The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation [1 ed.] 9789048518029, 9789089644770

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The Making of the Asia Pacific Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation

Copyright © 2012. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

See Seng Tan

amsterdam university press

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Copyright © 2012. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

The Making of the Asia Pacific

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Publications Series General Editor Paul van der Velde Publications Officer Martina van den Haak Editorial Board Prasenjit Duara (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore) / Carol Gluck (Columbia University) / Christophe Jaffrelot (Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales-Sciences-po) / Victor T. King (Universiti Brunei Darussalam) / Yuri Sadoi (Meijo University) / A.B. Shamsul (Institute of Occidental Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) / Henk Schulte Nordholt (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) / Wim Boot (Leiden University) The IIAS Publications Series consists of Monographs and Edited Volumes. The Series publishes results of research projects conducted at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Furthermore, the aim of the Series is to promote interdisciplinary studies on Asia and comparative research on Asia and Europe. The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the

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interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation. The institute focuses on the humanities and social sciences and, where relevant, on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia scholars worldwide. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing various parties together, working as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, hosting academic organisations dealing with Asia, constructing international networks, and setting up international cooperative projects and research programmes. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Asia and Europe. For further information, please visit www.iias.nl

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

The Making of the Asia Pacific Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation

Copyright © 2012. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

See Seng Tan

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Publications Series

Monographs 10

Cover illustration: Michael Tan

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Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Layout: The DocWorkers, Almere ISBN e-ISBN e-ISBN NUR

978 90 8964 477 0 978 90 4851 802 9 (pdf) 978 90 4851 803 6 (ePub) 759

© IIAS / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the author of the book.

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Copyright © 2012. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

For Trina and Elisabeth

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Copyright © 2012. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved. Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Table of Contents

List of Tables

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1

9

Acknowledgements

11

Introduction: From ‘Pacific Asia’ to ‘Asia Pacific’ The Politics of Representation What Discourses Do About This Book

13 16 19 20

2 The Desire for Essence State of the Art: Security, Sovereignty and Subjectivity Art of the State: What States Make Ideas All the Way Down Conclusion: Beyond Essentialism and Rationalism?

27 31 34 40 43

3 Knowledge Networks as Agents of Representation Debating Epistemic Agency Knowledge Networks as Instrumental Agents Knowledge Networks as ‘Abject Beings’ Epistemic Agency as Political Prerogative Knowledge Networks and Their Representational Practices A Strategy in Radical Constructivism How Texts Work Conclusion: Towards a Radical Constructivism

45 46 47 52 55 57 62 63 67

4 Representing the ‘Asia Pacific’ ‘Asia Pacific’: Whose and What? A Realm of Abjection Presupposition Predication Placement/Positioning of Subjects ‘It’s Europe, stupid!’ A Realm of Uncertainty and Opportunity Presupposition Predication

69 75 76 77 78 79 83 85 89 91

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Placement/Positioning of Subjects Conclusion: Whither Asia Pacific Subjectivity?

94 108

5 Representing Sovereign States The State as a Constructed and Contested Identity Presupposition Predication Placement/Positioning of Subjects The China Threat and the Writing of ‘America’ Conclusion: Are States What States Make of Them?

111 112 115 122 126 127 133

6 Representing the ‘In/Human’ Faces of Asia Pacific Security Asia Pacific Security: Reset or Redux? Non-Traditionalising Security: Expanding State Purview and Control? Humanising Security: Who’s Responsible? From ‘Right’ to ‘Responsibility’: Re-visioning Sovereignty? (En)Countering Terrorism: Abjection and Agency at the ‘Second Front’ Conclusion: Domesticating Security, Sovereignty and Subjectivity

135 138

7 Representing the ‘Authority’ of Knowledge Networks Deconstructing the Imagined Community Self-Formation Self-Governance Track 2 Discourse: Revolution or Re-incitement? Sovereignty-Subjectivity Nexus: Reinforcement or Reinstatement? Forming and Governing the Track 2 ‘Self’: Two Illustrations Domesticating the Regional Security Discourse Domesticating Human Rights Discourse Conclusion: The Precarious Art of Self-Representation

155 157 160 162 165

8 Conclusion: A Plea in Three Parts The Persistent Allure of Essence The Scholar/Statesman Paradox An Invitation to Play

179 180 182 184

139 142 146 148 152

167 169 169 173 176

Notes

187

Bibliography

203

Index

229

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

List of Tables

1A 1B 1C 2 3

Predicates Predicates Predicates Predicates Predicates

and and and and and

Practices Practices Practices Practices Practices

on ‘China’ (Set 1) on ‘China’ (Set 2) on ‘China’ (Set 3) on ‘Taiwan’ on ‘America’/‘United States’

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Table Table Table Table Table

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

116 117 118 118 119

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Acknowledgements

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In the process of researching and penning this work, I have benefited hugely from the support of colleagues, friends and institutions, without which this book would likely not have been possible. I am particularly indebted to Joseph Liow, Ralf Emmers, Bhubhindar Singh, Iqbal Singh Sevea, Barry Desker, Alicia Cheung, William Tow, and Michael Tan. The Australian Research Council provided a Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS) fellowship grant. The S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), my home institution, furnished a grant and – crucially – a timely sabbatical. The Department of International Relations at the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of International, Political & Strategic Studies as well as CEPS at Griffith University (Mt. Gravatt Campus) offered wonderful academic hospitality; for that, my heartfelt gratitude to William Tow, Paul Hutchcroft, Simon Bronitt, Bruce MacLeod, Milisa Haberschusz, and especially Kana Moy. Last but not least, thanks are also due to Paul van der Velde and Martina van den Haak of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden for their wonderful editorial guidance, to the Amsterdam University Press, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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1

Introduction: From ‘Pacific Asia’ to ‘Asia Pacific’

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The idea of a beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning … (Said 1979: 16) Whose ideas matter? Such is the title of an acclaimed work on agency and power in international relations (Acharya 2009). Ideas and visions, championed by interested institutions and individuals with power and position or backed by those with such, could conceivably emerge as the preponderant ideology of a given environment and even come to be accepted in time as, if you will, ‘the natural order of things’. But as this book will show, political ideas, agency and power vis-à-vis the ‘Asia Pacific’ do not necessarily lend themselves to the seemingly neat and self-evident resolutions that support the standard chronicles that adorn the pages of college textbooks and scholarly tomes on Asia Pacific international affairs. A transnational hub of knowledge communities, by dint of their focused policy-oriented advocacy, contributed to the making of the regional security architecture of post-Cold War East Asia (or Pacific Asia). Aided by the ideas and ideals of like-minded academics, their efforts effectively represented (some might say misrepresented) the East/ Pacific Asian region, wherein most of the activities in security regionalisation tended to be concentrated, as the ‘Asia Pacific’, thereby fostering the impression of a considerably wider regional security domain than the physical limits of East/Pacific Asia might have allowed. Accounts differ, but most propose that the Asia Pacific idea had its beginnings in policy discourses in the late 1980s, possibly a year or two before the Cold War ended.1 Taken to denote an expanse of staggering complexity and proportions, the regional idea enjoyed prominence during much of the 1990s thanks in no small part to networks of security studies institutes and policy think tanks whose dialogical, consultative and cooperative activities helped produce a precise knowledge about the region and its dominant modalities of collective existence. Also known variously as ‘epistemic’ or ‘interpretive’ communities (Adler 2005; Haas 1990, 1992; Verdun 1999; Zito 2001), these loosely-knit networks of

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THE MAKING OF THE ASIA PACIFIC

(in the context of these pages) ‘security intellectuals’ or ‘intellectuals of statecraft’ (Luckham 1984a, 1984b; O’Tuathail & Agnew 1992) – academics, policy intellectuals and policy practitioners who claim professional expertise in international affairs – facilitated the emergence of narratives on ‘Asia Pacific security’ that helped shape regional understandings of apparent strategic challenges confronting the region and the appropriate strategies for dealing with those challenges. In a key sense, our very understanding of the ‘Asia Pacific’ can be partly traced back to the discursive (and non-discursive) labours of these knowledge brokers. Nevertheless, important as their narratives have been in sanctioning and sustaining a particular rendition of Asia Pacific life, they do not always comport with the totality of socially lived experience in the region, certainly not the concrete experiences of those for whom the state system holds no significance or claims no allegiance. At the risk of oversimplification, the Asia Pacific that ‘emerged’ out of those regional security discourses principally refers to a post-Cold War geopolitical ‘imaginary’ whose ostensible regional structure consists in an assemblage of sovereign states – including some of the world’s largest, most populous and, in economic and military terms, most powerful nations – that are further enmeshed in webs of American-led alliances and multilateral institutional arrangements, most of them hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). To these primary forms of state-centric regionalism may be added the burgeoning transnational economic and cultural ties pursued and sustained by a diversity of ‘non-state’ subjectivities from the corporate world and civil society that reinforce the perception of the Asia Pacific as a region, if not community (Yamamoto 1995). Indeed, so compelling has this regional idea evidently been that if it did not exist, it would, as has been argued, ‘have to be invented by policy planners and social scientists’ who share in the conviction that the vast expanse in question would eventuate in ‘an integrated source of boundless markets, wondrous raw materials, and ever-expanding investments’ (Wilson & Dirlik 1995: 2). Certainly, the sanguinity behind views such as this has sobered considerably in the wake of financial crises, pandemics, tsunamis and terrorist incidents that have blighted the region in the recent past. Even then, efforts to redefine – or, as others have put it, ‘rediscover’ (Woods 1997) – the region by way of, among other things, a discourse on regional security remains, in part at least, in the hands – or, more aptly, the words – of the region’s knowledge communities. When and how did this discourse of knowledge and power concerning ‘Asia Pacific security’ emerge? How did the constitutive elements, natural categories and inherent subjectivities – the foundational genera, if you will – that presumably make up Asia Pacific security arise? Whose interests are being served whenever the expression ‘Asia Pacific

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15

security’ is invoked? To whose Asia Pacific and, in that vein, whose security are we referring? It has been argued rather persuasively that this regional idea, together with related ideas such as the ‘Pacific Century’, is predominantly a Euro-American invention of a geographically vast and culturally diverse region (Dirlik 1992). But the idea has also subsequently been accommodated, appropriated, reformulated and mobilised by the region’s knowledge networks to serve a variety of interests. Chief among their interests is the desire to domesticate and manage the local and regional environs, which the networks achieve through disseminating a pervasive wisdom regarding the sovereign state as the most enduring form of political identity known in modern world history and the linchpin of relevant answers to fundamental questions of and about international life (Walker & Mendlovitz 1990). Take, for instance, the claim by a liberal international theorist that the principal task in security studies was to develop answers to ‘questions that Realism poses but fails to answer’ (Keohane 1986: 198-199). By disallowing the possibility that questions posed by ‘Realism’ might not be the only ones that matter to the majority of the world’s inhabitants, that eminent theorist uncritically privileged social constructs such as international anarchy and states as ‘central facts’ that need little or no explanation (Ashley 1988, 1989). ‘If you fail to ask the right questions’, as Richard Falk (2005) once mused, ‘it is impossible to find the right answers’. On the other hand, ‘there is nothing natural about a world simply divided into territorial states and their interactions with one another’ (Agnew & Corbridge 1995: 5). The stuff of Asia Pacific security – the things on which academics and policy intellectuals specialising in international security affairs bestow currency and legitimacy – is neither natural nor self-evident. Far from innocent, all knowledge of and about Asia Pacific security is therefore not based on objective representations of the region ‘as it is’, but on histories of struggle among multiple epistemic agents – including the knowledge brokers of interest here – to organise, occupy and administer space, time and identity. In short, it is – even if only indirectly and implicitly – about ‘fixing a home’ for man in space and time through an identity and ideology predicated on the state or some other sovereign subjectivity (Walker 1993: 39-40). Nevertheless, that such knowledge is itself contested and contestable does not preclude attempts by its agents to make it seem less so. Yet it is by such actions that ‘the utterly mysterious turns into the readily familiar’ (Walker 1992: 182), as it were; hence the difficulty, if not fallacy, of separating the world from the words and wordsmiths who define it. ‘Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye’, according to Homi Bhabha (1990: 1). ‘Such an image or narration of the nation might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from

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those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea’. So too, we might add, from contemporary narratives on security, sovereignty and subjectivity in and of the Asia Pacific region – a discourse whose viability is partly enabled by those same traditions, even if no direct link between them is ever conceded explicitly by their appropriators.

