Date: July 8, 2010, 10:00~12:00

Venue: Grand Ballroom, Westin Chosun Seoul

 

Moderator: Feng Zhu

 

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am Zhu Feng from the Center for International and Strategic Studies of Peking University. It’s my great honor to be the mediator of this session, Group 2’s morning session.

 

First of all, let me extend a great gratitude to President Lee, for her excellent organization of Seoul MacArthur Asian Security Initiative Annual Conference 2010. It is very impressive so far, so I feel much pressure because next year it will be my turn to host this annual conference. But anyway, I think I will learn a lot from the EAI’s exercise, and hopefully next year we also will have a very enjoyable and fruitful gathering in Beijing.

 

This morning session, first of all, we will have two distinguished presenters. First is Dr. Nikola Mirilovic, from George Washington University. And the second is Professor Yen Tiehlin, from the National Chengchi University of Taiwan. So I will give each of them ten minutes, then I will open the floor for questions and comments on the presentations. So, the first presenter in this session is Dr. Mirilovic. Please.

 

Presenter I: Nikola Mirilovic

 

Good morning. I would also like to thank the organizers for inviting me to present in this conference, and I have also been very impressed by the level of organization, and thank you for the opportunity to come here and speak to you.

 

My name is Nikola Mirilovic. I am from the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University. And today I will be speaking about the past and the future of the East Asian Community.

 

In particular, this presentation will do the following: it will begin by defining the key terms; I will then briefly compare regional integration in East Asia with regional integration in Europe; and I will describe the key obstacles and catalysts of further regional integration in East Asia in the future.

 

So, for the purposes of this presentation, East Asian Community refers to regional-level inter-governmental international institutions: most notably, ASEAN, ASEAN Plus Three, ASEAN Regional Forum, and APEC. As you can tell, this implies a broad definition of East Asia, which includes both Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.

 

If we compare regional integration in East Asia with regional integration in Europe, we can see that in Europe, regional integration began sooner and has developed further than it has in East Asia. For example, the European Union has created a number of significant European-level institutions, formally binding regulations, many barriers have been removed between the economies of the EU members, including adopting the common currency; and whether this is a good idea is a separate question, given the recent developments. But it has been adopted.

 

By contrast, in East Asia, the regional-level integration has been categorized by more in- formal arrangements and it has emphasized regular meetings, as opposed to legally binding rules. So, where there is a consensus that there is more regional integration in Europe than there is in East Asia, scholars have also debated the question of whether the effectiveness of these informal arrangements is properly appreciated. There are scholars who argue that informal arrangements can also be quite effective, especially in the context of East Asia.

 

I will now describe the key catalysts and obstacles to further regional integration. We can think of the key catalysts coming from three groups, which are derived from three different theoretical perspectives. The first set of arguments is functionalist and emphasizes economic independent variables. One argument of this kind is that increasing economic interdependence calls for, at an international and regional level, a regulatory structure. So this creates a need for regional-level institutions. A related argument points to the Asian financial crisis as a catalyst for further regional integration, because the financial crisis exposed the limitations of the institutions that were in place at that time, to effectively address the crisis, and it provided a catalyst for the creation of new institutions.

 

The second argument is the dominant theory argument. The claim here is that regional integration in one part of the world provides an incentive for regional integration in other parts of the world: most notably with the advents of the European Community and the European Union later. This created an incentive for regionalization elsewhere. And the reason for this is that in addition to creating trades, by lowering barriers between members, regional blocks can also lead to trade and investment diversion, because where barriers are lower between members, artificial barriers might remain between members and non-members. So they divert trade and investment, due to this. So this dynamic creates an incentive for non-member countries in the regional block and their businesses to push for the regional block of their own, to match the advantages of the original regional block.

 

The final set of arguments, on the catalyst side, emphasizes the security benefits of regionalization. The argument here is that regional integration decreases the likelihood of inter-state war. Two mechanisms through which it does so [are]: one is that it leads to the confidence building measures; and other is that regional institutions lead to the sharing of information and to more transparency and less uncertainty about the intentions of member states. And this line of thinking would point to the end of the Cold War as an important catalyst for regional integration in Asia. There are again two mechanisms through which this took place according to this argument. The first is that traditional alliances and divides from the Cold War-era weakened with the end of the Cold War. And this allowed further forming of links across the previous divide. The other argument is that the end of the Cold War increased the uncertainty about the United States’ role in the region. So this provides an incentive for East Asian states to either create a new structure that would lock the United States into the region, or to create a regional structure that would provide the potential alternative, should the United States choose to leave the region in the future.

 

Let me now move onto the obstacles of further integration, which we can also think of in three broad categories. First, there are issues of historical legacies and memory. There are legacies of World War II, which still have negative effect on prospects for regional integration in generating mistrust, most notably between Japan, Korea and China respectively. There are also legacies of colonial rule; many Asian countries have experienced historical periods of colonial rule and foreign domination. And the argument is that this has made them less likely to forfeit, to limit their sovereignty and to accept challenges, potential challenges to their territorial integrity, which might come from limiting their sovereignty through regional level, formally binding agreements...(Continued)

 

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Moderator

Feng Zhu

 

Presenters

Nikola Mirilovic

Tiehlin Yen

 

Participants

Malcome Cook

Ralf Emmers

Xiao Fu 

James Gannon

Brad Glosserman

Jing Gu

Jennifer Lee

Sook-Jong Lee

John Schaus

Andrew Sheare

David F. von Hippel

Tadashi Yamamoto

Daqing Yang

Kiho Yi

 

Observer

Dongsun Park

 

Prepared by the Asia Security Initiative Research Center at the East Asia Institute. The East Asia institute, an Asia Security Initiative core institution, acknowledges the MacArthur Foundation for its generous grant and continued support. The East Asia Institute takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the Korean government.