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ABSTRACT
The world is experiencing a dramatic transformation. Many security challenges, from territorial disputes to climate change, are threatening political stability and economic prosperity in the world. One interesting puzzle in the Asia Pacific is the so-called “Asian exceptional peace” phenomenon, i.e. there has been no military conflict in the Asia Pacific since 1979. By engaging the debate over the “Asian exceptional peace” puzzle, I introduce an “institutional peace” argument, which suggests that Asian countries have constructed an institutional framework of “dynamic security governance” to manage three types of security challenges in the region. I also discuss three future challenges as well as how to sustain this “institutional peace” in the Asia Pacific.
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number FT160100355]. This paper is a revised version of the author’s speech for the Australia-Japan Foundation Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series at the University of Niigata Prefecture, Japan on October 29 2018. The author would like to thank Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Hiro Katsumata, Ka Po Ng, and Takeshi Uemura for comments and suggestions on the paper. All errors and omissions are the author’s own.
Notes
1 In the debate on “East Asian Peace,” scholars pointed out that there are different understandings of “East Asia” and “Peace.” East Asia here comprises Southeast and Northeast Asia, i.e. the 10 ASEAN members, and China, Japan, North Korea, and South Korea. In her 2007 article, Solingen pointed out, “Indochina has been at peace for two and a half decades, maritime Southeast Asia for four, and Northeast Asia for five.” See Solingen, “Pax Asiatica versus Bella Levantina,” 757; and also Tønnesson, “Can the East Asian Peace Survive?”
2 Tønnesson, “Can the East Asian Peace Survive?”
3 Beeson, “Is the ‘Long Peace’ of East Asia Exceptional?”
4 Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be its Future?”
5 See Tønnesson, “Can the East Asian Peace Survive?”
6 Sample, “Arms races and dispute escalation.”
7 Kang, American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century.
8 For a warning of a possible arms race in Asia, see Ryall, “Asian Arms Race Is On, Stoked by China’s Booming Defence Budget, Japanese Analysts Say.” For a rebuttal, and see Huxley, “Why Asia’s ‘Arms Race’ Is Not Quite What It Seems.”
9 Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry.”
10 For the lack of balancing phenomenon in Asia, see Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong”; Ross, “Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China”; Chan, “An Odd Thing Happened on the Way to Balancing.” For China’s assertiveness in diplomacy and its criticism, and see Johnston, “How New and Assertive Is China’s New Assertiveness?”.
11 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.
12 Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong.”
13 For democratic peace theory see Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace.
14 For crony capitalism, see Kang, Crony Capitalism; Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism. For soft authoritarianism, see Roy, “Singapore, China, and the ‘Soft Authoritarian’ Challenge”; Means, “Soft Authoritarianism in Malaysia and Singapore”; and Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience.”
15 In a special issue in Global Asia in 2015, a group of scholars broadly debated the causes of East Asian peace from different perspectives, emphasizing the roles of developmental states, dependence, gender, religion, etc. Some of these arguments can be broadly included into the realist, liberalist and cultural camps. This paper will not go into a discussion of the gender and feminist scholarship, which are important in pointing out the unique gendered cultural practices exemplified in Confucianism.
16 Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World.”
17 Ikenberry, “American Hegemony and East Asian Order.”
18 Ross, “The US-China Peace.”
19 Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, status competition, and great power war.”
20 Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion.”
21 Allison, Destined for War. For a criticism on Allison’s argument; and see Kirshner, “Handle Him with Care.”
22 For China’s assertiveness in diplomacy, see He and Feng, “Debating China’s Assertiveness”; Johnston, “How New and Assertive is China’s New Assertiveness?”; Yahuda, “China’s New Assertiveness in the South China Sea”; Friedberg, “The Sources of Chinese Conduct”; and Jerdén, “The Assertive China Narrative.”
23 For power transition theory, see Organski, World Politics; Tammen and Kugler, “Power Transition and China–US Conflicts.” For a critique, see Chan, China, the US and the Power-Transition Theory. For offensive realism, and see Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
24 Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics”; Gartzke and Li, “War, Peace, and the Invisible Hand.”
25 See Funabashi, “The Asianization of Asia”; Haggard and Noland, “A Security and Peace Mechanism for Northeast Asia”; Weede, “The Capitalist Peace and the Rise of China”; Schneider and Gleditsch, “The Capitalist Peace”. For a criticism on the thesis of economic interdependence and peace, and see Copeland, “Economic Interdependence and War.”
