By Kei Koga The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has transformed itself into a comprehensive regional institution si...
By Kei Koga
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has transformed itself into a comprehensive regional institution since its inception in 1967. Whilst the effectiveness of ASEAN has often been debated, such institutional change is quite obvious when we compare ASEAN in 1967, aimed at only economic and socio-cultural cooperation among the five Southeast Asian states—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand—with ASEAN in 2015, which has included all 10 Southeast Asian states and had a plethora of ASEAN cooperative frameworks, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Plus Three (APT), the East Asia Summit (EAS), and the ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting (ADMM). These changes were particularly visible in the post-Cold War period.
To be sure, this is not a
unique phenomenon to ASEAN. Institutions change over time. Some add functional
scope and expand membership, while others displace their institutional
objectives and focus on a particular issue area. This notion is generally
accepted, and the theme, institutional change, has become one of the important
subjects in political science. Nevertheless, institutional change has yet to be
sufficiently or systematically studied in the International Relations (IR)
field, as the mainstream IR theories that are structural/neo-realism, institutionalism,
and social constructivism, lack analytical frameworks to comprehensively
understand such changes.1 Structural/neo-realism considers institutions as the
byproduct of states’ common interests. Thus, institutions change when these
common interests also change (Mearsheimer, 1990; Waltz, 2000). Institutionalism
argues that institutions change due to environmental change. The reduction of
transaction costs and institutional rules/norms created by great powers make
institutions more durable (Haftendorn, Keohane & Wallender, 1999;
Ikenberry, 2000). For social constructivists, the role of identities created
within is the glue that sustains institutions (Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1999).
While these theoretical frameworks provide a partial response, they do not comprehensively
answer why, how, and when institutions change.
Historical institutionalism
in the comparative politics field provides a useful analytical approach to
understand institutional change in international organization. Its basic
framework is based on two main concepts, path dependence and critical junctures
(see Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007). Path dependence refers to institutional
norms/rules that are ossified through positive feedback generated through
members’ interaction, becoming difficult to alter. Critical juncture is the
certain period of time that breaks such path dependence and creates a new one.
These two concepts are useful, because they can provide a broad explanation of
why and how institutions change. Positive feedback creates institutional
continuity, and when such positive feedback disappears, change occurs.
Image Attribute: ASEAN Member Countries / Source: Wikimedia Commons
Yet, another critical
question remains: When does a critical juncture emerge? Generally, such a
juncture is evaluated in a post-hoc manner, and the weakness of the concept
lies in its difficulty to articulate “when.” Yet, as already employed in
literature of public policy, the punctuated equilibrium thesis provides a hint
to answer this question. This thesis, originally derived from the evolutionary
biology field, emphasizes the importance of “external shock” (or “exogenous
shock”), which breaks the historical path to produce radical change (see
Eldredge & Gould, 1972, pp. 82-115). In other words, the historically
recognized “positive feedback” is likely to be altered to “negative feedback”
by an external shock, which propels an institution to transform itself into a
different form.
How can we operationalize
this broad analytical model to understand changes in international
organizations? For the political security field, by replacing “positive
feedback” with the stable distribution of power, and “international
institution” with international organization, we can assume that institutional
change occurs when an actual or perceptual change in the distribution of power
occurs. This strategic turbulence causes member states to reassess the organization’s
security utility, because a new environment may not sustain its existing
utility. The types of member state reassessment of the organization’s security
utility—positive, negative, and uncertain—lead them to produce certain types of
institutional change—institutional consolidation, displacement, and
layering. Consolidation strengthens
existing political/security functions and norms, displacement replaces existing
political/functions and norms, and layering adds new political/security
functions and norms on top of existing ones (Streeck & Thelen, 2005, pp.
3-39). At the same time, the specific direction of such institutional change is
determined by the competing ideas that the so-called “institutional norm
entrepreneurs” (INE) provide during this transition period (Koga, 2012; Koga,
2014).
This analytical model sheds
light on ASEAN’s recent institutional changes in the post-Cold War period. In
the 1990s, ASEAN created ASEAN-led institutions in the Asia-Pacific region,
including the ARF and APT (see Koga, 2012). In fact, these institutions were
the by-products of ASEAN’s institutional change, through institutional
layering. For the establishment of the ARF, ASEAN member state expectations of
a shift in the regional distribution of power in the Asia Pacific region were
formulated immediately after the Cold War, due to the rise of Japan and China,
as well as US relative disengagement from Southeast Asia. This triggered member
states’ reassessment of ASEAN’s security utility. Since ASEAN did not have any
security function to influence the overall regional “balance of power”, its
utility remained uncertain. In this context, an INE, ASEAN-ISIS—ASEAN’s own
track 2 network—proposed the establishment of a regional cooperative security
framework with a new institutional norm, ASEAN Centrality. By this, ASEAN
retained the right to control the institution through means such as
agenda-setting. The idea was then modified and actualized in 1994 through
institutional layering.
Likewise, ASEAN member
states institutionalized APT to safeguard their economic security in the
post-Cold War era. Facing changes in the economic power distribution in East
Asia created by the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) forum, US consideration of human rights in its economic/trade policy,
and the rise of regional FTAs, such as the North American Free Trade Area
(NAFTA), ASEAN member states reassessed ASEAN’s utility in international
economic negotiations. Although ASEAN had utility in negotiating great powers
through the ASEAN-Post Ministerial Conference (PMC), it was still uncertain, as
such efforts fell short of sufficiently influencing international negotiations,
as shown in the 1991 failure of the Uruguay Round. Given this, Malaysia’s Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad, as an INE, proposed the idea of creating the East
Asia Economic Group (EAEG, later called EAEC—East Asian Economic Caucus).