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The Politics of Representation The English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once asserted that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (1852: 49). In response, W.H. Auden memorably rejoined that such a statement better describes the secret police than poets (1989: 27). This book is neither about poets nor the secret police, although readers may be forgiven for thinking so given its broad emphasis on texts and discourses on the one hand, and the notion of the domestication and regulation of what is possible and permissible in regional life on the other. Acts of domestication and regulation involve practices and processes that Michel Foucault (1977) has described as discipline and punishment. That said, inasmuch as the field of Asia Pacific security has become a cottage industry, one can also understand Asia Pacific security as a kind of corporate institution established for managing, and thereby constructing, the Asia Pacific region by issuing statements about it, sanctioning views of it, describing and teaching it, settling or domesticating it, and of course policing it.2 To the extent that the language of Asia Pacific security works to domesticate and regulate the polymorphous ‘nature’ of regional life, then it may be that both ‘poets’ and ‘police’ are in effect one and the same, or are working in collusion to constitute the contemporary world of Asia Pacific security. For some, security dialogues undertaken by loosely-knit networks of ‘nonofficial’ knowledge brokerages are empirically rich but theoretically shallow exercises (Alagappa 2003: ix), whilst for others they are little more than a collection of flatulent musings and vacant pontificating (Jones & Smith 2001b: 285). Despite the relative aptness of these claims, what is absent therein is arguably a critical appreciation for the productiveness of discourse in both theoretical as well as substantive respects.3 Hence, what one observer has termed ‘a healthy and pluralistic array of dialogue activities’ conducted under the ‘Track 2’ rubric (Evans 1994a: 130) – as opposed to ‘Track 1’, that is, governmental or official – can, in another respect, be understood as ‘semi-official narratives that authorise and provoke certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing counter-narratives from emerging’ (Said 1993: 324). My argument as such is that without examining Asia Pacific

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INTRODUCTION: FROM ‘PACIFIC ASIA’ TO ‘ASIA PACIFIC’

17

security as a discourse, one cannot possibly appreciate the systematic discipline by which regional Track 2 institutions, along with the stock of ideas from the twin worlds of academia and policy within which they are co-located, have been able to manage – or, for that matter, produce – the Asia Pacific as a political, diplomatic, economic, military and cultural subject of the post-Cold War period. Indeed, so evidently ‘authoritative’ has that discourse been that few today can think, write or speak regarding the Asia Pacific without subscribing to the socio-linguistic parameters delineated by that discourse. But much as I am concerned with the words and work of knowledge networks, my aim is not to reproduce a history of Track 2 diplomacy and the policy think tanks and academic institutions that participate in it, a fair amount of which has already been written elsewhere (Ball 2000; Cheit 1992; Evans 1994b; Katsumata 2003b; Kim & Young 2005; Kraft 2000b; Simon 2002; Woods 1993). What I am principally interested in are effects that arise from the discourses on security produced and circulated by the region’s premier knowledge communities – including, but not exclusive to, the sub-regional grouping of policy think tanks collectively known as the ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS), the Asia Pacific-wide Council for Security Cooperation in Asia Pacific (CSCAP) and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC), theme-based research-cum-advocacy hubs such as the Consortium of Non-Traditional Security Studies in Asia (NTS-Asia), and the wider community of university-based security intellectuals – that affirm and sustain the dominant image of the Asia Pacific as a region comprised primarily of sovereign states, and secondarily of diverse ‘non-state’ subjects, not all of whom are necessarily endowed (or perceived to be endowed) with agency. Indeed, it is within the discursive framework or domain allowed by that dominant statebased construal – in which Asia Pacific analysts of different theoretical persuasions, whether realist, liberal or mainstream constructivist, fundamentally share – that some of those ‘non-state’ entities are represented as abject social beings with little or no agency of which to speak. Nor, for that matter, do states enjoy the same level or quality of agential privilege within that domain. The immediately critical period in question here is the 1990s, when these epistemic networks contributed to the post-Cold War Asia Pacific.4 The first decade of the twenty-first century, marked by the post-9/11 concern over religion-inspired domestic and international terrorism and, specifically for the Asia Pacific, the focus on ‘non-traditional’ and ‘human’ security issues, are also of importance to this book given the role that security intellectuals from the region and beyond played in constructing and instantiating perdurable as well as new imaginaries with which the Asia Pacific has in more recent times come to be associated.

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THE MAKING OF THE ASIA PACIFIC

This is not to imply that regional security discourses unilaterally determine what can be said about the Asia Pacific. I do not insist that language therefore is everything, or that discourse exhaustively produces that which it allows. Rather, it is the whole network of interests – of which discourse is both function as well as authoriser – that are inexorably brought to bear on any instance when Asia Pacific security is in question. Significantly, this book does not deny that the lives, histories and customs of the diverse lands and peoples of the Asia Pacific do not have a kind of brute reality greater than anything that could be said or written about them in security discourse. Instead, the claim here is that there can be no reference to any subjectivity which is not, at the same time, a further production of that subjectivity simply because our knowledge of it is already and always indebted to some form of language and tradition of interpretation. In short, no Asia Pacific independent of discourse and interpretation is possible, not least where the words, interpretive dispositions and even practical attitudes of knowledge brokerages in the region are concerned. A final preliminary thought on epistemic agency: what should we make of the notion of ‘Track 2’ or ‘second-track’? For the most part, most analysts seem more or less satisfied with the by now common explanation that it refers to a semi-official process of multilateral security dialogue and cooperation that is ‘endogenous to the Asia Pacific, but exogenous to the individual state policy-making elites of the region’ (Higgott 1994: 368). More recently, a noted student of the region argued for ‘symbiosis’ between the first and second tracks as a possible solution for better management of challenges to the region’s economic security (Morrison 2004). But however sensible these claims may seem, the Track 2 process is neither wholly ‘endogenous to the Asia Pacific’ – if by this we mean all its participants are from, and/or its activities conducted are held within, the Asia Pacific region – nor ‘exogenous’ to policy elites – if by this we mean it is hermetically sealed from official policy circles.5 If so, writers and writings whose ideas as well as frames and terms of reference are fed by proxy into second-track dialogues and whose articulations help define the post-Cold War Asia Pacific can, in an important respect, also be regarded as indirect interlocutors in the region’s security discourse. Moreover, if we accept the view that the region’s security planners and practitioners function and are enabled within a discursive domain or space demarcated by the regional discourse on security – a discourse in which security intellectuals as well as practitioners are intimately involved – then in a critical sense, the notion of ‘policymaking’ need not be limited to state elites as international theory in the main understands it. Rather, the policy process could conceivably include the nameless bureaucrats who produce the numerous memoranda, intelligence reports and policy papers; pundits who

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INTRODUCTION: FROM ‘PACIFIC ASIA’ TO ‘ASIA PACIFIC’

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contribute to the op-ed pages of daily broadsheets and on the Web and the blogosphere; ‘talking heads’ who pontificate on CNN and other broadcast infotainment; as well as universities, research institutes and think tanks, and the security intellectuals that staff them (Doty 1993: 303).6 Stated differently, Asia Pacific security discourse is irreducible to Track 2, whereas Track 2 is irreducible to the realm of the ‘non-state’. For my purposes, there is no need to engage in the sorts of problematic closure sometimes involved in notions of community and the like, although this, as I shall want to suggest, should not preclude the rendition of causal claims. Put differently, it is to acknowledge the epistemic agency of knowledge brokers without subjecting that acknowledgement – as well as the agents in question – to essentialism and reification.

What Discourses Do

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Without wanting to privilege texts over real people or their concrete experiences, my analysis of the Asia Pacific as an effect of security discourses to which regional knowledge networks contribute quite significantly takes, as its starting point, the view that no human comprehension of the region and its security concerns is conceivable – much less possible – apart from the language and interpretive traditions and dispositions that contribute to its making. Hence this fundamental question about discourse: if one concedes the materiality of a certain aspect of Asia Pacific life – say, the materiality of particular subjects – does his or her concession operate to form and materialise those subjects? Significantly, no hasty conclusions that this automatically leads to ‘nothing but the text’ or ‘interpretation all the way down’ interpretations need apply here.7 As Judith Butler has put it: Is the discourse in and through which that concession occurs – and, yes, that concession invariably does occur – not itself formative of the very phenomenon that it concedes? To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body. (Butler 1993: 10) A second consideration has to do with the avoidance of essentialist or reified understandings of both discourse and the epistemic agents that produce them. For Foucault, discourse ‘refers neither to an individual subject, nor to some kind of collective consciousness, nor to a transcendental subjectivity’; rather, it is ‘an anonymous field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking subjects’ (1986: 122).

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THE MAKING OF THE ASIA PACIFIC

Thus understood, security discourses are not just ways by which the Asia Pacific can be articulated and known but are linked to specific claims regarding speaking legitimately or correctly about the region. They act to marginalise and exclude other ways of thinking and specifying the region, while at the same time creating and specifying the relationship of the speaker/author to the object of knowledge, and in the process, de-legitimising and relegating other forms of this relationship. As such, discourses are political resources that can be mobilised and deployed to validate particular political arrangements in the Asia Pacific (Dalby 1990: 174). Nevertheless, as noted earlier, acknowledgement of the problematic closure on notions such as ‘agent’, ‘person’, ‘community’ or, for our purposes, ‘network’ does not and should not preclude my articulation in causal terms – notably, the post-Cold War Asia Pacific as a social construction of a security discourse purveyed by Track 2 epistemic agents – as long as this concession to essentialism is rendered on strategic rather than philosophical and theoretical grounds, without ignoring or palliating the ambivalences and antinomies that unsettle attempts to ascribe a sovereign voice and unadulterated agency to any subjectivity. The concern here is two-fold: firstly, to avoid the so-called ‘Nietzschean trap’ of ‘metalepsis’ – that is, the fallacy of substituting an effect for a cause and vice versa, when thinking in causal terms (Williams 1984) – while, secondly, to nevertheless address epistemic networks in causal terms, without ignoring or palliating the contradiction and paradox of such as equally effects in themselves, for the reason that one simply ‘can’t throw away thinking causally’ (Spivak 1990: 23). In other words, neither the downplaying nor outright denial of human agency need obtain along with the concession that agency is always and only a political privilege. A greater understanding of the ‘dramatis personae of the policy process’ is therefore called for (Higgott 1994: 367) – in regard to their discursive practices of statecraft as epistemic agents, yes, but free of the positivist-rationalist preoccupation with establishing determinate causation and fixing subjectivity as sovereign.8

About This Book The reflection on contemporary Asia Pacific security as discourse that follows is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. The next two chapters discuss two significant, related sets of scholarly contributions to Asia Pacific security studies – one on epistemic (or what I have referred to here as ‘knowledge’) networks in the region, the other on the particular mode of constructivism fashionable in this regional discipline – that together serve as the backdrop against which an alternative ‘radical

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constructivist’ approach I have adopted for this study is introduced in the second chapter. Chapter 2, ‘The Desire for Essence’, surveys the relevant to-date literature on Asia Pacific international relations and security studies and identifies specific gaps and problems germane to the concerns of the book. More fundamentally, it detects in that literature shared aspirations for what I call ‘essence’. While most security analysts accept the notion of the Asia Pacific as a social construction – at the very least, they pay lip service to the cliché – just as quickly, with the mantra safely rehearsed in their preambles, they subsequently and uncritically essentialise the Asia Pacific (and ancillary regional or sub-regional constructs such as ‘East Asia’ or ‘Southeast Asia’) in their formulations. Such reductionism is understandable in realist and liberal-institutional strands of rationalist scholarship on Asia Pacific international relations. But what has been surprising, if not perplexing, is the apparent readiness of many mainstream constructivists writing about Asia Pacific security to engage in similar acts of essentialism, despite the sensitivity that constructivists purportedly harbour about historical contingency.9 Confronted with potentially irresolvable contradictions or un-decidable alternatives – agency versus structure, state versus non-state and the like – the propensity in extant scholarship is to force a resolution or decision, to determine the essence of the matter. Essentialist conceptions of political agency are thereby reliant on specific settlements regarding subjectivity (and/or ontology) as already given and inextricably tied to sovereignty, without which all notions of subjectivity are, accordingly, deemed impossible. Hence, determinations concerning which actor/ agent is the ‘more sovereign’ invariably end up resolving the matter in favour of the state. Put differently, the field of Asia Pacific security already and always privileges an ontological commitment to the nationstate. To the extent that other agents/actors are ‘permitted’ or ‘recognised’ within sovereignty discourses, they are more often than not viewed through the prism of the state and, as such, are assigned identities, roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis the state. Following this, chapter 3, ‘Knowledge Networks as Agents of Representation’, examines three concerns. First, it highlights competing essentialist perspectives on regional knowledge networks in Asia Pacific IR scholarship. Essentialist interpretations represent subjects with varying degrees of political agency in ways that foreclose the possibility for critical inquiry on the assumptions and conclusions behind those readings. Second, in contrast to essentialism, I appropriate Judith Butler’s contention that agency is but a ‘political prerogative’, subject to historical contingency, to make a case for a non-essentialist understanding of epistemic agency, whereby regional knowledge communities socially represent not only the Asia Pacific and the ‘sovereign’ identities that

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make up that world but also their own subjectivity as legitimate agents of security. Third, it discusses a text-based methodology – a radical constructivist strategy, as I call it – with which to critically analyse and assess regional security discourses and the words and works of knowledge networks active in representing/constructing the post-Cold War Asia Pacific. The value of this method is its capacity to analyse discourses on a multidimensional basis. The epistemic agents in question here are principally the knowledge networks (or epistemic communities) active in the region, although their contributions make up only part of regional discourse. While groupings such as the ASEAN-ISIS and the PECC have long been active in regional policy discourse, newer research networks and hubs have joined the ranks.10 Complementing these are other knowledge networks – some relatively well institutionalised and others more loosely knit – formed around particular policy concerns, such as ‘non-traditional security’ challenges, counterterrorism and the like. For example, the NTS-Asia, a consortium of eighteen research institutes from East, South and Southeast Asia working on various aspects of NTS, has contributed more than most to the securitisation of nonmilitary concerns in the Asia Pacific region such as environmental degradation, financial crises, declining fish stocks in regional waters, robbery and piracy at sea, and the like. Chapter 4, ‘Representing the “Asia Pacific”’, briefly introduces several knowledge brokerages and the policy and academic intellectuals cum practitioners – the ‘poets and police’, if you will, of Asia Pacific security – and identifies and examines their discursive practices in regional security discourses to which the ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP and PECC and their ancillary communities contribute. In particular, subjectivities are inscribed in discourse as either authorial, enjoying a significant degree of political agency and power, or as abject and weak and hence relatively – or in some instances considerably – less endowed and effective compared with the former. The representations of post-Cold War Asia Pacific as an uncertain region, as a region increasingly defined by transnational forces that challenge state sovereignty – and the likely regional responses to such forces – and as a realm of economic opportunity and risk are examined here. Crucially, the politics of representation reveal how, in the light of early and quite robust attempts by extra-regional knowledge communities to portray the Asia Pacific as a high-risk region threatened by great power competition and conflict and/or self-inflicted implosion (abjection), indigenous or local communities engaged in counter-narratives that depict a region negotiating myriad challenges and constructing its own stable, peaceful and prosperous destiny (agency and authority).11 At the same time, tensions exist within these local narratives over the security prospects of the Asia Pacific region. Crucially, such representations of the self and the other foster

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conclusions well beyond what the statements themselves explicitly claim, revealing presuppositions and background conditions. Chapter 5, ‘Representing Sovereign States’, explores intellectual representations of state identities. Inextricably tied to knowledge brokers’ representations of the region are their efforts to represent states as the foundational or constitutive elements of regional life. Much as the Asia Pacific remains a contested notion that, paradoxically, is also named (or referenced) in discourse in uncontested ways, the same is true of statist subjectivities which, despite the contested meanings of ‘America’ or ‘China’ – or, for that matter, a regional institutional ‘actor’ such as ‘ASEAN’ – are nonetheless invoked in discourse as given presences, always and already self-evident. Indeed, the ASEAN case is particularly stark given that it is an organisation comprising ten member nations, each holding apparently diverse security perspectives. Against a backdrop of policy debates about identity formation and the changing ‘nature’ of global and regional powers in the Asia Pacific – say, the debate on ‘status quo’ and ‘revisionist’ states, on ‘established’/‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’/‘rising’ powers, and so forth – the politics of representation work variously to assign different values and ascribe different agential powers, prerogatives and discretions to different states such as Australia, China, India, Japan and the United States. Chapter 6, ‘Representing the “In/Human” Faces of Asia Pacific Security’, looks at how regional knowledge networks have promoted and indeed defined the policy agenda of states and regional organisations on ‘non-traditional security’ issues, which conceivably range from financial crises, climate change, natural disasters, food and health considerations, maritime challenges, transnational criminal activities and so forth to terrorism. More than any other, it is knowledge brokers and academics that have been culpable in encouraging – unhelpful and possibly detrimental to conceptual integrity, analytical rigour and policy relevance, in the view of hard security practitioners – the attachment of a slew of prefixes/predicates to security: economic security, environmental security, food security, health security, societal security and the like. Brought under the broad conceptual churches of ‘non-traditional security’ (christened ‘NTS’ by its promoters) and ‘human security’, the loose enterprise has indirectly challenged state sovereignty through its advocacy of multinational and multilateral cooperative responses, which could involve a measure of shared sovereignty and an enlargement of the pool of stakeholders to include non-state actors (e.g. non-governmental and civil-society organisations). On the other hand, the enterprise, particularly informed by ancillary deliberations on the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle (otherwise known as ‘R2P’), has inadvertently enhanced the power and purview of the state through promoting it as the default service provider to and protector of societies and