26 Goldsmith, “The East Asian Peace as a Second-Order Diffusion Effect.”
27 See Tan and Acharya, eds., Bandung Revisited; Acharya, “Studying the Bandung Conference from a Global IR Perspective”; and Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter?
28 Tu, “Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity”; and Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong.”
29 Solingen, “Pax Asiatica versus Bella Levantina”; and Svensson, “A Surprising Calm.”
30 Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter?; and Kivimäki, “East Asian Relative Peace and the ASEAN Way.”
31 Copeland, Economic Interdependence and War.
32 He, “Institutional Balancing and International Relations Theory”; He, Institutional Balancing in the Asia-Pacific; and He, “Contested Multilateralism 2.0 and Regional Order Transition”.
33 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations.
34 Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma.”
35 Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma.”
36 Buzan et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis.
37 Thomas and Tow, “The Utility of Human Security.”
38 Nguitragool, Environmental Cooperation in Southeast Asia.
39 See Caballero-Anthony, Emmers and Acharya, eds., Non-Traditional Security in Asia.
40 For collective security and the UN, see Claude Jr, “Peace and security”; and Thakur, The United Nations, peace and security.
41 Allison, Destined for War.
42 For deterrence and security threat, see Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence.
43 Katsumata, ASEAN’s Cooperative Security Enterprise; Evans, “Building Security”; Bal et al., “Track 2 Security Dialogue in the Asia-Pacific”; and Capie and Taylor, “The Shangri-La Dialogue and the Institutionalization of Defence Diplomacy in Asia.”
44 See He, Institutional Balancing in the Asia Pacific; Johnston, Social states.
45 Oye, “Explaining Cooperation under Anarchy.”
46 See Mackenzie, et.al., “The WHO Response to SARS and Preparations for the Future,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92476/.
47 It is worth noting that I use the word “balance” artistically in defining “balance of trust” and balance of cooperation.” Balance means a harmonious situation with perfect design and proportion. In contrast to traditional “balance of power” – i.e., states fight for power, “balance of trust” and “balance of cooperation” suggest that states can pursue mutual trust and cooperation in a harmonious and coordinating way.
48 Axelrod and Keohane, “Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy.”
49 Keohane and Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory.”
50 Katsumata, “Establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum.”
51 Jones and Smith, “Making Process, not Progress.”
52 For different functions of institutions in security, see He, “A Strategic Functional Theory of Institutions and Rethinking Asian Regionalism.”
53 For non-traditional security cooperation, see Caballero-Anthony, “Non-Traditional Security and Infectious Diseases in ASEAN”; Arase, “Non-Traditional Security in China-ASEAN Cooperation.”
54 For challenges of non-traditional security cooperation, see Caballero-Anthony, Emmers and Acharya, eds., Non-Traditional Security in Asia.
55 Patrick, “Trump and World Order.”
56 See Chong, “Deconstructing Order in Southeast Asia in the Age of Trump.”
57 Sevastopulo, “Trump Gives Glimpse of ‘Indo-Pacific’ Strategy to Counter China”; and Tow, “Trump and Strategic Change in Asia.”
58 He and Feng, “Debating China’s Assertiveness.”
59 Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy.
60 For an accommodation policy toward a rising power, see Paul, ed., Accommodating Rising Powers.
61 For hedging strategies, see Roy, “Southeast Asia and China”; and Kuik, “The Essence of Hedging.”
62 He and Feng, “Leadership Transition and Global Governance.”
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Kai He
Kai He is Professor of International Relations at Griffith Asia Institute and Center for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Australia. He is a visiting Chair Professor of International Relations at the Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University, China (2018-2021). He is currently an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow (2017-2020). He is the author of Institutional Balancing in the Asia Pacific: Economic Interdependence and China’s Rise (Routledge, 2009), Prospect Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis in the Asia Pacific: Rational Leaders and Risky Behavior (coauthored with Huiyun Feng, Routledge, 2013), and China’s Crisis Behavior: Political Survival and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2016). He is a co-editor (with Huiyun Feng) of US-China Competition and the South China Sea Disputes (Routledge, 2018), Chinese Scholars and Foreign Policy: Debating International Relations (with Huiyun Feng and Xuetong Yan, Routledge, 2019), and China’s Challenges and International Order Transition: Beyond “Thucydides’s Trap” (with Huiyun Feng, University of Michigan Press, 2020).