Power Bumps on the Way to Regional Community: Asia’s Mixed Security Logics

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how persistent uncertainties about US East Asian commitments have informed that region’s efforts to construct a stable regional order beyond a set of US-centric arrangements in place since the Cold War. Moved by two related imperatives — specifically the need to ameliorate questions about US East Asia commitments and a need to engage an increasingly influential China that had been mostly outside that US system — those efforts have been given particular expression in the creation of regional frameworks like the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the ASEAN Plus Three (APT), and the East Asia Summit (EAS). Of special interest to this chapter have been the ways in which conceptualizations of ‘regional community’ have informed their development. Theoretically contested and practically challenged, neither regional community conceptualizations nor institutional trends have been straightforward in their development. Still, the significance of regional community expressions lies in their projection of a more China-inclusive regional order and of regional security that contrasts with that expressed by US alliances and partnerships. The result is a regional system of mixed community and deterrence logics. Tensions between these two security logics have recently become sharper with two related developments: firstly, the growth of Chinese influence, and, secondly, heightened US regional attention as expressed most notably in the US ‘pivot’/’rebalance’ to Asia.