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populations. The enduring problem of essentialism and sovereign subjectivity is especially critical here, not least in policy determinations on how best to deal with the widening gamut of concerns – which, combined with the region’s flimsy record in human rights and governance and a long dalliance with authoritarianism, both hard and soft – has left the region historically pervious to being represented in abject, inferior and subaltern terms. To that end, the region’s indigenous discourses on NTS, human security and R2P have sought to recoup the Asia Pacific’s ‘human(e)ness’, as it were, whilst reinvesting in the state as the default subjectivity and agency without which the region and its inhabitants would be much worse off. The book is not complete without revisiting the question with which it started: the ‘authority’ of the knowledge brokers whose work and words on security matters help to fashion our understanding of the contemporary Asia Pacific. Chapter 7, ‘Representing the “Authority” of Knowledge Networks’, asks: how do the knowledge networks of interest here ‘represent themselves to themselves’, so to speak? Imagined communities as such exist in the interpretive attitudes and practical dispositions that privilege the sovereign state, held and circulated by knowledge networks and the national security establishments that the former variously support and at times critique. Yet it is precisely this shared commitment to and incessant affirmation of agency and sovereign subjectivity that symbiotically grants the knowledge networks that engage in it their authority and legitimacy as rational, speaking subjects. But such endorsement is not to be taken lightly and thereby requires constant cultivation – in and through discourse, among other things. How knowledge networks, in representing/producing the Asia Pacific to their audiences, engage in self-representation is thereby instructive. The complexity of practices that go into the constitution of the self in Asia Pacific security discourse is impressive. In this respect, two groupings of practices are noteworthy: first, self-forming practices, which can roughly be divided into self-production and self-promotion; and second, self-governing practices, which can be divided into self-surveillance and self-regulation. Finally, in ‘Conclusion: A Plea in Three Parts’, the book closes with a reflection on the persistent allure of essentialism in security ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ in the Asia Pacific, which knowledge networks help establish and preserve. It is suggested that a rethinking on Asia Pacific security begins with sustained critique and reflection. To be sure, these are foundational elements to the work of every scholar, analyst or informed lay person concerning regional matters. Nonetheless, it is ironic how pundits and practitioners ‘forget’ such prerequisites owing to a convenient reliance on dominant geopolitical imaginaries which, supported and sanctioned by ontological essentialism, insist on a particular

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representation of the ‘Asia Pacific’ through discourses on ‘Asia Pacific security’.

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2 The Desire for Essence

The problematic essentialisms that characterise the contributions of Track 2 knowledge networks of the Asia Pacific are also to be found in constructivist writings in international relations, not least those which make the Asia Pacific (or East Asia and Southeast Asia) their foci of study. To be sure, realist/realpolitik contributions, with their insistence on assuming the unquestioned objectivity of their claims, are the most blatant and readily available expressions of essentialism in Asia Pacific security studies,1 and a number of excellent rejoinders from non-realist quarters have arisen in recent years (Burke & McDonald 2007). The more interesting and tricky examples of essentialism are those within the efforts of (self-professed) constructivist scholars of Asia Pacific security, whose otherwise appealing innovations on identity-based questions are, at least to my mind, stymied by a common refusal to entertain seriously the radical implications that their inquiries raise. Yet it is this same refusal that renders suspect their claim of Asia Pacific security as a social construction. More precisely, it is not their claim per se that evokes suspicion as much as their foreclosure of inquiry into their own complicity in the constitutive process – a problem involving fundamental suppositions about subjectivity as sovereign, in short. Arguably, any serious attempt at addressing this enduring problem of subjectivity, which has long informed security studies generally and Asia Pacific security studies particularly, would find better purchase in an understanding of subjectivity that is decoupled from the long-cherished supposition of sovereignty (Tan 2006). But as we shall see, most constructivists writing about the contemporary Asia Pacific implicitly share a desire for essence for which their realist and rationalist counterparts are better known. Social constructivist accounts have been making their mark in the field of Asia Pacific security studies (Acharya 2009, 2011; Ba 2009; Haacke 2003; Johnston 2007; Katsumata 2010). So forceful has their advance been that at least one pundit has taken to describing the field, rightly or otherwise, in terms of ‘the new constructivist orthodoxy’ prevalent among many students of regional affairs (Khoo 2004: 45). This development is all the more remarkable for having taken place within an enterprise that has hitherto eschewed the application of formal

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theory to the analysis of regional security (Emmerson 1987). As a consequence, the time-honoured view that regional security studies ‘primarily involve recognition of prevailing reality [as] it actually is’ and ‘have not been, to any significant degree, philosophical, methodological, disciplinary, or missionary constructs’ is no longer tenable, if at all (Sandhu 1992: 299). If anything, the self-conscious deploying of the sorts of paradigmatic cum methodological approaches more commonly found in the pages of celebrated academic periodicals for international theory such as International Security, International Organization or Review of International Studies to the study of Asia Pacific affairs is also, for want of a better term, ‘constructivist’ in that such efforts seek to delineate the field in terms of particular constructs. They aim in part to reconstruct our orientations on Asia Pacific security – indeed, of ‘Asia Pacific’ per se – since all theoretical perspectives on regional security, including those they seek to supplant, are, according to the logic of constructivism, social constructs (Lapid 1989). Not surprisingly, the constructivist ‘turn’ in the study of Asia Pacific regionalism has provoked a number of quite diverse rejoinders, none of which, however, describes the assessment I want to proffer in my discussion in this chapter (Jones & Smith 2001a, 2002a; Khoo 2004; Leifer 2001; Peou 2002). Instead, the concern here has to do with the appeal by constructivists for a particular methodology that, where the study of Asia Pacific security is concerned, likely reveals more about their specific metaphysical and ontological commitments, which at times contradict one another, than it does about the lives, histories and customs of the localities under scrutiny. By no means unitary, constructivist contributions nevertheless evince sufficient shared aims and conclusions to warrant this claim. In that respect, as is the case with any methodology or technique, the preference for constructivism and its categories ‘arguably says more about us, our collective constructions of international life and our desires than it does about what is happening in the world’ (Doty 2000: 139). What much of Asia Pacific constructivism likely reveals is the desire to discover, or perhaps to recover, the ostensible essence or fundamental nature of Asia Pacific security. In that respect, constructivists are no different from neo-realist and neo-liberal rationalists in their common modern quest to construe deep structure and natural teleology in international politics (Ashley & Walker 1990). But in order to pull this feat off, constructivists would have to resolve the tensions arising from three potentially contradictory aims. First, they want to turn security analysis from the highly empirical and shallow enterprise that has hitherto characterised Track 2 contributions into a theoretically grounded and analytically rigorous one (Alagappa 2003: ix). Second, they want to adopt a critical stance towards rationalist-oriented theories, notably, neo-realism

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and neo-liberalism. Third, they want to maintain unity, stability and order in the security studies discipline by unifying the field through the bridging of approaches otherwise thought to be incompatible (Wendt 1991).2 In endlessly alternating between these competing aims, constructivism could conceivably end up deconstructing the very foundations it seeks to establish in Asia Pacific security studies. As such, the relentless search for essence – or, more properly, the desire, if not for the reality of essence then certainly its ideal – could well be an improbable quest for a holy grail. Such self-deconstructing reconstructions of Asia Pacific security invite both admiration and bafflement. Constructivists are to be admired for their willingness, even boldness, in confronting a field long dominated, at least perceptibly so, by a realist orientation (Huxley 1996; Kerr 1994; Simon 1995). They are to be admired for attempting to do in an explicit fashion what most analysts working within that domain do only implicitly and often accidentally: offer a social basis for analysing regional security. To pursue the claim that fundamental aspects of revered accounts of Asia Pacific security bear rethinking clearly requires courage, not least where the complex relationships between power, on the one hand, and ideas, identities and norms on the other, is concerned. In that respect, some constructivist works on Asia Pacific security cooperation, ‘region-making’ and regional community can certainly be regarded as bold in their sweep and ambition – the impressive oeuvre of Amitav Acharya, for example (Acharya 2001, 2009, 2011). Indeed, there is much in Asia Pacific constructivism with which to concur – not least, the insistence that we ought to pay greater attention to identity concerns as they pertain to regionalism, or to the related notion of ‘imagined communities’ in the regional context (Adler 1997, 2005). On the other hand, there is much that evokes bafflement, especially over the way some constructivists seem intent on retying the very knots they have worked so hard at disentangling. On the one hand, constructivism presupposes a voluntarist subject that socially constitutes identities and ideologies through instrumental actions. In other words, every productive act is seen to stem from an identifiable author or actor, whether defined in individual or collective terms. This first understanding revives the enduring problem of subjectivity that constructivism has, on occasion, sought to call into question. On the other hand, constructivism also understands social production in terms of discourses and ideas that operate deterministically to constitute reality. More broadly, the ‘critical’ constructivism of Nicholas Onuf is a plausible candidate befitting this tradition partly because of its implicit acceptance of a structuralist interpretation of language-game theory, which emphasises the completeness of language and sees meaning emerging out of relationships internal to linguistic systems (Palan 2000: 586; Campbell

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1998). But as I shall argue, this logic can also be found in versions of constructivism that presuppose subjectivity – for example, the ‘ideas all the way down’ logic of Alexander Wendt.3 This second understanding potentially makes a mockery of human agency. In this respect, not even ‘postmodern’ constructivists, whose writings appear to epitomise (or so their critics often aver) a ‘nothing but the text’ reasoning, would insist that everything can or should be reduced to the discursive realm: ‘discourse is discourse’, as Baudrillard and Lotringer have allowed, ‘but the operations, strategies, and schemes played out there are real’ (1987: 5). In an important sense, however, this understanding of constructivism can also be situated within the problem of subjectivity, although in this instance it is norms rather than humans that play the role of constructor/producer. While the bulk of what stands for Asia Pacific constructivism is more or less predisposed towards the first understanding, there are some aspects of it that stress the second understanding. This chapter will deal with attempts that constitute subjectivity, either through state-centrism or an ideational or normative determinism, in the Asia Pacific as well as sub-regional contexts in ways that mimic various naturalising and delimiting practices which constructivism claims to avoid. To that end, I will focus on the embedded rationalism in the constructivism of leading exponents of that genre – Peter J. Katzenstein, Alexander Wendt, Emanuel Adler and the like – whose writings have partly inspired the constructivist turn in Asia Pacific security studies. I will also explore various constructivist contributions to Asia Pacific security, particularly their uncritical emulation of conceptual conundrums that plague constructivism in general. In its quest to dismantle various intellectual and political barriers put up by rationalism, much of Asia Pacific constructivism instead ends up, if only indirectly, ‘policing the discourse’ on regional affairs by determining what properly constitutes legitimate and illegitimate courses of inquiry (Sullivan 1996). In other words, the parochialism and provincialism of which constructivism indicts realist and liberal rationalism and from whose claims it seeks to distance itself could equally have been its problem as well. Indeed, insofar as even the more critically inclined versions of constructivism continue to ‘posit a limit to the limit-attitude’, warns David Campbell (1998: 224), they are bound to ‘replicate elements associated with the more mainstream appropriations from which they want to be distanced’. This is not to imply that constructivism seeks deliberately to subvert its own agenda; after all, its agenda is essentially limited in reach, tethered to rationalist reins. Rather, it highlights fidelity in certain epistemological foundations that constructivists share with other positivists.

