Sample Chapter - United Nations University

30 Yoshinobu Yamamoto
of economics, security and society. Several different patterns of regional
governance were then presented from that perspective and used to analyse
the Asia-Pacific and East Asian regions.
The beginnings of the institutionalization of cooperation in the Asia-
Pacific and East Asian regions can essentially be traced back to the end
of the Cold War. First, APEC and ARF were formed, covering the entire
Asia-Pacific region, and the end of the 1990s saw the institutionalization
of cooperation in East Asia in the form of APT. The Asia-Pacific region
contains a roster of regions and subregions, including North America,
East Asia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, and each subregion has
different characteristics. Some have (comparatively) developed institutions
across the board, and in others a balance of power still plays a
major role. The Asia-Pacific region as a whole looks as though it is drawn
in countless different shades, with different elements such as membership,
security, economics and society forming different patterns. Nearly all
integration that has taken place in the Asia-Pacific and East Asian regions
consists of regularized forums and international regimes with no
legally binding power and loose-knit cooperative entities such as summits
(the exceptions being FTAs and the US-centred hub-and-spoke network
of alliances). There has been almost no integration in the strict sense, i.e.
institutions based on the delegation of national authority. In that there
are many, mostly informal, international regimes and continuous cooperative
forums, the region as a whole can be considered in-between a competitive
regional complex and a regional society. Within that regional
governance, one can see efforts to combine the many existing institutions
to realize national interests, to restrain the expansive behaviour of other
countries and to prevent a transition to a regional security complex divided
by confrontation. On the other hand, we see efforts such as ASEAN
to progress to the (sub)regional community stage and FTAs to promote
economic cooperation and interdependence.
Notes
1. Regarding delegation in international relations, see, for example, Hawkins et al. (2006).
2. Figures 1.1 and 1.2: see Yamamoto (2009), Yamamoto (2010, p. 83). Also see Dobson
(1991, p. 3) which presents a diagram similar to Figure 1.2.
3. For example, Lombaerde and Langehove (2005, p. 5). Also, Mattli defines [economic]
integration as “the voluntary linking in the economic domain of two or more formerly
independent states to the extent that authority over key areas of domestic regulation
and policy is shifted to the supranational level” (Mattli, 1999, p. 41).
4. Insofar as continuous cooperative entities and international regimes affect mutual restraints
of nations’ actions, they constitute a “negarchy” as defined by D. Deudney; that
is, via mutual restraints, nations are subject to “negative” restrictions on their sovereignty,
resulting in a relationship that lies between anarchy and hierarchy (the left and
right ends of Figure 1.2) (Deudney, 2007, pp. 48– 49).