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Abstract
This article reviews Michael Leifer's contribution to the study of Southeast Asian regionalism, particularly the role of ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Unlike some who portray Leifer as a realist or a neo-realist who totally dismissed the role of ASEAN in the regional order, this article argues that the real difference between Leifer's and the newer constructivist understanding of Southeast Asia is not so much over whether regionalism matters, but under what conditions does it matter. Leifer viewed material forces, such as the prior existence of a great-power balance as a precondition of effective regionalism. He paid less attention to norm dynamics and the politics of regional identity formation. He did not consider them as independent forces in regional order. This paper argues that taking a more sociological approach, factoring in the role of regional norms and identity formation offers a more complete explanation of ASEAN's achievements and failures than Leifer's diplomatic investigations focusing on the balance of power. This also opens the space for a more transformative understanding of Asian security order in which socialization and institution-building are to be seen not merely as adjuncts to the balance of power dynamics, but as shapers of the regional balance of power.
Notes
1. I include myself in this group, although I think it blurs the important divergence between cultural and sociological approaches, or those who stress the relative importance of traditional culture versus those who emphasize actor socialization based on modern principles of international relations, as determinants of regionalism.
2. I can attest to Leifer's tolerance and even encouragement of divergent perspectives. Although I was not a student of Michael Leifer, my book, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia was written substantially under his guidance – as a result of continuous interaction with him between 1997 and 2000. He was a hands-on editor, meticulous in his attention to detail and quick and forthright in his critique of any (mis)interpretations in my study of ASEAN. His criticisms ensured that the book's constructivist claims did not stray too far from empirical evidence. We disagreed over the initial title of the book. My preference, Avoiding War in Southeast Asia, did not evoke much enthusiasm in him, on the grounds that it smacked of a ‘worst-case’ assumption, since there had been no serious prospect for war in Southeast Asia since ASEAN's creation in 1967. The fact that he attributed this state of affairs to the US-led balance of power order in Asia, whereas I credited a good deal of it to ASEAN regionalism, was one important aspect of our intellectual disagreement. But this never prevented us from discussing the book, eventually published under his Politics in Asia series, over countless meetings during his visits to the region or on the margins of international conferences and in numerous e-mail exchanges over a four-year period. Without his constant encouragement and timely reminders, the book would not have been conceived, much less completed.
3. My selection of the first set of norms (legal–rational) was determined by the fact that they were enshrined in ASEAN's constitutional documents, including the Bangkok Declaration of 1967, the Kuala Lumpur Declaration of 1971, and the two core documents to emerge from ASEAN's inaugural summit in 1976: the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and the Declaration of ASEAN Concord. Indeed, non-interference and non-use of force are also the core norms of the UN which regional institutions all over the world self-consciously emulated. As such, the prominence of these norms could be established independent of intra-ASEAN interactions during the critical periods of the Cambodia crisis. In so far as the second set of norms (socio-cultural) are concerned, after examining how they evolved through intra-ASEAN elite interactions, I analyse the impact of these norms on subsequent intra-ASEAN relations, thereby avoiding tautology.
4. Other reviewers of the book recognized this distinction, Diane Mauzy refers to my approach as ‘centring on the efforts to construct a regional “identity”’ (CitationMauzy 2000: 613).
5. Although one of the motives for ASEAN countries in embracing Burma was to counter the growing influence of China there, there is little question that a quest for regional identity played a causal part, as it had done in explaining ASEAN's rejection, about two decades earlier, of the membership application of Sri Lanka on the grounds that it was not sufficiently ‘Southeast Asian’.
6. This distinction runs through my book, The Quest for Identity, which is primarily concerned with the latter. Regional identity, or to put it more specifically, regional identity-building efforts, are used in the book as ‘a peg’ (CitationDatta-Ray 2001) on which to hang its core analytic perspective in investigating the international relations of Southeast Asia.