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State of the Art: Security, Sovereignty and Subjectivity In their introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary issue of International Organisation, a trio of iconic IR theorists, Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane and Stephen Krasner – nominally representing the constructivist, neo-liberal and neo-realist traditions respectively4 – proposed that the main axis of debate in the field of international relations in the foreseeable future is likely to be the pitting of rationalism against constructivism (1998). Others such as Peou (2002) and Eaton and Stubbs (2006) have since tried to define the field of Southeast Asian (and, by extension, Asia Pacific) security in a somewhat similar way, notably by squaring realism off against constructivism as ‘key intellectual competitors’. In this respect, it is tempting but inaccurate to read realism as synonymous with rationalism, since the realism in question, as in Peou’s analysis, is that of Michael Leifer, whose work certainly cannot be described as rationalist neo-realist even if that is implied by Peou. Other realist renditions of Asia Pacific security would make better candidates (Betts 1993/1994; Buzan & Segal 1994; Friedberg 1993/1994). Be that as it may, given some notable differences between rationalism/ realism and constructivism, the above propositions would seem fairly incontrovertible. For constructivists, the problem with rationalism is that it takes the identities and interests of international actors as given for the reason that rationalism recognises changes in the behaviours of those actors but not changes in their identities and interests. This is because rationalists also take the structure of international anarchy as well as the selfhelp system it is said to produce as given. Driven by these twin suppositions, rationalist theories thereby do not allow for better understandings of change in both agents and structures, because their conception of change is limited to the dimension of behaviour and not that of identity and interest. At base, constructivism contends that identities and interests in international politics are unstable. In short, they have no pre-given nature. This is supposedly true for the identity of actors, not least sovereign states, as it is for the identity of international anarchy or that of a region. The following comment on state identity as a construct by Katzenstein is noteworthy: ‘Cultural-institutional contexts do not merely constrain actors by changing the incentives that shape their behaviour. They do not simply regulate behaviour. They also help to constitute the very actors whose conduct they seek to regulate’ (1996: 22). Following closely behind Katzenstein, Amitav Acharya, whose innovations in and influence upon Asia Pacific constructivism are incontrovertible, makes a similar claim vis-à-vis the regional context. Arguing against adopting the ‘rationalist, utility-maximising and sanction-based view of cooperation’ that purportedly drives neo-liberalist theories, he

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makes his preference clear: ‘constructivist theory offers a more qualitatively deeper view of how institutions may affect and transform state interests and behaviour’. In concert with the work of Risse-Kappen (1994) on the link between international institutions and collective identity, Acharya argues that ‘institutions do not merely “regulate” state behaviour, they can also “constitute” state identities and interests’ (2001: 22). To these views we may also add that of Emanuel Adler, whose work on ‘imagined security communities’ as ‘cognitive regions’ appears to challenge rationalist suppositions about the state by opening up possibilities for the rise of new collective identities that could conceivably transgress as well as transcend state boundaries (1997: 250). Accordingly, imagined regional communities arise insofar as there are emergent regions ‘whose people imagine that, with respect to their own security and economic well-being, borders run, more or less, where shared understandings and common identities end’. This understanding also resonates in Acharya’s writings. Viewing regions as contested and unnatural notions, he notes that ‘regions are socially constructed, rather than geographically or ethno-socially pre-ordained’. Taking a page from Adler and Ben Anderson (1983), Acharya likens regions to nation-states in that both are imagined communities. He notes, for example, that a key argument of his ‘has been that as with nationalism and nation-states, regions may be “imagined”, designed, constructed and even defended’ (2001: 163). But there is a key difference: what is, for Adler, a kind of transcendental possibility – collective identities going beyond state boundaries – becomes, for Acharya, a transcendental reality, or something close to it: an ASEAN or Southeast Asian identity, if only incipient. These are rather significant claims, not least because they render the notion of states as given identities difficult if not untenable. Constructivists thereby reject the notion of international anarchy and regions as given. From here we get Wendt’s well-known formulation that ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992). Thanks to this important insight, we are able to see how states construct anarchy and regions by attributing to them either conflictive or cooperative properties, and consequently construct the security strategies appropriate to negotiating those conditions. Hence, ‘Southeast Asia’s international relations represent a quest for regional identity. Success or failure in developing this identity explains a great deal of the pattern of conflict and cooperation among countries professing to be a part of the region’ (Acharya 2000: 11). Acharya’s reconstruction of the Southeast Asian region as a relatively pacific environment conducive to the imagining of security communities makes it possible to consider particular security approaches to which realists give little substantive credence, even if they do not rule these out completely. Hence, in the short term, multilateralism ‘may help to shape the balance-of-power by providing norms of

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restraint and avenues of confidence building among the major powers’; in the long term, however, ‘it may even enable states to transcend the balance-of-power approach’ (Acharya 2000: 184). However, the prognosis about a rationalism-versus-constructivism axis may seem odd in view of the apparently rationalist premises that underpin the writings of many constructivists, especially those whose constructivism is adduced as essentially a methodological appendage to positivist-oriented research paradigms without necessarily undermining the latter’s rationalist bases (Smith 2000). Indeed, given the readiness of constructivism to maintain an imaginary unity and order to the discipline – an imagined IR and security studies community or tradition, if you will – it would be difficult to see how long that perceived ‘debate’ can last before contradictory efforts are made to demonstrate the inherent compatibility and commensurability thought to exist between those theories. Think, if you will, of a rationalist amphitheatre, one that is built for realists and liberals with constructivists streaming in through the porticos (Persram 1999; Walt 1998). This clearly has serious implications for constructivists who wish to build bridges and ‘redress the extreme imbalance’ between what purportedly counts as mainstream and what counts as critical, between ‘structural and rationalist styles of analysis and sociological perspectives’ (Katzenstein 1996: 5). Yet any effort to unify approaches and define the via media effectively and inexorably serves a delimiting and foreclosing function as well (Little 2000; Wight 1966); as R.B.J. Walker (1993: 32) once noted, ‘as with all appeals to a middle road, the intended compromise reinforces the legitimacy of the two poles as the limits of permitted discourse’. Commenting on areas of potential convergence between constructivism and rationalism, two scholars have noted that these two approaches ‘often yield similar, or at least complementary, accounts of international life. This redundancy may arise because in the end they are studying the same underlying reality’ (Fearon & Wendt 2002: 53). Likewise, in their enthusiasm for a kind of paradigmatic eclecticism, analysts of Asia Pacific security such as Katsumata (2004: 239) readily embrace a rationalist constructivism for the reason that ‘this kind of constructivism, like the rationalist approaches, seeks to explain events in the real world’. With such logic in place, analysis regarding an already self-evident ‘real world’ need only focus on technical concerns wherein a ‘problem-driven approach’ would nicely suffice in place of tedious discussions about paradigms and epistemologies (Katsumata 2004: 239). Students of Asia Pacific affairs as ‘technicians’ out to ‘fix’ regional problems – a strange implication indeed, especially since such conclusions stem from people who aver that international realities are social constructions and who concern themselves with the capacities and motivations of subjects ‘to manage and

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even transform reality by changing their beliefs of the material and social world and their identities’ (Adler & Barnett 1998: 43-44). Unless, of course, their readiness to affirm and reify the real world as an ontological given – in contradistinction to their express claim to emphasise practice – betrays an embedded rationalism in their thinking which ultimately separates not only theory and method from the real world but also from the analysts who use them. In that respect, constructivists are perhaps deserving of the charge that they are but ‘rationalists who had read Foucault’ or some other luminary of postmodern ideas (Keohane 2000: 125).

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Art of the State: What States Make Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about Asia Pacific constructivism is its propensity towards state-centrism. Yet it is not state-centrism per se that disturbs me as much as the fact that this tacit assumption forms the core of a theory advocating a return to process and practice. By making the state (or some other subject) the principal articulator regarding the character of international anarchy, constructivists like Wendt contradict their own argument that identities and interests are protean simply because the identity of the state as principal articulator can neither be changed nor, for that matter, seriously questioned (Weber 2001: 60). If anything, this gesture towards a form of individualism has the consequence of ridding constructivism of the social logic it ostensibly espouses and centring the methodology within the economic logic of rationalism (Palan 2000). In that respect, the oft-heard claim that sociology serves as the starting point of constructivism, in opposition to realism and other ‘materialistic’ theories, rapidly loses credibility, as it becomes clear that starting with a ‘sociological concept of action’ does not automatically mean that one would end with it, much less preserve sociology’s most powerful insights (Busse 1999: 44). Notably, not all who regard themselves as constructivists, certainly not the more critically inclined among them, would subscribe to this individualism (Onuf 1998). Notwithstanding his concession (cited above) to state identity as a social construction, neither Katzenstein nor his collaborators in The Culture of National Security (1996), a seminal collection of explicitly constructivist essays on strategic culture, seem prepared or willing to push hard the claim of mutable identity (Katzenstein 1996b). This is true even of constructivists who study complex processes of social learning in Asia Pacific international relations but who either cannot or would not de-centre the state in their analyses (Ba 2003). Instead, their readiness to re-endorse state-centric realism leaves the radical implications of their initial claim largely unexploited.

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Accordingly, the attention given to effects of construction takes the existence of states as given (Jepperson, Wendt & Katzenstein 1996: 41). As for Emanuel Adler (1997), nowhere does his theory of cognitively constructed regions provide any clear understanding as to how peoples’ imaginations of ‘their own security and economic well-being’ seem to converge more or less with the boundaries of states. His work on international institutions and epistemic communities allows for multiple social actors in the collective imagining of community. But the readiness with which his narrative formulates states as ‘voluntarist interactionist’ associations participating in the communal construction of regional order reconstitutes the state implicitly as a voluntarist subject – albeit a collective and not individual subject/actor, in this case – involved in the business of region-making, consciously and deliberately so. Simply put, if anarchy is what states make of it, then regions are equally what states make of them. This is a crucial step, not least because of the need to privilege states as ontologically prior to regions, even if Adler’s cognitive regions are synonymous more or less with states. Adler’s analysis implicitly raises another concern: what are the effects, intended or otherwise, of cognitive region-formation? What kinds of collective identities do states produce: state or trans-state or something other? Earlier, we took note of Acharya’s more expansive notion of Adler’s cognitive regions, taking the latter’s state-centred collective identity towards a transstate-centred one where Southeast Asia is concerned. Consider, for instance, his following statements: ASEAN regionalism began without a discernible and pre-existing sense of collective identity among the founding members, notwithstanding some important cultural similarities among them. Whether such an identity has developed after more than thirty years of interaction is debatable. But this should not detract from the serious nature of the efforts by ASEAN members to overcome their security dilemma and establish a security community through the development of norms and the construction of an ASEAN identity that would be constitutive of their interests. (Acharya 2001: 28) The notion of Southeast Asia as a homogeneous cultural or geographic entity can indeed be overstated. But its social and political identity, derived from the conscious promotion of the regional concept by its states, societies, and peoples, is what makes it a distinct idea in the latter part of the 20th century. (Acharya 2001: 163) Perhaps the most significant project undertaken by Southeast Asian countries following the end of the Cold War was the

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fulfilment of the ‘One Southeast Asia’ concept. This was a conscious region-building exercise seeking to redefine the Southeast Asian political space. (Acharya 2000: 134) The above excerpts tell us that the collective ASEAN identity is the constructed effect of interactions among given member states. Carefully avoiding claiming that ASEAN members have succeeded in cultivating a region-wide identity congruent with the geographical boundaries of Southeast Asia, Acharya highlights instead the ostensible collective efforts by Southeast Asian states and societies to promote and realise the ambitious vision of a singular regional identity. Again, according to Acharya, ‘by the early 1990s, [the ASEAN] members could claim their grouping to be one of the most successful experiments in regional cooperation in the developing world. At the heart of this claim was ASEAN’s role in moderating intra-regional conflicts and significantly reducing the likelihood of war’ (2000: 5). The implication in these statements is that ASEAN members have for the most part not behaved according to power balancing dictates but, as a nascent, imagined security community, have relied upon norms for collective action and identity-building initiatives to ensure regional security. As Busse has noted of the propensity among the grouping’s leaders to speak in collective identity terms:

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Slogans like ‘the spirit of ASEAN’, ‘doing things the ASEAN Way’ or ‘think ASEAN’ became ever more popular in the foreign policy circles of the region. For instance, a Malaysian foreign minister once described ASEAN as an ‘almost telepathic community’. Even official statements by foreign ministers of the Association talked about ‘ASEAN’s identity’. (Busse 1999: 54) And precisely because security communities are best understood as social constructs imagined into existence, they are, in Acharya’s view, logically preceded by a vision of community rather than political, strategic and functional interactions and interdependence. In short, their collective identity is attributed to non-material factors. According to Sorpong Peou, Acharya’s constructivism is ‘rather ambitious, even radical’ in that it ‘projects itself as a meta-theory that subsumes both realism and liberalism’ and seeks ultimately to supplant them (2002: 131). But here we see another side of the ambitious and radical nature of Acharya’s constructivism, particularly in his insistence that the ‘One Southeast Asia’ concept constitutes a ‘significant project’ in ‘conscious region-building’. If Peou is right in calling Acharya’s constructivism a ‘meta-theory’, then the latter’s effort to inscribe a grand purpose, unity and vision to region-making in Southeast Asia (if not the Asia Pacific), to which all states and societies have adhered

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conscientiously through time, can be understood as a ‘meta-narrative’ that imbues Southeast Asian security with a deep structure and a natural teleology – an essence, in short – that, in some mysterious way, can be traced back and linked to older visions of ‘region-ness’ operative during pre-modern times. It is the same rationalist logic that permits, say, neorealists to not only aver that states have existed throughout history but to trace their ideas in an unambiguous trajectory back to Hobbes, Machiavelli and even Thucydides (Walker 1989a, 1989b). In other words, Acharya’s constructivism is apparently informed by a robust hermeneutics of suspicion that could prove, ironically enough, ahistorical and structuralist even though it supposedly emphasises history and practice. Contrast all that, however, with Leifer’s contention (2001) that the idea of regional autonomy and identity in ASEAN has proved and continues to remain elusive even as the group has enlarged itself and promoted wider regionalism and multilateral cooperation. Indeed, Leifer’s writings betray a discomfort with the certitude of rationalism in its insistence in locating explanation in deep structures (Tan 2005a). Suspicious of attempts to uncover a reified teleology in Asia Pacific security, he would take issue with those who construct meta-narratives that could conceivably explain present-day felicities. Take, for example, his resistance to the notion that there is a notably ‘distinctive ASEAN peace process’ that shaped the course of regional peacemaking in Southeast Asia. ASEAN, he writes, ‘relates to peace through a general influence exercised on member governments to observe standard international norms and not through applying any distinctive process to a particular conflict which may be transformed as a consequence’ (Leifer 1999: 26). That said, the fact that realists like Leifer – and here we must surely add Hans Morgenthau – are often caricatured as the archetypal straw man by constructivists and critical security studies scholars should not distract us from the ‘constructivist’ sensitivities discernible, say, in Leifer’s work on nationalism (2000a) or Morgenthau’s view of the state (1967: 484-485). Without overstating the case for similitude, important parallels can be drawn between how those realists view the state and Adler’s cognitive regions, by which he principally means nation-states. Be that as it may, Acharya’s focus on collective identity potentially opens up new ways to understand regional security. Most significant is his apparent willingness to relax the realist assumption regarding the state as unitary actor when it comes to identifying the participating social agents who construct the collective identity of the region. Likewise, a recent constructivist reading of security culture in Southeast Asia has urged: ‘States should only be regarded as “notional entities” rather than corporate persons with a single will and possessing qualities or attributes that apply to human personality’ (Haacke 2003: 11). For example, Acharya (2001: 163) attributes conscious promotion of the ‘One

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Southeast Asia’ idea to states, societies and peoples. But while such a statement, as a general proposition, may be factually correct, the eclecticism of this broad coalition makes for rather complicated analysis of the mechanics of construction. As such, Ronan Palan’s criticism regarding Adler’s silence on how his equally eclectic group of constructing agents interact together and produce collective identities could conceivably be applied to Acharya’s constructivism as well (Palan 2000: 587). Picking up where Acharya left off, other constructivist accounts of Asia Pacific security seem content to focus solely on state identity-formation. Most intriguing is their contention that at least one important effect, intended or otherwise, of the ASEAN states’ collective construction of regional identity is the constitution of state identities – a point acknowledged, if only tacitly, in Adler’s conclusions. Take, for example, the following observations by Shaun Narine:

