What Explains ASEAN’s Leadership in East Asian Community Building?

Conventional wisdom holds that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been able to lead community building in East Asia by default, against the background of Sino-Japanese rivalries. The present study maintains that this line of argument is insufficient, and offers a complementary account, centered on the statement that ASEAN has actively constructed a social environment which defines itself as the legitimate leader of East Asian community building. More specifically, the leadership of ASEAN can be explained in terms of three parallel developments since the early 1990s that are associated with the Asia-Pacific framework of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF): the Southeast Asian association has been able to lead community building in East Asia because (1) it has advanced the vision of an “East Asian community” by drawing on its cooperative security norm embodied in the ARF; (2) through their participation in the ARF process, the Northeast Asian powers have come to recognize the value of ASEAN’s cooperative security norm, and thus to share with the Southeast Asian nations their vision of an East Asian community; and (3) the sharing of a community-building vision by all the East Asian countries has constituted a structure that makes it costly for the Northeast Asian powers to challenge the Southeast Asian association.

東盟能引領東亞共同體的建立嗎？

傳統觀點認為，在中日對抗的背景下，東南亞國家聯盟（東盟）已能够引領東亞共同體的建設。本項研究認為這種論點不够全面，因而對其加以了補充。本文認為東盟積極地構建了將自己定義為東亞共同體建設的合法領導人的社會環境。具體而言，自1990年代初以來，東盟的領導力可以通過與東盟地區論壇（ARF ）的亞太框架相關的三方面的發展看出：東盟已能够引領東亞共同體的建設因為（1）它已經以其ARF共同安全規範為例提出了一個“東亞共同體”的景像， （ 2 ）通過對東盟地區論壇進程的參與，東北亞的權力大國已經認識到了東盟的共同安全規範的價值，從而與東南亞國家共享其東亞共同體的景像，（ 3）所有東亞國家共享的共同體建設景像已經構成了一種結構，使得東北亞大國將為挑戰東盟付出高昂的代價。

Translated from English by Xin Huang