Sources of peace in East Asia: interdependence, institutions, and middle powers

Abstract

For forty years, the East Asian regional order has delivered widespread peace and prosperity. That order faces possible upending by an economically and militarily more powerful China and a decreasingly robust and engaged United States. While accepting the possibility that such structural shifts could upend the regional order, this paper contends that three powerful counterweights are working to counter disruptive conflicts and to foster peaceful change, namely strong and rising economic interdependence, expanding institutionalization, and active preservation efforts by number of other Asian states, particularly the region’s middle powers. This article analyzes the contribution of these three forces to creating the existing order and to their roles in its continuation.

KEYWORDS::

• East Asia
• peace
• liberal order
• China
• middle powers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes

1 Immanuel Kant argues for the importance of three factors in promoting peace: economic interdependence, institutions, and democracy. Democracy has hardly been pervasive across East Asia during the periods analyzed here. Instead, multiple authoritarian or only partly democratic and free regimes have been influential. Would more democracies have deepened the level of peace and facilitated peaceful changes? Perhaps, but that is a speculative counterfactual. I therefore do not treat it as a critical driver of the East Asia’s regional peace in the period examined.

2 A useful overview of this period is Yahuda (1996), section 1, 1–83. Of course, the US also contributed immensely to a host of conflicts in the region from the Korean War to the wars in Southeast Asia.

3 Two 2015 national programs are indicative of that thrust: “Made in China, 2025” and “Internet Plus.” For details see, inter alia, Wübbeke et al. (2016); Wang et al. (2016); Johnston (2019).

4 How asymmetrical trade offers the more powerful trade partner the opportunity to weaponize trade for geopolitical ends was detailed in Hirschmann (1945).

5 The two economies individually and their links to global supply chains along with a half trillion in annual trade make talk of such decoupling sheer folly. In 2019, despite economic and trade frictions that resulted in a 15 percent drop in bilateral trade from 2018, the volume of trade in goods between China and the US still reached $541.2 billion. For a serious analysis of the perils of such actions, see for example. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “The Folly of Decoupling from China: It Isn’t Just Perilous—It’s Impossible,” Foreign Affairs, June 3, 2020 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-06-03/folly-decoupling-china. See also, Joseph Nye, “Cold War with China is Avoidable,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2020.