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ASEAN is the foundation of a meaningful regional identity in Southeast Asia … [This] identity is real and is shared by many, though not all, members of ASEAN … The identities that affect the operation of ASEAN are still being formed. Most of the ASEAN states remain deeply engaged in the process of state building; they are trying to create stable national identities out of many disparate factions … ASEAN’s fundamental norms are directed toward protecting and enhancing the sovereignty of its member states. Sovereignty is the foundation on which ASEAN is built, is the generative institution from which all of ASEAN’s other norms and practices emanate, and is continually reinforced by those norms and practices … In practice, this means that the ASEAN regional identity does not prevent the ASEAN states from putting narrow national interests above regional interests; in a sense, it even encourages them to do so. (Narine 2002: 3-4) The process of state building requires that states forge common national identities out of these divergent parts. The ASEAN states are, to varying degrees, caught up in this state-building process. Their focus on constructing national identities helps to explain the primacy of sovereignty within ASEAN. It also underscores the point that it is difficult to create an influential regional identity when national identities are still in the process of formation. (Narine 2002: 4) Narine’s analysis raises a crucial point: states participate in the collective construction of regional identity, although their efforts also engender state identities. Indeed, this conclusion is difficult to miss given that the ‘meaningful regional identity’ shared by member states has

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everything to do with promoting and protecting their state sovereignty. Narine hence makes the point that the production and re-endorsement of state/national identity is viewed as more important than the construction of regional identity. His conclusion brings us full circle, back to the state-as-given assumption of Adler – and, for that matter, of Katzenstein, Wendt and possibly even Acharya – in their versions of Asia Pacific constructivism. Imagined communities and collective identities abound, but the one that truly matters is that whose boundaries are most congruent with the boundaries of the state rather than those of the region. Anarchy and regions are what states make of them, for sure, but the central message of Asia Pacific constructivism, if only an implicit, tautological and unintended message, may well be that states are what states make of them. With moves of this sort, constructivism revives an enduring problem that it has on occasion called into question, namely, the problem of subjectivity or, more specifically, of authorship. In this respect, theoretical discourses on international relations are generally ‘disposed to recur to the ideal of a sovereign presence, whether it be an individual actor, a group, a class, or a political community’, as Richard Ashley (1988: 257) has observed: ‘they are disposed to invoke one or other sovereign presence as an ‘‘originary’’ voice, a foundational source of truth and meaning’.5 ‘All this, of course, is inconsistent with the constructivist adage that identities and interests are ‘co-determined’ and ‘mutually constituted’ (Wendt 1987). Perhaps nowhere is the contradictory desire in constructivism – to criticise rationalism, yes, but also to preserve the fiction of disciplinary unity and order – more apparent than in its oscillation between those ultimately inconsonant objectives. Quite possibly the most cogent observation on these contradictions inherent in Wendt’s constructivism remains that made, intriguingly enough, by a leading proponent of rationalism: Wendt begins by recognising that both realism and institutionalism are rationalist, individualist theories and therefore have a lot in common. Perhaps surprisingly, he then accepts many of their assumptions and arguments: that states exist prior to the system; that material interests and power (as well as institutions) are important causal factors; that states can be viewed as acting rationally for the most part; and that meaningful science requires propositions that are potentially falsifiable with evidence. These admissions bring him substantially closer than in his previous writings to what he calls ‘mainstream’ IR. (Keohane 2000: 125) The same conclusion can also be drawn about rationalist constructivist renditions of Asia Pacific security.

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Ideas All the Way Down

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What about the constructivist argument regarding the autonomous influence of ideas and norms over state interests and identities? A decade ago, there was little disagreement over whether ideas mattered in Asia Pacific security studies (Higgott 1994). This paucity is clearly no longer the case with the emergence of constructivist readings of Asia Pacific international relations. For example, Katzenstein understands norms as collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors within a given identity, and we are left in no doubt as to what he means by identity: ‘a shorthand label for varying constructions of nation- or statehood’ (1996a: 5). More specifically, state decision-makers invoke the identity concept in their depiction of varying ideologies of collective distinctiveness and purpose (ibid. 6). Norms and identity are understood here as being applied in instrumental ways by given states to achieve quite specific purposes, a supposition which Wendt doubtless shares. Note, however, that Wendt maintains that ‘the structure of any social system … might consist mostly of material conditions, mostly of ideas, or a balance of both’ (1999: 157). If so, then his claim that ideas are constitutive of material conditions is essentially untenable. Rather than understand that constructivism decentres received wisdom regarding power and interest, what Wendt’s formulation ends up doing, as Palan wryly notes, ‘is privileging “ideas”, devoid of human experience, over power and interests as conventionally understood’ – a mockery of human agency, in short (2000: 590). Among constructivists studying the Asia Pacific, quite possibly the work of Acharya comes closest to emulating Wendt’s reification of ideas. According to Acharya, norms have a life of their own: Norms are not epiphenomenal or part of a superstructure shaped by material forces such as balance of military power or wealth. They have an independent effect on state behaviour, redefining state interests and creating collective interests and identities. This is key to understanding the constructivist claim that agents (states) and structures (international norms) are mutually reinforcing and mutually constituted. (Acharya 2001: 24) Yet how are agents and structures ‘mutually reinforcing and mutually constituted’ when the ‘subjects’ in this case – namely, norms and ideas that enjoy relative autonomy – have clearly been reified? Nevertheless, fidelity to a rationalist methodology invariably means having to adopt, if only tacitly, a kind of essentialism that refuses to take serious consideration of the processes and practices that grant intangible elements such as an idea or a norm – or, for that matter, a culture or an identity – an

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existential reality (Busse 1999: 50). But it is in this manner wherein norms come to be regarded as variables – non-material, but evidently essentialist – that are then inserted into already existing epistemological and theoretical commitments (Campbell 1998: 218). There are, to be sure, constructivist analysts who demonstrate greater sensitivity to the interactive dynamic between the ideational and the material. ‘For constructivists, norms are not exogenous to the process, and should not be treated as given and fixed’, as Hiro Katsumata (2003a: 110) has allowed. Why? Because they ‘can be reconstituted through the process of interaction between actors’ (ibid. 110). The ways in which a global normative principle such as non-interference has evolved in some instances but not in others have invited the attention of constructivists. According to Katsumata, North American and European nations in the Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have ‘modified their interpretation’ of the non-interference principle by decoupling human rights issues from it. On the other hand, this Western reorientation is evidently not shared by the ASEAN countries, which (in Katsumata’s view) remain resolute in their traditionalist interpretation of and commitment to the non-interference principle. Yet Katsumata (ibid. 110) notes a few lines later: ‘the difference between ASEAN and the Western countries arises because the Southeast Asian countries have reconstituted the elements of the global norms, including the principle of non-interference, in the Asian context through the process of interaction over time’ (emphasis added). Although there is little doubt that the efforts of the ASEAN states at appropriating and localising a global norm can arguably be considered as a sort of normative reconstitution, it would however appear that the relative lack of normative reinterpretation on the part of ASEAN in comparison to OSCE countries – according to Katsumata’s reading, importantly – renders his argument tenuous. The apparent contradiction therein is underscored when the writer subsequently identifies the formation of ASEAN as an occasion on which ASEAN members ‘consolidated the non-interference principle’ (ibid. 114). More important for my purposes, however, is Katsumata’s apparent readiness to situate his analysis within a rationalist framework. As we have already seen, rationalism is predisposed to resolving, once and for all, the opposition between agency and structure, and one key way in which constructivists seek to accomplish this is to treat the relationship between agents and structures as one that is co-determined and mutually constitutive. That he holds to this perspective is evident. Hence, his discussion of ASEAN’s engagement with global norms is located within an already established opposition such that the regional process and practice of norm evolution (which the author sought to recount) finds narrative significance only insofar as ASEAN practices normative

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reconstitution and, in doing so, reproduces the very structure that constitutes it (Katsumata 2003a: 119n). When constructivism is, say, formulaically reduced to ‘how norms are produced at time t, diffused at t + 1, internalised at t + 2, and then reproduced or changed through the practice of states at t + 3’ (Johnston 1998: 58), it is exceedingly difficult to see how historical contingencies and practices that do not fit within that established structure can find intelligibility, signification and hence inclusion. In this respect, all process and practice, in short all agency – or at least that which is deemed analytically ‘meaningful’ – are ironically treated as ‘supplemental’ to structure (Ashley 1989; Doty 1997). In other words, inherent in Katsumata’s reading is a tacit structuralism that inadvertently but nevertheless effectively locates subjectivity outside history and practice, despite claims to the contrary. It is difficult to see how the logic of constructivism can be sustained when, on the one hand, ideas, norms, cultures and identities are privileged, to the exclusion of human experience, over material concerns, or when, on the other hand, institutional experience is granted significance only in accordance with certain structural imperatives. But while the first understanding may mock human agency, in no way does it mock agency per se, for it simply reformulates voluntarist subjectivity in a new way without resolving any of the difficulties associated with it.6 As we have seen, all this is usually explained by simplistic allusion to co-determination and mutual constitution, but without an account of the constitutive processes and practices precisely for the reason that these would complicate the presupposition of subjectivity ultimately held dear in constructivism. Indeed, nowhere else than in the above statements do we see more clearly the readiness of constructivism to cover all bases, even at the cost of holding contradictory theoretical and paradigmatic positions, and to do so while maintaining fidelity to an illusory unity centred on rationalist grounds. As a critic of constructivism, in a comment on Wendt, has put it: ‘Against rationalist accounts of international relations, Wendt wants to argue for both an idealist and holistic account; against more radical constructivists he wants to argue for a science of international relations. Wendt therefore sides with positivists in terms of epistemology, but with post-positivists in terms of ontology’ (Smith 2000: 151-152). But can constructivism, as the cliché goes, have its cake and eat it too? Some rationalists seem to think so, particularly those who imagine that constructivism ‘has shown convincingly that one does not have to swallow the contaminated epistemological water of postmodernism in order to enjoy the heady ontological wine of constructivism’ (Keohane 2000: 129). And perhaps this is true, since the constructivist arguments discussed above ultimately side with a positivist-rationalist epistemology. On the other hand, this conclusion is possible only because

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rationalists themselves believe that the unconscious metaphysics they tacitly presuppose are sufficiently secure to keep the ontological waywardness of constructivism in check. However, despite efforts not to, what constructivist adventurism inadvertently confirms is that no such metaphysical foundation and ultimate centre – already secure, stable and unambiguous – exists within the international relations and security studies discipline. As such, every constructivist effort to resolve contradiction and reconstruct international politics and security only ends up generating new contradictions in an endless and quite unintended deconstruction. In this sense, constructivism, at the risk of oversimplifying, invites interlocutors into an interpretive chase that is the intellectual equivalent of the ‘catch me if you can’ game that children play. But here, too, we are reminded that this, after all, is the game of IR theory and practice at large.7

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Conclusion: Beyond Essentialism and Rationalism? Therefore, it is in at least two respects, both having to do with treating subjectivity as given and sovereign, that Asia Pacific constructivism ultimately fails to deliver on its promise to take us beyond the shortcomings of rationalism. On the one hand, in granting ontological priority to states, constructivism cannot fully transcend reification because its effort to avoid reifying international anarchy or regions comes at the expense of a reified state. On the other, in either reifying the state or ideas/norms, constructivists can no longer claim to privilege practice in their scholarship on Asia Pacific security (Weber 2001: 78). Constructivism, it seems, tends to fall back upon the idealised notion of a ‘pre-interactional order’ in its attempts to explain persistent patterns in international affairs, and in doing so ends up ‘reducing processes of “inter-subjectivity” to where they had always been in realist discourse – to the status of epiphenomena’ (Palan 2000: 593). On his part, Wendt has urged that the question of regional community and integration should be addressed with a state-centric perspective as the basis for ‘a critical theory of world politics’ (1994: 385). Yet it is unclear just how a state-centric perspective that idealises a world prior to interaction can critically reflect on global life – and, by extension, on itself – in any serious way when it refuses itself the possibility of vital encounters with historical process and practice. To this concern, Katzenstein has furnished this rejoinder: ‘History is more than a progressive search for efficient institutions that regulate property rights. And history cannot be reduced to a perpetual recurrence of sameness, conflict, and balancing. History is a broad process of change that leaves an imprint on state identity’ (1996: 23). With this in mind, he concludes: ‘The historical

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evidence compels us to relinquish the notion of states with unproblematic identities’. All well and good, but on closer inspection, how the desire to historicise fits with the competing desire to accord the state ontological priority is a fundamental issue curiously absent from Katzenstein’s discussion. That this is so even as he censures neo-realists and neo-liberals – in short, the rationalists – for their failure to consider the question of state identity as a construction is clearly troubling. That constructivism takes states as given, despite sophisticated discussions on ‘identity formation’ and the like, is perhaps most evident in its tacit treatment of the state as ‘the material substrate of agency’ that remains ‘once the constitutive properties of the self [read identity] are stripped away’ (Campbell 1998: 220). Given those circumstances, no reflection can be possible at all, but only refraction through the prism of the state or some nebulous norm that serves in the interest of subjectivity. This is not to imply that constructivism makes no significant contribution to Asia Pacific security. Importantly, constructivists help to undermine the rationalist myth, maintained by neo-realists and neo-liberals alike, about international anarchy as given. Constructivists also show how regions and regional identities come about. Thanks to constructivism, we are able to see how states and norms work to produce anarchy, regions and/or states. Yet it fails to show how these constructs are co-determined and mutually constituted. Constructivism does not, cannot and would not tell us how states are produced; they are always and already ‘out there’ or at least ‘in here’ – always and already given in constructivist discourse, that is. Indeed, they have to be; after all, they are the producers and articulators of international anarchy, regions and ultimately of themselves. And it is for that reason – how best to account for the apparent ‘given-ness’ of any particular ontology – that any rationalist constructivism must necessarily ensure that subjectivity or agency is not compromised, and this can only be accomplished by excluding from consideration the processes and practices that make the state.8 Yet it is precisely these concerns today that undermine the very grounds that constructivists are seeking to establish in Asia Pacific security. As such, any serious attempt to restore process and practice to the study of Asia Pacific security has to grapple with the enduring problem of subjectivity. And it will have to do so without succumbing to the rationalist desire for an imagined unity, an ultimate centre or an essence that is beyond power and politics.

