Regionalism in the Asia Pacific/East Asia: A Frustrated Regionalism?(Report‪)‬

Regionalism has emerged as an influential paradigm in conceptualizing the politics of Asia, reflecting the profound implications of the end of the Cold War on both the structure and interpretation of international politics in an open-ended and evolving region. Indeed, the salience of regionalism in Asia--as an empirical dynamic and as a conceptual device n has been part of a much broader trend, whereby the region has been foregrounded in the analysis of international politics, has emerged as the locus for international economic activity, and for organizing security and resolving conflict. (1) Regionalism in Asia has antecedents: most notably, the ASEAN process has reflected this at a sub-regional level since the 1960s. However, it was only by the turn of the 1990s that new multilateral initiatives on a broader Asian region took root, a process captured by the burgeoning literature on "new regionalism". (2) As much of this literature notes, Asia's region-building process has been driven not only by formal state-led initiatives--referred to as "regionalism"--but also by the more informal "bottom up" process of "regionalization", brought about by globalization and complex networks of trade and production. (3) Over the last two decades, the effervescence of grassroots regionalization has been fostered by, and has given rationales to, the institutions and frameworks of state-led regionalism, and these institutions are the primary focus of this study.