ASEAN+3: The Failure of Global Governance and the Construction of Regional Institutions

Abstract

The debate that has taken place in IR between rationalists and social constructivists in the last fifteen years has been rather confusing, especially when it came to empirical testing of the various hypotheses put forward by one or the other side. The confusion stems from the simple fact that both theories are rooted in different metatheoretical orientations. As various German scholars suggested in the so-called ‘ZIB-Debate’ in the 1990s,¹ the IR community should not overstress the variation in metatheoretical orientations, such as rational choice capturing the ‘logic of consequentialism’ and constructivism covering either the ‘logic of appropriateness’ or the ‘logic of arguing’ (for example, Muller 1994; Risse 2000). Since both modes of action are ideal types that hardly ever happen in real life, one should rather stick to a combination of the two or ask which logic might dominate in a given situation.