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3 Knowledge Networks as Agents of Representation

The role of knowledge brokerages as producers and purveyors of knowledge on international life is no longer questioned today, least of all by conventional students of security (Adler 2005; Haas 1992). Likewise, the notion of security studies communities throughout the Asia Pacific region – comprising constituents of the various official as well as nonofficial national and regional security establishments – as epistemic agents is increasingly acknowledged by scholars for their contributions to knowledge constitution about security in ways positive and negative, depending on the respective appraiser’s normative disposition (Ball 2000; Cheit 1992; Evans 1994a; Hernandez 1994; Jayasuriya 1994; Jones & Smith 2001a; Katsumata 2003b; Kim & Young 2005; Kraft 2000a, 2000b; Simon 1996a, 2002; Tan 2005c; Woods 1993, 1997). At the risk of oversimplification, two broad conceptual understandings arguably define how the region’s security studies communities – notably, regional networks of research and policy institutes such as those of interest to this book – have generally been viewed in scholarly circles. The first understanding presumes an intentional subject that constructs security knowledge through instrumental actions. The second understanding presumes that construction operates in a deterministic fashion – a move which, as we shall see, seems to ignore or deny human agency (Carlsnaes 1992; Dessler 1989; Doty 1997; Wendt 1987). Thus understood, knowledge networks are either autonomous, voluntarist actors with settled identities who construct the identity of the region or of the state and influence its behaviour, or passive recipients whose subjectivity is but a product of pre-existing social structures or some ontologically prior constructor/author, and who exist principally to promote the interests and preserve the well-being of the state and the regime that rules it. In contrast to both these essentialist interpretations, this present undertaking seeks to read Asia Pacific knowledge communities neither (in the first instance) as ‘autonomous origins of meaning, registers of social value, and irreducible agents of history-making’, nor (in the second) as passive, abject targets under the totalising control of the state, and void of meaningful agency (Ashley 1988: 245; Butler 1993: 3). Rather, they are understood here as subjects whose practices, linked

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interchangeably with associated discourses, socially constitute not only the political world and the ‘sovereign’ statist identities that make up that world but also the very subjectivity of those same knowledge networks as legitimate agents of security. As such, they are subjects that ‘emerge in history’, alternately constructing and marginalising subjects while their own subjectivity is in process of being constructed and/or marginalised by others, including the state (Ashley 1987a). What I hope to provide below is an understanding of agency or subjectivity that will allow for an investigation into its construction. Without privileging ‘linguistic’ or ‘ideational’ reasons over ‘material’ ones, my modest contention – modest because it partly retreads some of the conceptual terrain others have covered more admirably, albeit in different contexts – is that the constitution and instantiation of agency are intimately linked to security and ancillary discourses generated partly by students of knowledge networks and partly by the communities themselves, whose very identities as legitimate, productive agents of security are indebted to those articulations.

Debating Epistemic Agency

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Agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an external political world. But if we agree that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction … In a sense, the epistemological model that offers us a pre-given subject or agent is one that refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative. (Butler 2001: 638) Judith Butler’s words in the above epigraph highlight an oft-cited tension within modern understandings concerning sovereignty and subjectivity, not least that which underwrites some views on epistemic agents of Asia Pacific security. Even constructivist readings of this issue have not been free of such tensions, although this should not surprise us given the rationalism-based essentialism that colours some of these works (Ashley 1989; Persram 1999; Smith 2000). Both essentialisms identified at this chapter’s outset are found in writings that deal with secondtrack knowledge brokerages. Despite the ostensible readiness in both interpretations to allow for an appreciation, no matter how limited, of agency as a ‘political prerogative’ (à la Butler), a careful reading would suggest a proclivity, shared by both interpretations, to retie the very conceptual knots they claim to have untangled (Walker 1999).

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Knowledge Networks as Instrumental Agents The first essentialism has to do with the supposition of knowledge brokers as pre-existing instrumental agents of their own volition. Here, they are seen as having the wherewithal to make their own choices according to their given interests. By focusing on the ideational influence of epistemic agents on policy outcomes, this approach highlights the efforts of individuals or institutions that help to explain political outcomes in security policy (Goldstein & Keohane 1993: 3). In a largely positive vein and more specifically within the context of post-Cold War security discourse, a fair bit of this can be found in Track 2 diplomacy, which ostensibly brings scholars and statesmen together in institutionalised settings towards the common object of promoting regional cooperation in the Asia Pacific region through policy dialogues. Carolina Hernandez, a key ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP insider, encapsulates what has become the conventional wisdom on second-track processes:

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Track Two diplomacy refers to the generation and conduct of foreign policy by non-state actors, including government officials in their private capacity. It includes the participation of scholars, analysts, media, business, people’s sector representatives, and other opinion makers who shape and influence foreign policy and/or actually facilitate the conduct of foreign policy by government officials through various consultations and cooperative activities, networking and policy advocacy. (Hernandez 1994: 6) Their ‘efficacy’ therefore is to be measured in terms of whether their ideas and proposals make it into the policy process, as well as the availability of institutionalised means by which such ideational transference can occur: ‘Among the measures of their effectiveness are the extent to which their policy recommendations find their way into official policy, the value attached by government officials to their views and the presence or absence of institutionalised mechanisms for the transmission of their policy advice to official policymakers’ (Hernandez 1994: 6). More recently, Hiro Katsumata (2003b) has contended that at least three notable ideas promoted by regional knowledge networks during the 1990s have since become ‘reality’ (in, we might add, the existential if not material sense): common and cooperative security, which presume that regional security is indivisible; formation of an intergovernmental forum for multilateral security dialogue, as evidenced by the establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF); and extension of ASEAN’s diplomatic style throughout the Asia Pacific region so as to promote regional cooperation. For Katsumata, these can all be traced back to efforts of the ASEAN-ISIS, a conclusion also held by a number of other

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analysts, all (unsurprisingly) long-time Track 2 participants (Capie & Evans 2007; Kraft 2000a). Based on these foregoing points, the ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP or PECC – and their respective ‘licensed’ national representing agencies – are thereby understood as instrumental actors whose ideational efforts have occasionally proved efficacious in shaping official policy directions and substance in the region. Regarding the Asia Pacific, members of Singapore’s knowledge communities specialising in international affairs such as the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA), and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) are viewed as instrumental in contributing to the formulation of the concepts and principles of preventive diplomacy pertinent to the Asia Pacific region and playing a key role in the drafting of the 1995 ARF concept paper on the issue.1 This is not to say that ideas by themselves – certainly not those purveyed by the local scholarly community – invariably exert a causal impact (Yee 1995). Indeed, ideas are more likely to influence policy if they ‘fit’ well with existing ideas and ideologies in a particular historical setting (Sikkink 1991; Goldstein 1998). As one scholar has allowed, ‘persuasiveness is an inherently relational concept, determined as much by the shape of current economic and political circumstances as by the shape of the ideas themselves’ (Hall 1989: 370). Perhaps most fitting, however, is the view that the interpretive influence of knowledge networks is best understood in terms of their production of ‘semi-official narratives that authorise and provoke certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing counter-narratives from emerging’ (Said 1993: 324). All this appears to have been the case with efforts by the ASEANISIS and the CSCAP at promoting comprehensive security – a ‘new organising concept for security’ for the region2 – which easily found resonance with Asia Pacific nations because the concept legitimises rather than undermines established regional principles, not least state sovereignty and non-interference (Alagappa 1988a; Dupont 1995; Wanandi 1991). And although regional governments seem somewhat less enamoured with cooperative security than comprehensive security, the same argument more or less holds; as Jim Rolfe (1995: vii), a regular CSCAP contributor from New Zealand, has intimated: ‘Cooperative security approaches acknowledge the centrality of the state in security processes and the primacy of state interests in the achievement of security’ (emphasis added). Hence, in sponsoring and sanctioning the state as much as being state-sponsored and sanctioned, ideational narratives circulated by the region’s security studies communities can thereby be considered as practices of statecraft that authorise the state and inscribe its agential powers while at the same time excluding narratives that promote alternate subjectivities at states’ expense.

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In all this, the debate over just how efficacious regional knowledge networks have been in advancing their preferred security ideas and norms is nevertheless joined by the shared supposition regarding the instrumentality of epistemic agents. This much is clear even in works that adopt a considerably less charitable view of local security studies communities. For instance, David Martin Jones and Michael L.R. Smith (2001a, 2001b, 2002) have taken umbrage at what they perceive as the willingness of those communities to forfeit their privilege of critique and role as their respective nations’ moral consciences. Regarding Southeast Asian security discourse as a seriously flawed enterprise, they identify (by name no less) and denounce various Southeast Asian security intellectuals as ‘scholar-bureaucrats’ who flatteringly but fallaciously portray ASEAN as ‘the basis of a new regional identity and dispensation’ (Jones & Smith 2001a: 844). Elsewhere, they fault the perceived collusion between scholars and statesmen wherein the former provide the requisite ideological ballast to a dubious brand of regional institutionalism which the latter have erected, one full of talk but empty of substance:

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Such insecurity translated to a regional level produces a rhetorical and institutional shell. The shell delivers declarations, holds ministerial meetings, and even supports a secretariat, but beyond the flatulent musings of aging autocrats or postmodern constructivists pontificating in Track Two fora nothing of substance eventuates. However, because Southeast Asia’s political elites along with their academic travellers have invested so heavily in ASEAN’s ‘alternative security’ discourse, it is regarded as impolite to point out [ASEAN’s] essentially ersatz quality. (Jones & Smith 2001b: 285) Hence, far from a ‘new organising concept’, comprehensive security – or, perhaps more conspicuously, notions like the ‘ASEAN Way’ – serve as discursive tools that practitioners and intellectuals of statecraft employ, knowingly or otherwise, to rationalise and legitimise political authoritarianism. And if not as scaffolding for authoritarianism then certainly as a convenient excuse to eschew taking the tough but necessary steps toward economic and social reform – change which, in retrospect, could conceivably have mitigated, say, the more debilitating effects of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis (if not avoided it altogether) for countries like Indonesia and Thailand. In the late Gerald Segal’s inimitable words: You know the argument: ‘sorry, we cannot possibly agree to such confidence building measures, it is not the way Asians handle

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security’. Such ethnic-chic is often used to explain why Asians do not always open their markets or why their economies are so successful. But as with many trendy explanations, this one has only the smallest grain of truth. In practice, there is little that is ‘Asian’ about Asian security, and Asians and others need to stop believing that such thinking is either politically or even scientifically correct. History does not become blood and the fate of Asian security is in Asian hands, not their genes. (Segal 1995: 107) In this sense, it may be said that the very ideas and norms advanced by local security studies communities ‘have been used to codify existing practices rather than to initiate new forms of order. Ideas have not made possible alternatives that did not previously exist; they legitimated political practices’ – reprehensible ones, Jones and Smith want to highlight – ‘that were already facts on the ground’ (Krasner 1993: 238). Such conclusions inadvertently foster the impression that Asia Pacific epistemic communities are without agency or instrumentality, or possess very little of which to speak. But this clearly is not what Jones and Smith – or, if you will, the ‘Jones and Smith’ of the text in question – seem to want to convey. After all, their criticism appears to be premised on the supposition that the region’s ‘scholar-bureaucrats’ have essentially (and, presumably, shamelessly) ceded their moral-cum-intellectual authority to speak truth to power – or at least truth that is un-beholden to and autonomous of the repressive power of ruling autocrats. Do the Asia Pacific region’s policy intellectuals, to borrow from William Wallace (1998: 229), ‘maintain the delicate balance between intellectual political orthodoxy and openness to expert criticism and new ideas which they have so far successfully managed?’ Do they skilfully speak truth to power without bitterly offending those in power? To these questions Jones and Smith’s riposte is a resounding ‘No’ – not because those intellectuals cannot but that they would not. The tacit liberal humanism in Jones and Smith’s text is therefore unmistakable. More importantly, the form and extent of political subjectivity which these authors implicitly attribute to the community of ‘scholar-bureaucrats’ in effect involves a relatively high level of agency and instrumentality, without which the charges they level at the latter would be incomprehensible. In other words, the agency of these local security studies communities is better understood in terms of their decision to vigorously promote and protect the interests and agenda of their autocratic masters rather than dispute them; they instrumentally align their lot with the state. Indeed, Jones and Smith’s dismissal of ASEAN (2001b, 2002) as an ‘imitation community’ and a ‘rhetorical and institutional shell’ with an ‘essentially ersatz quality’ are possible only by refracting ASEAN’s institutional

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practices and ‘accomplishments’ – and the scholarship on knowledge communities that celebrates and sanctions them – through the ideological prism that governs their text. Contrast their conclusion, however, with the following reflection by the late Michael Leifer, who was by no means an ASEAN apologist. Where Jones and Smith’s ‘scholars and statesmen’ pontificate futility and vainglory, Leifer’s engage themselves vigorously (or are urged to do so) in ‘conservation’, namely, the incessant prosaic labours of constituting, buttressing and reinforcing the regional status quo:

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It is well understood that conservation cannot be achieved by standing still … Nonetheless, regional order in the practical sense for ASEAN will depend on adequate attention being paid to the commonplace, which requires special attention because it is commonplace and, therefore, in danger of being taken for granted. (Leifer 1987: 21) Regional order and institutionalism, Leifer (or at least his text) seems to imply, is ultimately about instantiating and hence remaking boundaries and borders – the ‘commonplace’ elements that hold up the purported ontological integrity and primacy of states and, by extension, the state system. It is, as I have noted elsewhere, a delicate acknowledgement by this venerable contributor to regional security discourse that articulations of ‘commonplace’ anarchies, dangers and fears – spurring, in turn, appeals for collective vigilance – are at times necessary in order for the limits of state-centric discourse to be affirmed and sustained (Tan 2005a: 83). It is the fragile admission that sovereign states and regional institutions like ASEAN are partly the effects of representational practices that can be made to work only so long as alternate or rival voices are excluded or silenced (Ashley 1988: 324). Oddly enough, it is perhaps Leifer’s realism, among other things, that compels his text to speak not only of but also to the ‘other’; it reflects a commitment to dialoguing with the particular world under observation (‘Asia Pacific’, ‘Southeast Asia’) even as it contributes to the latter’s reification. In this respect, it may be said of works like Leifer’s that they exercise ‘humility in the face of the final authority of the text’ of the social world with which they seek to converse (Ashley 1981: 212). It is partly this unassuming attitude that accounts for the ambivalences that colour his ruminations on the security of the region, and the tensions which refuse easy conclusions. Clearly, this is a humility that escapes Jones and Smith’s text in its impatient drive towards ideological closure and cultural essentialism.

