Towards Asian regional functional futures: bringing Mitrany back in?

Abstract

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Asian regionalism is at a crossroads. While the region is home to a broad array of multilateral organisations, the record of these bodies in fostering effective and legitimate cooperation has been decidedly weak. Drawing on insights from the work of David Mitrany on international cooperation, this article contends that the key problem facing Asian regionalism is a predilection for ‘top-down’ rather than ‘bottom-up’ regionalism strategies. These top-down strategies have involved efforts to find a single institutional design for regional cooperation (similar to the experience of Europe), which has been hindered by geopolitical rivalries and a lack of shared consensus around what constitutes the ‘Asian region’. By considering the contours of interstate competition in Asia, the track record of its existing regionalism efforts and insights from comparative regional studies, it is instead argued that Asia's future is one of regions rather than a single region. As Mitrany suggests, the unique geopolitical context in Asia means that functionally discrete and variegated strategies are likely to provide a more effective basis for regional cooperation. Indeed, trends towards such a functional approach to regionalism are already becoming evident in Asia today.

Keywords:

• ASEAN
• ASEAN Plus Three
• Asia-Pacific
• David Mitrany
• East Asia
• East Asia Summit
• regionalism

Notes

1. The authors wish to thank Shahar Hameiri, Lee Jones and the participants at the workshop on Regionalisation, Regionalism and the Rescaling of Economic Governance in Asia, held at Murdoch University in October 2013.

2. A term recently used by Thomas Moore (2007) to describe regional dynamics in Asia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme project GR:EEN—Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks—a large-scale integrated research project [grant number 266809].