Although this idea faced severe criticism within and outside ASEAN, the meeting
was held annually within the ASEAN framework and turned into APT in 1997.
In the 2000s, several
institutional changes occurred within ASEAN. Among them, EAS was the most
notable, because it was the very first institutional framework at the summit
level that ASEAN could create in East Asia. The trigger was the perceived shift
in the regional distribution of power due to the rise of China and the
uncertainty of US commitment following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and
9/11. Although the original idea of establishing the “East Asian Summit” as an
upgraded version of APT came from the East Asia Vision Group (EAVG), created by
South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, member states considered the idea
relatively positive given its similar form of cooperative security to ensure
regional powers’ commitment (see East Asia Vision Group Report, 2001). Yet, as
upgrading APT would face a risk of increasing influence of great powers and the
erosion of ASEAN centrality, ASEAN began to consider the establishment of EAS
as a separate framework (see Malik, 2006; Emmers, Liow & Tan, 2011). In the
process of institutional design, some members, such as Malaysia, focused with
China on APT membership, and attempted to task EAS as a supplemental role for
APT in East Asia’s community building. Meanwhile, other members with Japan attempted
to include Australia, India, and New Zealand. ASEAN internalized these ideas,
and in order to avoid dividing the region into Chinese and American spheres in
East Asia, member states took an inclusive approach to prevent any powers from
dominating the summit over ASEAN, creating a new cooperative security framework
in the region.
As such, this analytical
model sheds light on why, how, and when ASEAN member states have conducted
institutional changes. Because they perceived strategic uncertainty in East
Asia from the end of the Cold War, they were more likely to conduct
institutional layering to enhance ASEAN’s security utility, resulting in the
establishment of the ARF, APT, and EAS. That said, it is important to note that
the above examples are not exhaustive, and there can be multiple institutional
changes simultaneously. For example, during the 1990s, ASEAN member states
conducted institutional consolidation by expanding its membership to non-ASEAN
states in Southeast Asia, namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Stability in Indochina in the post-Cold War era contributed to ASEAN member
states’ positive perception towards these states, leading to their inclusion.
So, what can we understand
from these institutional changes in ASEAN? Again, as many scholars have already
pointed out, ASEAN’s institutional changes do not necessarily mean that the
institution has become better at solving regional problems. On the contrary,
most cases illustrate that ASEAN has yet to have an effective problem-solving capability.
Nevertheless, such a capability may not be ASEAN’s institutional objective.
Here, the analysis contributes to the understanding of what these institutions
are and what they are not, by showing institutional continuity and change.
Throughout its institutional
changes in the post-Cold War period, ASEAN has continuously attempted to ensure
its member states’ security interests, particularly national independence,
prevention of political marginalization, and regional autonomy from great power
politics. The institutional norm of ASEAN Centrality is a case in point. To
ensure these interests, ASEAN does not play pure “balance-of-power” politics,
due to the limited military and economic capabilities of member states.
Instead, through political alignment, member states can maintain policy options
to adjust their political distance from each regional great power at any given
point in time, as if they played a role of a quasi-balancer. However, their
behavior is ultimately based on ASEAN’s core political/security interest.
ASEAN’s reaction to the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is illustrative. Too often, AIIB is
seen as a challenge or even a threat to ASEAN Centrality, given China’s leading
role in the institution. It is reasonable to assume, considering ASEAN’s
previous negative reactions to the potential consolidation of APEC and the
functional expansion of the Six-Party Talk, that it would politically
marginalize ASEAN. However, ASEAN’s past institutional changes show that ASEAN
Centrality persists on the basis of member states’ motivation to prevent
political marginalization. As long as ASEAN can prevent it, member states do
not react negatively. Indeed, as AIIB’s geographical scope extends to not only
Southeast Asia but also wider Asia, including Central and Southwest Asia, this
scope does not conflict with ASEAN’s interest. In other words, a central role
that ASEAN has been playing in East Asia will not be threatened. Essentially,
ASEAN’s motivation for such a central role does not come from its desire to
lead, but its desire to protect.
Understanding the causes and
processes of institutional change is important to grasp not only the
possibility and limitation of ASEAN’s institutional change, but also ASEAN’s
reaction to a particular international event. It is certainly better for East
Asia if ASEAN enhances its problem-solving capabilities in the region. However,
such function remains its second-tier objective, unless the problems impede
member states’ fundamental political/security interests. Accordingly, the
analytical model presented here can contribute by providing a useful tool for
examining institutional changes and its nature.
About The Author:
About The Author:
Kei Koga is an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. His recent publications include “Preparing for Future Disasters: Strategic Assistance and the U.S.-Japan Alliance: The National Bureau of Asian Research” [co-authored] (NBR Report, 2015) and “The Yasukuni question: histories, logics, and Japan–South Korea relations” (The Pacific Review, 2015). He is the author of the forthcoming book, Reinventing Regional Security Institution: Power Shifts, Ideas, and Institutional Change in Asia and Africa.
End Notes
To be sure, there are plenty
of studies on institutional change in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). However, the majority of these studies solely focused on NATO and did
not focus on other institutions, particularly those organizations that do not
include world great powers, such as ASEAN, the Economic Community of the West
African States (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Mencosur, Arab
League, and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
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This article was originally published at E-International Relations on October 26, 2015 under Creative Commons 3.0
AIDN: 001-11-2015-0395