7. A separate but related point made in Leifer's review concerns my reliance on ‘secondary’ sources to investigate the evolution of Southeast Asian identity-building. Reliance on secondary sources, even by such eminent scholars as Russell Fifield in the context of his analysis of the Southeast Asian Command, leads to inaccuracies (which the review does not specify). Yet, much of the book is not a study in history, but an analysis of historiography. In an historiographical study, the so-called secondary sources, those written by eminent scholars of Southeast Asia, becomes primary material, as it is they who imagine ‘regionness’, delineate (however artificially) its outer limits, and defend the usage of the regional entity. Thus, in a fundamentally interpretative and discursive method, such as that employed in my book, scholarship by those who helped to imagine and popularize the notion of Southeast Asia is legitimate (and often a more important) source material, even if it conflicts with the ‘official’ history of Southeast Asia available from those who were directly engaged in the making of history.
8. In Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, I use the concept of security community primarily as an analytic tool to permit a broader investigation of ASEAN that was not available in the existing literature. As stated in the Introduction (p. 6), the book ‘does not assume, a priori, that ASEAN has become a security community in Deutsch's terms – or perhaps become a full-fledged security community. Rather, the purpose of this exercise is to use the idea of security community as a framework within which to examine the evolution and nature of ASEAN's political and security role and identify the constraints it faces in developing a viable regional security community.’
9. Leifer dismisses ASEAN's record in peaceful management of disputes by arguing that there has never been a genuine casus bellum among the ASEAN states since the Confrontation that might have put the ‘ASEAN way’ to a genuine test. But the Sabah dispute between Malaysia and the Philippines and recurring bilateral tensions between Singapore and Malaysia in the 1980s and 1990s belies such claim. These disputes had a potential for escalation into armed hostilities.
10. As CitationFearon and Wendt (2002) and others have acknowledged, the earlier academic debate between rationalism (and materialism) and constructivism as mutually exclusive paradigms falsely obscured the significant common ground that obtains between them. The recent move towards ‘synthetic’ or ‘eclectic’ theorizing is thus a step in the right direction (CitationKatzenstein and Shiraishi 1996).
11. I use the term ‘orientalism’ to denote similar imagery about Asian and Southeast Asian regionalism as Said applied to a particular kind of Western knowledge about the orient. Broadly stated, orientalism is a ‘set of stereotypical images according to which the West is seen as being essentially rational, developed, humane, superior, authentic, active, creative, and masculine’, while the orient is seen as being ‘irrational, aberrant, backward, crude, despotic, inferior, inauthentic, passive …’ (CitationMacfie 2000: 4). Looking at some, but by no means all, commentaries on Asian and Southeast Asian regionalism in recent years, one cannot but be struck by the manner of contrasting European and Asian regionalism or critiquing Asian regionalism as an impossible, failed and even laughably decadent project. While the European regionalism (both modern such as the EU, NATO as well as classical such as the Concert of Powers) is viewed as ‘rational’ and ‘developed’; Asian regionalism is viewed as ‘underdeveloped’, ‘backward’; while European regionalism is seen as an ‘authentic’ model; Asian regionalism, even with its own claims about culture and identity, is seen as ‘crude’ and ‘aberrant’; while European regionalism is seen as ‘active’ and ‘creative’, able to adapt to new security challenges and developments; Asian regionalism is seen as ‘passive’ and ‘reactionary’. These stereotypes are sometimes left implicit in the writings of scholars, conforming to what Said called ‘latent’ orientalism, while for some, they are presented in cynical voices in a way Said would characterize as ‘manifest’ orientalism (CitationSaid 2000: 111–14). Interestingly, the critics of Asian regionalism have been branded as ‘realist’. While I acknowledge that not all realists are orientalists, the intellectual link between orientalism and realism is stressed by Macfie, who notes that critics of Said's formulations on orientalism often include scholars ‘firmly wedded to a traditional (realist) approach’ (CitationMacfie 2000: 5).
12. I am not the only scholar in such a situation; Jürgen Haacke is another example of a constructivist whom Leifer nurtured at LSE.