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Knowledge Networks as ‘Abject Beings’ Contrary to the way political agency and instrumentality are assigned in the first instance, a second essentialism involves the treatment, explicit or tacit, of knowledge brokerages as abject and/or passive subjects, almost always at the mercy and service of a prior author or constructor. Here, they do not act of their own accord; if they do at all, the options available to them are highly limited, as are the capabilities and resources available to them. In this regard, a dated but intriguing essay by Kanishka Jayasuriya (1994), which explores the efforts of Singaporebased epistemic agents in the post-Cold War construction of regional identity, is particularly illustrative of such reasoning and will be considered at length here. Seeking to denaturalise the reification of ‘region’, Jayasuriya’s text, following Iver Neumann (1994), analyses multiple regional identities as effects or products of state elite discourses, particularly in the case of Singapore. Noting the importance of understanding how regional definitions are produced as well as who produces them, the text concludes: ‘In the Singapore case, we shall argue that while policy communities played some role in the management of various regional discourses, the production of regional identities has been preeminently a state sponsored project’ (Jayasuriya 1994: 412, emphasis added). Furthermore, he suggests that security studies communities in Singapore and presumably the region also – the text singles out the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) – function primarily as ‘cheerleaders’ for Singapore’s ruling elite by ‘disseminating the language of regionalism’. Most, if not all, of the security studies institutes in the region claim, in their annual reports and brochures, that they are independent, private institutions or institutions semi-autonomous of the government (Noda 1985: 431). But as pointed out in the preceding section, the agency of knowledge brokers is itself a difficult notion, not only for the reason that ‘nonofficial’ subjectivities are never quite autonomous actors whose actions are unmistakably independent of the state. Indeed, perhaps no other nation epitomises the idea of the state as a dominating absolutist presence more than Singapore, not least where reasoning about and policymaking in security are concerned. In short, the Singaporean state is often treated as the agent of security par excellence (Leifer 2000b; Worthington 2003). In this respect, the notion of local ‘non-state’ agents of security working outside of the control and influence of the Singaporean state would seem inconceivable to not a few, as Jones and Smith’s notion of ‘scholar-bureaucrats’ readily attests, as we have earlier seen. Nevertheless, Jayasuriya’s admirable analysis presents at least two conceptual conundrums. Here, I want to suggest, is where his text and

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those of Jones and Smith part ways in their dissimilar ascriptions of epistemic agency. First, his implication that the discourse of regionalism is (nearly) absolutely captured and controlled by state elites, such that local security studies communities end up as unofficial mouthpieces of the Singaporean government, is a tricky argument to sustain even if the impression is such. In response to the notion that ‘the state spans the essential sector of disciplinary practices’ – in short, state absolutism – Michel Foucault answers:

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I do not mean in any way to minimise the importance and effectiveness of State power. I simply feel that excessive insistence on its playing an exclusive role leads to the risk of overlooking all the mechanisms and effects of power which don’t pass directly via the State apparatus, yet often sustain the State more effectively than its own institutions, enlarging and maximising its effectiveness. (Foucault 1980: 72-73) Simply put, security intellectuals working to ‘sustain the State’, as Foucault has put it, may volitionally be co-opted by the state or be coerced into the task, but this does not mean that they are to be dismissed as mere stooges of their political masters, void of contestation – a contention even scholars of authoritarianism writing in the main, at least since James C. Scott’s work on resistance (1985), can make but only with great care.3 Second, the contention that these intellectuals are merely ‘disseminating the language of regionalism’ for state elites suggests that regional security discourse is merely a collection of inert linguistic codes simply manipulated by knowing agents of and for the state, who constitute meanings and then transcribe them into discourse. As such, purporting to conduct a ‘genealogy of regionalism’, Jayasuriya’s explanation and attendant conclusion comprise a problematic totalisation of the state’s privileged role as sovereign actor in its will to power and truth via its regionalism discourse. Hear, for instance, the following rejoinder by an ISEAS faculty member: [A]ny intellectual discourse on the project of ‘Asian’ regionalism would have to take into account the existence of divergent and contesting ‘projects’ and ‘practices’. As with every other conceptual entity, ‘the region’ is a historically contingent, social construction. State discourses very often possess a competitive edge in reality construction, but never a monopoly. A ‘genealogy of regionalism’ in which the construction of an imagined community beyond the nation-state is seen to have been the sole prerogative of state elites who enjoy a complete monopoly over the

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fabrication of ideas disavows the plurality inherent to society. Despite the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ it displays towards the state, Jayasuriya’s account privileges – indeed, it absolutises – the discourse of the state. (Wong 1995: 688) There is much in the foregoing assessment with which to agree. However, I would take issue with the gist of the final sentence: it is precisely because of and not despite his ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, I argue, that Jayasuriya’s absolutisation of the discourse of the state is made possible. The perceived deep, hidden meanings which purportedly underwrite regionalism discourse, refracted through a Ricoeur-style hermeneutics of suspicion (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982; Ricoeur & Thompson 1981), understandably engender the conclusion that the Singaporean state is in fact in hegemonic control of discourses produced by sectors of society, including epistemic communities. In Jayasuriya’s text, the People’s Action Party (PAP) government of Singapore has a firm hold on practically all walks of life in Singapore, so much so that all manner of representation, interpretation and signification of not only regionalism but many if not most issues, in the final analysis, is ‘state-sponsored’. But this does not automatically imply that state elites therefore speak and act as pre-existing social subjects. Indeed, they are subjectivised themselves via the very discourse they aim to dominate. In contrast to the critical appreciation that all subjects without exception ‘emerge in history’, Jayasuriya’s text tacitly presupposes that the Singaporean state subject remains very much outside of history and practice. Although it engages in the discursive construction of multiple regional identities, the state is, nevertheless, written as a metaphysical given that is located exogenous to all constitutive processes. Ironically, Jayasuriya’s move – a very modern one, it should be said – to seek determinate causation through fixing the origins of the regionalism discourse in the state is rendered clearer when we compare his constructivist approach with so-called ‘essential core’ explanations which his study purports to eschew assiduously. Whether his text avoids rendering an essential core explanation is highly debatable, and there are good reasons that imply his ultimate recourse to essentialism. Taking a page from Neumann – on whose work Jayasuriya clearly relied – essentialist views of regionalism are troubling precisely because they presuppose an objective entity independent of the social construction, say, of region by subjects. Essentialist positions assume that ‘the construct [of region] does not assert its authority as an “imagined community”, a cognitive construct shared by persons in the region themselves. Rather, it is the construct of one man – the allegedly sovereign actor’ (Neumann 1994: 57). In fairness to Jayasuriya, the spirit of his analysis remains relatively faithful to Neumann’s conceptual

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parameters. Yet in attributing regionalism discourse to the sole prerogative and purview of the Singaporean state, he paradoxically reifies the state – albeit as a sovereign collective, not individual, actor – thereby rendering it an ontologically prior given rather than a social construction. Hence, despite the reference to the critical social strategy of ‘genealogy’ in his study, what Jayasuriya’s text provides instead is a limited constructivist exercise that stops well short of pursuing fully the ramifications of constructivism. In this sense, it may be said of his analysis that it posits ‘a limit to the limit-attitude’ – a move that condemns it to replicating elements associated with the more conventional appropriations from which it wants to be distanced (Campbell 1998: 234).

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Epistemic Agency as Political Prerogative To recapitulate, both essentialisms critiqued above hold to certain assumptions about subjectivity that ultimately do not permit inquiry into its construction. On the one hand, constructivists who value the ideational and normative inputs of epistemic communities, as well as liberal critics who draw attention to the perversity of those contributions, presume intentional subjects with settled identities who construct security knowledge through instrumental actions. On the other, constructivists (one of them, at least) who treat non-official epistemic communities as passive recipients whose subjectivity is but a product of an ontologically prior state are in danger not only of reifying the state but of mocking human agency, not least that of the knowledge networks of interest here. Whether praised or pilloried as instrumental agents in their own right, or reduced to abject subjects under the hegemonic command of a given state, such views of security studies communities are possible only due to prior acts of naturalisation and reification. The conceptual challenge before us is therefore not unlike that which norm theorists have to deal with. Essentialist narratives of how norms are derived fail to account for the raison d’être of certain fundamental ontological presuppositions at the expense of others. Take, for example, the following reflection by Cynthia Weber (whose notion of an ‘interpretive community’ can, in a sense, be likened to an epistemic/knowledge network): For the concept of norms to be meaningful in global political life, there must exist an interpretive community to evaluate state practices in the light of prevailing norms. These issue-specific interpretive communities often are expressed as the origins of norms rather than as their effects. That is, according to this logic, state practices encounter interpretive standards that are always already in place before practices occur, and these standards emanate

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from an already existing interpretive community. Interpretive communities appear to exist prior to state practices because in giving an explanation for the existence of norms, [security] theorists must assume both sovereign states and interpretive communities a priori. Very few theorists question this logic, much less turn it around by asking how interpretive communities can be said to exist before interests converge. (Weber 1995: 4-5)

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In other words, how might interpretive/knowledge networks be regarded as progenitors of norms when their existence is traceable principally to an ontological assumption? How can they be the source of meaning or social register of value when their very own subjectivity is in question and under construction through a prior constructor – ontologically prior interpretive standards put forth by an even prior interpretive community? Likewise, the first essentialism this essay has examined makes a priori assumptions about the settled identities of the sovereign Singaporean state and the security studies communities involved in security knowledge constitution. The second essentialism partially solves the problem by presupposing security studies communities as a social construction that ‘emerges’ thanks to the productive labours of the sovereign state, although it fails to account for how the identity of the state as a sovereign absolutist actor arises. To students versed in critical theoretical debates on subjectivity and sovereignty, these are tired questions; nevertheless they are far from retired. Yet even those who are most aware of the power politics behind subjectivity claims continue, seemingly, to be seduced by the idealistic lure of and desire for essence. Confronted with a similar problem in literary theory, Stanley Fish responds with the following reflection: And the conclusion to that conclusion is that it is the reader who ‘makes’ literature. This sounds like the rankest subjectivism, but it is qualified almost immediately when the reader is identified not as a free agent, making literature in any old way, but as a member of a community whose assumptions about literature determine the kind of attention he pays and thus the kind of literature ‘he’ ‘makes’. (The quotation marks indicate that ‘he’ and ‘makes’ are not being understood as they would be under a theory of autonomous individual agency.) Thus the act of recognising literature is not constrained by something in the text, nor does it issue from an independent and arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide by it. (Fish 1980: 11)

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That said, to the extent that Fish’s conception assumes a unity among his ‘community of readers or believers’, the problem of subjectivity still persists precisely because the source of meaning, rather than being located either in the objective conditions of reality or in subjective perceptions, is here located in a unitary collective norm or shared knowledge within a bounded interpretive community – to the exclusion of difference and heterogeneity which may raise serious objections about the assumed bounded-ness and fixity of that community. The immense conceptual difficulties posed by quite fundamental and ultimately essentialist suppositions held in mainstream views on epistemic agency in the Asia Pacific context are generously replicated in the related literature on constructivist renditions of contemporary Asia Pacific international relations. As the foregoing discussion has shown, when our understanding of agency is reliant on specific settlements regarding subjectivity as already given and inextricably tied to sovereignty, without which all notions of subjectivity are, accordingly, deemed impossible, then the constructivist claim that ‘Asia Pacific’ and ‘Asia Pacific security’ are social constructions becomes immediately suspect, precisely because there are more elemental practices and processes of naturalisation and reification at work that are neither innocent nor inadvertent, but which are kept from criticism in order that a preferred ontology can be affirmed and sustained.

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Knowledge Networks and Their Representational Practices A way ahead for the non-essentialist, non-rationalist approach to Asia Pacific constructivism may ironically be found in the sorts of textual strategies to which Fish likely subscribes. To be sure, the reception of discourse-oriented constructivist approaches in the study of knowledge networks by the guardians of IR orthodoxy would probably be cool for at least a couple of reasons. First, the focus on discourses and texts in security studies has occasionally been dismissed by rationalist scholars, famously so in one instance, as part of ‘a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world’ (Walt 1991: 223). Second, even literary critics such as Edward Said (1979: 93) have derided the purported preference of discourse analysts for the ‘schematic authority of a text to the disorientation of direct encounters with the human’. This is a fair criticism given difficulties posed by views that insist upon a ‘nothing but the text’ or ‘ideas all the way down’ type of logic (Smith 2000). A possible reply to the first criticism is a relatively straightforward one: all human comprehension of the so-called ‘real world’ is invariably indebted to language and traditions of interpretation. As Laclau and

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Mouffe (2001: 108) have noted, earthquakes and falling bricks exist independently of human thought and will, but whether humans interpret their occurrence in terms of natural phenomena or the acts of a wrathful God ‘depends upon the structuring of a discursive field’. If so, the charge that academic discourses that privilege discursive epistemologies and methods are ‘divorced from the real world’ is, in a fundamental sense, conceptually flawed. Moreover, no academic discourse, not least ‘realist’ or even scientific discourses, is ever without a hint of prolixity and self-indulgence. To the second criticism it may be said, without privileging texts over real people, that my focus on discourse stems from sensitivity to the problematic closure sometimes involved in the notion of ‘person’ or ‘community’, as we have seen has been the case with the two broad types of essentialist perspectives on epistemic agency examined above. Textual encounters, on the other hand, allow for discourses to dialogue with one another (i.e. ‘intertextuality’), thereby providing us with a sense of how a particular social reality ‘emerges’ as the (unintended) effect of disparate yet related discourses. Put another way, it is the consequentiality rather than intentionality of texts that ultimately matters, albeit not in a deterministic way.4 Importantly, appreciation for the intertextual ‘nature’ of discourse opens up an alternate way of comprehending the interrelation between practitioners of security (statesmen) who make ‘official’ policy and members of the ‘unofficial’ security intelligentsia (scholars) who, as intellectuals of statecraft, help to establish the conditions of knowing and legitimise the hyperrealist and state-centric worldviews from which policy positions derive (Luckham 1984a, 1984b; O’Tuathail & Agnew 1992). If practitioners and intellectuals of security function within a discursive space that imposes meanings and thereby create and maintain reality, then the notion of ‘official policy community’ need not be limited to important policymakers, as understood within conventional security studies, but could conceivably include nameless bureaucrats involved in the policy process, pundits who comment on security concerns, and academics and analysts who supply the requisite intellectual and/or ideological ballast (Doty 1993: 303). As such, the conventional view that Track 2 diplomatic processes are ‘endogenous to the Asia Pacific, but exogenous to the individual state policy-making elites of the region’ may – at least from this critical standpoint – be conceptually untenable (Higgott 1994: 368). In this respect, rationalist-based efforts to glean an unadulterated causal linkage between a constructor and a constructed, which entail privileging either the Singaporean state or some ‘non-official’ epistemic agent as an ‘originary’ presence, may simply be erroneous, since both state and non-state elements can equally comprise constituents of knowledge networks as well as the ‘effects’ of the latter’s constitutive labours.

