Asia’s New Institutional Architecture: Evolving Structures for Managing Trade, Financial, and Security Relations

Abstract

During the Cold War, the Asian region consisted of three distinct subregions—Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia. Aside from the geographical constraints of the region itself, this subdivision of Asia was a product of culture, economics, history, and superpower rivalry. From one perspective, Asia remains too heterogeneous to permit the invocation of a distinct Asian identity. Southeast Asia is divided deeply along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. In Northeast Asia, the effects of Japanese colonialism and imperialism have left sharply diverging historical memories and interpretations. And conventional analysis has separated South Asia from its “East Asian” counterpart. Such divisions and heterogeneity have inhibited the emergence of a common Asian identity let alone broad-based, effective Asian institutions.²

We would like to thank Jin-Young Kim and Peter Petri for their valuable comments. We are deeply indebted to Jonathan Chow for his editorial assistance.

International regimes have been defined broadly as “sets of implicit and explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge” (Krasner 1983). To refine this definition, we can distinguish between the principles and norms—the “meta-regime” (Aggarwal 1985)—and the regime itself, defined as the rules and procedures to allow us to distinguish between two very different types of constraints on the behavior of states. We use the term institution to refer to the combination of a meta-regime and a regime—rather than Krasner’s definition. Note that an institution is not the same thing as an international organization: one can find areas of international collaboration where there are well-defined principles, norms, rules, and procedures for actors’ behavior in the absence of an organization such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).