The Chinese Axis: Zoning Technologies and Variegated Sovereignty‪.‬

Concepts of regionalization and regionalism have dominated discussions of emerging global orders. With the rise of the European Union (EU), scholars have begun to look for similar multilaterally negotiated regional organizations in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the search for regional forms in East Asia that may approximate the EU seems to set up a situation for the disappointing admission that regionalism or intergovernmental collaboration in East Asia is weak and fraught with political obstacles. A leading scholar has identified ASEAN+3 (the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] plus China, Japan, and South Korea) as the major regional configuration in East Asia today, with the goal of "enmeshing" China in a "soft regime" of economic integration. (1) Such claims of a rising East Asian regional order seem dubious, more a vision shaped by politicians' rhetoric than an actually existing institutional structure. Indeed, the search for broad comparative ideal-types of regionalization in Europe, North America, and East Asia often uses Western modes of regionalization as the normative model, so that regional forms in East Asia are found to be lacking and defective. Alternately, one imagines that analysts in search of typologies may contrast the EU or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Asian regional configurations, drawing up a set of oppositions such as multilateralism versus universalism, or the protection of civil rights versus compromises on them.