Seeking a place for East Asian regionalism: challenges and opportunities under the global financial crisis

Abstract

After the devastating experience of the Asian financial crisis more than ten years ago, East Asia launched regional economic cooperation efforts. East Asia's mixed response to the global financial crisis a decade later, however, reveals how certain impetuses that gave rise to unified efforts to regional institution building in East Asia at the time of the AFC derived, fundamentally, from the region's defensive desire as it positioned itself within the harsh global economic and political environment of that time. The GFC triggered reorganization of global economic governance by discrediting neoliberal principles, introducing a new global governance structure and allowing reliance of domestic stimuli for economic recovery. Those shifts, in turn, led to the loss of East Asia's basic mandate towards regional cooperation. In other words, the focus of solving the region's economic vulnerability has now moved from regional arrangement to national and global stages. In particular, the East Asian governments now see less of a need to counterweight the predominant neoliberal voice through unified regional voice as the expansion of the forum to discuss global economic governance to G20 and IMF reform to provide East Asia more representation.