distrustful of one another; and the region evinces little of the sustained political leadership and conviction necessary to create the robust institutions that might deepen and regularize state-to-state cooperation across a range of complex issues. Yet even with its many halts and missteps, Asia has, beyond question, become a far more institutionally cohesive neighborhood than it was one or two decades ago.

Commercial integration has been a powerful force in eroding some of Asia’s walls of national insulation as cross-border production networks have forged a series of regional bridges leavening previously tight national economic boundaries and weaving a latticework of economic connections across large swaths of the region.

Economic globalization has undoubtedly facilitated integration of large parts of the region. Nevertheless particularly within East Asia national governments have remained the ultimate repositories of power and the primary building blocs in international affairs. Territoriality and national governmental priorities continue to trump the forces of globalized economics. Regional governance continues to lag behind burgeoning corporate linkages. Nevertheless, East Asia’s national governments, as they seek to mediate the extremes of economic globalization and to search for solutions to the growing number of intra-regional problems that defy solution by any single government, have come increasingly to define their self-interest as lying in greater cross-border cooperation through formal regional institutions. As a consequence, across the region, regional institutions have become increasingly utilized tools in the kits of still-sovereign governments.

Strikingly, even as regional ties have become more institutionalized, a marked imbalance continues between the steadily deepening connections in economics and finance and the much less robust bodies shaping events in the traditional security realm. To many who focus on security tensions. East Asian conditions suggest a region that, in the words of Aaron Friedberg (1993) is “ripe for rivalry.” In contrast however economic linkages suggest a region “ripe for cooperation.”

In this lecture, Professor Pempel will explore the nexus among rising regionalism, economic cooperation and security tensions. Key concerns will be the extent to which cooperation (or tensions) in one area spill over to others making regional cooperation either easier or more problematic.