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Abstract
The late Michael Leifer's association with an insecurity-focused realist approach to international affairs and his work on Southeast Asian regionalism inspire this question: How have the Asian financial crisis and the ‘war on terror’ affected the plausibility of insecurity-concerned realism compared with other ways of approaching regionalism in Southeast Asia?
Five general approaches (and featured themes) are presented: realism (insecurity), culturalism (identity), rationalism (interests), liberalism (institutions) and constructivism (ideas). By and large this sequence runs ontologically from the most to the least foundationalist perspective, and chronologically from the earliest to the newest fashion in the American study of international relations since the Second World War.
The Asian financial crisis and the ‘war on terror’ have, on balance, vindicated the extremes – realism on the one hand, constructivism on the other – while modestly enhancing the plausibility of culturalism and challenging the comparative intellectual advantages of rationalism and liberalism. But this result implies scholarly polarization less than it suggests a diverse repertoire of assumptions and priorities that are neither hermetically compartmentalized nor mutually exclusive.
Notes
1 For conversations or correspondence that helped me in writing or revising this essay I amgrateful to – but, alas, cannot implicate – Jennifer Amyx, Ralf Emmers, Erik Kuhonta, Joseph Liow and Danny Unger.
2 Security was also prominent in the connotations of the next most common conceptual references, to the balance of power (5) and order (4). These figures were calculated from a bibliography of 115 items kindly made available to me by Ralf Emmers and Joseph Liow. Excluded from the list were the many volumes written by others but selected by Leifer for the Routledge ‘Politics in Asia’ series that he oversaw as general editor.
3 See Leifer (1983: xiv–xv, 111, 145, 155, 169–70, 173–4).
4 The United States is my own parochial intellectual ‘home’ (CitationEmmerson 2004). An effort to show how its American provenance has colored and limited the literature I cite lies beyond my present scope.
5 The Right–Left dichotomy was not all that clear or consistent even during the Cold War. Before the incumbencies of Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping, was the Soviet Union Left of the United States, Right of Maoist China – or both? Were anti-communist social democrats in Europe and the US too Left to be Right, too Right to be Left – or both? Did such ambiguities jeopardize the utility of the distinction? Post-Cold War developments have further destabilized these terms. It has become harder to argue that the Right harbors ‘conservative’ appreciations of continuity – tradition – and doubts about the virtue or necessity of change, while the Left advocates more or less ‘radical’ transformation – revolution – and considers change of some kind ongoing and unavoidable. Consider the activist faction among US President George W. Bush's foreign-policy advisers in the early 2000s (CitationMann 2004), whose reasons for wanting to invade Iraq included a desire to trigger the revolutionary democratization of the traditionally authoritarian Middle East. Universally known at the time as Right-wing ‘neo-conservatives’ they could also have been called ‘anti-conservative’ Leftists with ‘neo-Leninist’ impulses to spark, speed and channel historical change.
6 Twenty years before the AFC, in August 1977, an ASEAN Swap Arrangement was established to help central banks cope with modest and temporary shortages in liquidity. At the Chiang Mai meeting in 2000, ASA's scope was expanded to allow a member central bank to swap its own currency for major international currencies for up to six months in amounts up to double that member bank's existing financial commitment to ASA. Even so, as of 2002, these commitments – a mere $150 million apiece from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and much less than that from the other four ASEAN members combined – were still negligible compared with the likely size of flows in a crisis. Even if Bilateral Swap Agreements are included, the total sum available to a suddenly needy member economy is ‘a drop in the ocean’ of money that churns through global financial markets every day. (See CitationWang and Andersen 2002–03: 90–1, 93 [‘drop’].)
7 ‘We are pushed to become a backward, weak race which is recolonised and having to serve others‘, Mahathir told a Malaysian audience in 1998. ‘They [the West] are trying to destroy all we have built’ (CitationSymonds 1998; see also CitationMahathir 1999).
8 The US Treasury Secretary in 1997–99 was Robert Rubin. Looking back on the AFC, he contrasted the fall of `an obscure currency, the Thai baht, in July 1997' (CitationRubin 2003: 212) with the severe risk to the world financial system posed by the AFC's arrival in South Korea the following October (pp. 228ff.; cf. p. 218). While stressing economic security, he acknowledged the geostrategic concerns of officials from the State and Defense Departments and the National Security Council. They favored a bilateral American contribution to what became an IMF-led $17 billion package of support for Thailand. Rubin did not, and he won. But South Korea was ‘a crucially important military ally’ with 37,000 US troops stationed near its border with North Korea (p. 218), whose own troops reportedly had gone on a ‘heightened state of alert’ (p. 232). In this military-security league, Thailand could not compete. In December, with Rubin's approval, the IMF announced a $55 billion reform-and-rescue package for South Korea. As for the AFC illustrating the (anti-realist) argument that states ‘matter less, in the sense that forceful imperatives of the world economy take power away from them’, Rubin (p. 215) flatly disagreed. ‘To me, the opposite is true. The potential impact of any one country's problems on others means that national governments matter more – an ineffective government in one country can have a damaging impact beyond that country's borders’.
9 In 2004 the historian John Lewis Gaddis ascribed to Americans ‘a level of vulnerability’ not seen ‘since they were living on the edge of a dangerous frontier 150 years ago’, and agreed with President Bush that, facing ‘sources of danger’, the United States was entitled ‘to take them out’ (CitationChace 2004: 15, quoting Gaddis in The New York Times Book Review, 7 October 2004, p. 23).
10 It is in this context unsurprising that rational-choice theorizing should have been less popular among scholars in Southeast Asia than in the United States, a relatively orderly country unaccustomed to being overtaken by events it did not anticipate and could not control – at least prior to 9/11.
11 Later, two knowledgeable observers would list this environmental calamity, the economic crisis (the AFC), the emergency in East Timor (in 1999) and the enlargement of ASEAN as ‘the four “E's’ of embarrassment for ASEAN' (CitationTay and Estanislao 2001: 4). An updated review of the Association's performance in times of crisis would include medical emergencies such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and avian flu.