Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series, 67. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xvii, 140 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-13-877637-1.
Naila Maier-Knapp raises a set of interesting policy questions in this book on Asian-EU relations: one crucial question is whether the EU contributes to security in Southeast Asia. More generally, the book addresses questions such as the following: Are there crises that lend themselves better to promoting a truly cooperative relationship between regions? Does an engagement in so-called non-traditional security (NTS) increase the visibility of an external actor and change perceptions about it as a security actor? And: is crisis a mechanism contributing to greater integration on an intraregional level? In answering these questions, the book looks particularly at crises that have affected Southeast Asia, how the EU responds to such crises, what kinds of instruments it develops, what motivates its behaviour (instrumental interests or norms) and whether the engagement of the EU in Southeast Asia enhances not only its visibility in Southeast Asia, but also contributes to strengthening the interregional relationship between the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As is evident, the book addresses quite a number of practical questions and provides even more answers to them, both of which pose a challenge for the depth of the author’s inquiry (see below).
The book is organized into eight chapters, including introduction and conclusion, and contains five case studies on Asian crises that have drawn the attention of the EU and triggered attempts to provide solutions to them: the Asian financial crisis, the Haze crisis, the Bali bombings and avian influenza, the Aceh Monitoring Mission, and non-traditional security crises since then. The case studies are chronologically organized, but the underlying logic for case selection— described only later in the book—is the following: the crises cover different issue-areas (financial, peace-building, humanitarian) and have been selected to evaluate whether there are issue-areas that principally lend themselves to greater EU visibility as a security-relevant actor or not. Each chapter is similarly organized. Maier-Knapp describes the nature of the crisis and its regional implications and how the EU has reacted. For example, in the financial crisis it provided financial assistance and set up an interregional trust fund and an expert’s network, and generally enhanced its cooperation, in the haze case it set up a number of development cooperation projects for the protection of rain forest, generally leading to an increase of competences of the EU Commission in external environmental affairs. These initiatives document, the book argues, that crises do have effects on inter-regional cooperation that lead to enhanced interactions and an increased visibility of the EU as security actor in the EU. An impressive number of interviews offer assessments and look at how Asian and European policy makers perceive their roles and the contribution of the EU. The findings, which are not presented very systematically in the book, refer to the ability of the EU to provide effective policy solutions across different issue-areas, with issue-area-specific variation. Maier-Knapp also discusses the implications of securitization for the EU’s status as a non-traditional security actor. Because it frames these crises as security threats, the EU’s own foreign policy becomes securitized. While the book offers rich empirical evidence, it is of less value to readers who are interested in answers to systematic questions. The most important point here is that the book lacks a convincing analytical framework that would allow a better evaluation (not to speak of measurement) of the significance of the individual crises for inter-regionalism between Asia and Europe. While the introduction and chapter 1 discuss various theories and concepts, such as integration theory, to understand the role of crises for the development of regional and interregional relations or the concept of securitization to highlight the construction of security threats by actors, none of these concepts is systematically linked to the ultimate research questions nor is the case selection justified in great detail. This has two implications. First, it becomes difficult to provide intersubjective measures for many of the causal relationships that Maier-Knapp is interested in, such as the relationship between the severity of the crises and the degree of EU involvement and ultimately also for the nature or deepening of the interregional relationship. Second, this makes it very difficult to vary some of these factors and therefore come to causal statements about the impact of crises, instruments, the visibility of actors, etc., on interregional relations. Maier-Knapp provides a number of ad-hoc evaluations, but these are not always intersubjectively comprehensible. To do justice to the author, she does not claim to develop such systematic linkages. Instead, she frequently speaks of the case studies as providing “illustrations” for more general phenomena, such as the EU’s approach to crises, its role conceptions (for example, as a normative power), and the EU’s status as a collective actor. From a systematic perspective, this remains unsatisfying, however.
This is not to say that the book does not offer insights. Empirically, the book provides interesting and little-known information, much of it drawn from interviews with EU and Southeast Asian policy makers on the breadth of EU activities in Southeast Asia and of its “toolkit” for approaching crises in the area of non-traditional security. Yet, this evidence could have been much better leveraged for answering the systematic questions raised above. Answering them systematically would have required much more reflection on the rationale for case selection and the operationalization of concepts. These are not just academic issues that need not be of concern for policy makers, but fundamental ones increasing our confidence in the reliability and robustness of the findings. They ultimately make the difference between empirical description and good social science. Policy makers will probably like the many original quotes from interviews; yet, as policy makers they should be cautious in drawing policy implications for EU-Southeast Asian interregional relations from this study or for interregional relations more generally.
Anja Jetschke
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany
pp. 474-476