Ideational and Normative Regionalism: The Case of ASEAN

Abstract

ASEAN, which was established for achieving stability, developing economic, political and cultural cooperation in the region, was evaluated a sui generis pattern of regionalism. Especially after 1997 The Asia Financial Crisis, countries of the region who give importance to strength the economic interdependence, increased normative and ideational integration activities besides economic integration. Both creating the region and sustaining activities, the emphasize of independence, nonintervention, respect to sovereignty, culture and history constitutes common norms and it can be seen that the policies of organization’s in international summits and platforms are complementary of its normative and ideational regionalism. One of the motivations behind ASEAN’s regionalism which has formed by formerly colonized countries is the idea of the joint action which may constitute by countries that share common valuesto the threats,which is identified as “security communities” by Karl Deutsch. Beside having differences, Southeast Asian countries have a lot of common norms and their cluster is rooted by this similar values and the organization sees these norms as a tool to protect themselves from outer threats and championed them in international platforms. Like other organizations, ASEAN modeled its structure from European integration. However, with including regions own cultural characteristics and values, it can be argued that the organization operates as a normative actor which unites local, regional and globalfeatures. This research is prepared to make a contribution to ideational and normative regionalism literature and aimed to take attention to the third dimension of regionalism that differs from economic or security regionalism studies. Additionally, although there is a remarkable increase in attention to non-European regionalism researches recently, the Euro-centrism on regionalism analysis remains dominant in the international relations field and it causes to ignore the other regions own structures and characteristics. In the first chapter of the research, old, new and comparative regionalism studies in international relations literature will be examined on the ideational and normative regionalism framework and different from economic, political and security dimensions, the impact of norms and ideas to constructing regions will be evaluated. In this context, researches on the norm, common values, culture and history of constructive theory and English School will be used. After this section, South East Asian regionalism studies will be expressed by examining ASEAN on the historical process and after the era of decolonization the dimensions of political, economic and security relations of region’s states will be explained. In the final chapter, as distinct from topics of the previous chapter the ideational and normative regionalism stands as one of the key features of the organization’s which is so-called ASEAN Way will be shown and it will be reached as a result that the norms and rules that organizations have developed have influence on region building and international initiatives.