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If constructivists are serious about restoring a deeper appreciation for history and practice, then they must necessarily begin with the understanding that all subjects, including ‘America’, ‘China’, ‘ASEAN-ISIS’, ‘CSCAP’ and ‘PECC’, are themselves sites of ceaseless political contestation and whose identities – or, a la Butler (1993), ‘materiality’ – exist only via precarious balancing acts wherein diverse interpretive elements are variously included and, at times violently, excluded (Ashley 1987a: 410). Thus understood, we can say, along with Spivak (1990: 34), that there may be ‘no end to narrativisation’ – even if we refuse the rank determinism and monism of particular ‘nothing but the text’ interpretations that do a disservice to Derrida – for the simple reason that those who insist on transcending narrative and interpretation are in all likelihood caught within narrating themselves. Some observations about a constructivism that acknowledges its ineluctable debt to language and its own complicity in social construction – or, to paraphrase Johan Eriksson (1999), its involvement in ‘political advocacy’ – are salient for my purposes. In its effort to restore a critical awareness for practice and process, this approach joins rationalist constructivism in wanting to historicise or denaturalise the given world of world politics. But it goes much further by highlighting the social fact of agency as always and only a political prerogative, and of subjectivity as always and only a constituted effect thanks to particular practices deployed by these networks of knowledge brokers. How this is to be accomplished via the focus on discourse yet without privileging texts over real people and concrete human experiences is the key methodological challenge that confronts this study. In this respect, knowledge networks could properly be regarded as ‘communities of practice’, whose cultural and ideological influences cannot be dissociated from the various ‘knowledgeable’ or representational practices – interpretive attitudes and practical dispositions – that are widely dispersed across disparate and varied locales to achieve specific related ends: to ‘discipline interpretation and conduct, open up domains of freedom, constitute ‘‘modern subjects’’, effect the self-evident truths of modern experience, and enable and dispose these subjects to the further replication and circulation of the practices themselves’ (Adler 2005: 15; Ashley 1989: 260261). In this regard, four noteworthy observations come to mind. 1 Representational practices are ambiguous and indeterminate Against the preceding backdrop, my first point is that relative to rationalist constructivism, a textual approach of the sort I wish to pursue takes the process of historicisation and politicisation much further in seeking an understanding of ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘discursive’ practices of statecraft that entails an acceptance of its indeterminate and ambiguous nature. Such ‘boundary-producing political performances’ are the things

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that socially construct ‘the very ontological conditions of human life in society as such’ (Ashley 1987b; Giddens 1976: 19). In drawing the boundaries that make possible identity and subjectivity – to which the attribution of ‘sovereign’ is conferred in the case of certain privileged identities – representing practices are thus able to construct, if only in a contingent and tenuous fashion, the appearance of an extra-historical, unproblematic presence and identity of a myriad of subjectivities, not least the ‘sovereign state’. Hence boundaries produced by knowledgeable practices fundamentally rely on an understanding that the former are always already in place. Or, if not the boundaries, then certainly the stable and fixed domestic community those boundaries evidently circumscribe. ‘Boundaries may become blurred, but they ultimately remain intact and given’, as Roxanne Doty (1997: 175) has noted. ‘The ontological commitment to the state ensures that the starting point is the existence of boundaries that are then transgressed, rather than alwaysin-process practices that effect the construction of contingent, and never fully fixed, boundaries’. In this regard, the ontological commitment to particular subjectivities is not compromised but merely redeployed. Indeed, even as subjects are in the process of being historicised, the ideal of a modern sovereign subjectivity remains paradoxically at hand in those same formulations. But it is something that cannot be taken for granted for the reason that its efficacy is totally reliant on its incessant reproduction in discourse. As a process that is always in jeopardy of falling apart, these identity-forming practices thereby rely upon myriad double moves of construction and concealment, the aim of which is the temporary ‘transformation’ or stabilisation of the subject from an effect to an apparent material entity. 2 Representational practices discipline and marginalise competing interpretations Secondly, the approach I have in mind sees the apparent unruliness and disorderliness of practice as something that is incessantly subjected to attempts by discourse to tame and stabilise them. Practice as such is an effect that encounters contesting interpretations, an effect that meets resistance, and an effect always in jeopardy of coming undone. It is therefore an effect whose persistent happening – when, where and if it happens – never ceases to depend upon the disciplining of an ambiguous history, the framing of text and context, and the arresting and exclusion of contesting interpretations through the hazardous and arbitrary play of knowledgeable practice itself (Ashley 1989: 273).

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3

Analysis of representational practices involves causality without sacrificing history Thirdly, my critique of causality is not to imply that constructivists must therefore refrain from rendering ‘causal’ claims for fear that these may run counter to their aim to historicise the given world of world politics. The paradox is that they have to, for constructivists, much as anyone else, cannot – indeed ought not – dispense with ‘thinking causally’, as Spivak (1990: 23) once put it. The task of analysing the workings of knowledgeable practices does not relieve one from personally engaging in those practices. This said, the cardinal distinction between rationalist constructivists and what I have in mind rests on one’s readiness to historicise one’s own assertions and to problematise one’s own aspirations to transcend history even whilst actively involved in history – the very concerns rationalist constructivists tend to neglect. Hence, it may be said of this sort of ‘radical’ constructivism that which has been intimated about deconstruction: ‘if one wants a formula it is, among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want’ (Spivak 1996: 27-28). As Foucault has put it:

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I would say that we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in order to function: we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess or to discover the truth. Power never ceases in its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalises, professionalises, and rewards its pursuit. In the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place.5 Hence it is this production of truth (Spivak’s ‘what one cannot not want’) that the radical constructivist, even as she participates in the practice of producing truth, must persistently criticise. 4 Representational practices are not reducible to ‘nothing but the text’ or ‘ideas all the way down’ logics Finally, the notion of an indeterminable practice is not an invitation to affirm the free play of interpretation and meaning or to memorialise and thereby ground an ultimate indeterminacy. Although language and writing are understood as productive rather than representational practices of statecraft, radical constructivism does not hold that the world of Asia Pacific security is therefore reducible to ‘an unconstrained, diachronous word-play’ (Bennett 1991: 280). The prospect of interpretation ‘all the way down’, if adhered to dogmatically, ironically revives the disputed notion of a pre-existing and bounded interpretive community,

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however. Inasmuch as the essentialisation of either agency, structure or the dialectical synthesis of these otherwise un-decidable alternatives should be eschewed, the essentialisation of practice should likewise be avoided.

A Strategy in Radical Constructivism

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If I understand deconstruction, deconstruction is not an exposure of error, certainly not other people’s error. The critique in deconstruction, the most serious critique in deconstruction, is the critique of something that is extremely useful, something without which we cannot do anything. (Spivak & Rooney 1989) Radical constructivism could perhaps be accused of prolixity and selfindulgence, yet its concerns are neither irrelevant nor superfluous. As Partha Chatterjee (1986: 17) has argued: ‘For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it [Enlightenment] could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself’. In other words, Enlightenment-inspired assertions of sovereign identity and unity are never complete without – in fact are wholly dependent upon – the attendant elements of difference and diversity. As such, security studies discourses in the main tend to be hierarchical: they privilege as superior the notions of identity/inside/self while treating as inferior those of difference/outside/other. Nevertheless, the determination of superiority and inferiority is essentially an arbitrary act. The conditions of identity/ inside/self rely upon difference/outside/other, in whose absence the former cannot be realised; indeed, the former would self-destruct or unravel. Textual strategies reveal how texts and discourses create and instantiate a ‘world’ through constructing a particular ‘reality’ that must be accepted in order for various statements in those texts and discourses to be considered meaningful and intelligible. The more reasonable and unremarkable that linguistically constructed world appears to be, the more powerful and successful the constitutive effects of representing practices are. From such ‘emerges’ the contemporary world-text of the Asia Pacific which, in turn, facilitates the foreign policymaking as states ‘respond’ to a supposedly given regional environment. The complexity of these constructions is rarely, if ever, constituted along a single level or axis. Instead, each construction is usually dependent upon multiple levels or axes. In his seminal study of the constructions of the Other by European explorers that paved the way for the subsequent conquest and domination of the indigenous civilisations of the Americas, Todorov (1984) has suggested the

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existence of at least three interconnected levels: an ‘axiological’ level, normally involving value judgments; a ‘praxeological’ level, involving either identification with, differentiation from, or neutrality and indifference vis-à-vis the other; and an ‘epistemological’ level, involving knowledge or its lack of the other.6 Hence, what we grasp as reality is really a kind of aggregate interactive effect of multiple levels. By the same token, no single level by itself is sufficient to establish and preserve the metaphysics of presence and identity. While for analytical purposes the textual mechanisms of presupposition, predication and subject-positioning as they appertain to a discourse are considered separately, in actuality all three operate together and simultaneously, much as Todorov’s three levels do. As an approach that historicises or politicises the naturalised border lines, margins and frontiers of global life as constituted by texts and discourses, radical constructivism is principally about the ‘de-centring’ of such hierarchies so intrinsic and necessary to modern discourse. By effecting a similar de-centring of the discursive hierarchies in second-track diplomatic dialogues, it becomes possible to locate and trace the impact of power and interpretation in producing the familiar and natural categories and referents of Asia Pacific security. Textual strategies construct discursively an ‘Asia Pacific’ by locating positions for various types of subjects and endowing them with particular qualities. It is crucial to bear in mind that nowhere in the ensuing analyses does this work dispute the veracity of the truth claims made in Track 2 discourse. Their perspectival readings of various aspects of contemporary Asia Pacific international relations, as well as the empirical evidence that they marshal in support of their hypotheses, are in a major sense ‘real’ and, as such, ‘objective’. What is central to my concerns here is how the how-possible question as analysis is put to the task of denaturalising or unsettling, and historicising or politicising, familiar and selfevident facts about Asia Pacific security.

How Texts Work The task before us, therefore, is to demonstrate how structures of identity/difference are established in Track 2 texts and discourses on Asia Pacific security. What textual strategies are deployed in these regional security dialogues capable of producing a particular world? What mechanisms render possible these hierarchies? Embedded in many if not most discourses on international security are certain textual devices, which help to highlight the implicit discursive hierarchies inherent in the tacit agreements, unspoken assumptions and background conditions of all texts and discourses. At least three such ‘devices’ are noteworthy for my purposes (Doty 1993).

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1 Presuppositions are germane to the intelligibility of texts, for they provide implicit knowledge on the existence of subjects, objects and their relation to one another. Take, as an illustration, this statement by Fouad Ajami (1993: 9) in his riposte to Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ essay in the leading policy periodical, Foreign Affairs: ‘We remain in a world of self-help. The solitude of states continues; the disorder in the contemporary world has rendered that solitude pronounced’. The background conditions this statement constructs are that there are such things as a world of self-help; that the world is comprised of states; that states are solitary entities that exist independently of each other; that the contemporary world is in an enduring state of disorder. This further presupposes the prior (or future) existence of order; that the world has an essential nature, particularly one marked by continuity, disorder and self-help; and, even more fundamentally, that the author (Ajami) is in the position to assert all this as factual. Without these presuppositions, the statement would be unintelligible. Presuppositions are therefore an important device for establishing the necessary conditions for constituting a particular world wherein certain subjects and objects are immediately recognisable as ‘real’ or ‘true’ to that world. 2 Predication refers to the manner in which texts construct worlds through attaching various labels – attributes, properties, qualities and the like – to subjects. It involves the coupling of specific qualities to particular subjects, such as qualities affirming a subject’s identity through deploying predicates and the adverbs and adjectives that modify them. To assert (as Ajami has done) that we live in a world of selfhelp in which the apparent solitude of states continues is therefore to link the attributes of self-help and solitude to state subjectivity – a condition augmented by the apparent disorder in which the world finds itself. The state is thereby portrayed as a subject existing in isolation; in rationalist terms, it is an autonomous actor bent on maximising its own self-interests. Another way in which the predication device operates is through attributing certain moral qualities to subjects: America as the nonpareil model of liberty and democracy; the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’; Iran, Iraq and North Korea as ‘rogue states’ and the ‘axis of evil’; radical Islam as a clear and present threat to the ‘West’, and so on. 3 Finally, presupposition and predication combine to establish various relationships between subjects as well as between subjects and objects through a strategy of placement and/or positioning. What delineates a particular kind of subject, then, has a lot to do with how it is positioned in relation to either other kinds of subjects or objects. Positioning occurs in at least three ways. First, the hierarchies inherent in the

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background conditions of texts and discourses rely upon positioning in their arbitrary distinction between superior and inferior terms: community/anarchy; security/insecurity; cooperation/conflict; order/disorder; domestic/international; inside/outside; identity/difference; self/ other. Sociolinguistic constructions of a particular social, political or religious group or community as the other can be construed as a process of making ‘foreign’ or exotic, and thus different from the self, someone or thing. Given the typical privileging of the self, the constitution of the ‘other’ almost invariably defines the other as a less-than-equal subject in relation to the self. Edward Said goes even further, dubbing such constructions as part of ‘an ultimately senseless dynamic’ comprising ‘border wars’: Whatever the ‘border wars’ have as aims, they are impoverishing. One must join the primordial or constituted group; or, as a subaltern Other, one must accept inferior status; or one must fight to the death. These border wars are an expression of essentialisations – Africanising the African, Orientalising the Oriental, Westernising the Western, Americanising the American, for an indefinite time and with no alternative (since African, Oriental, Western essences can only remain essences). (Said 1993: 311)

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The construction of otherness in distinction from, but always in relation to, the self does not and cannot exist on a singular axis. In order to justify and exonerate American interventions in the domestic affairs of Country ‘X’ or ‘Y’, US foreign policymakers, besides constituting the international arena as one replete with power and security concerns, must necessarily discursively construct self and other in moral terms. Dalby quotes from an unpublished paper by Michael Shapiro on US policy discourse on and about Guatemala: The making of the Other as something foreign is thus not an innocent exercise in differentiation. It is clearly linked to how the self is understood. A self construed with a security-related identity leads to the construction of Otherness on the axis of threats or lack of threats to that security, while a self identified as one engaged in ‘crisis management’ – a current self-understanding of American foreign policy thinking – will create modes of Otherness on a ruly versus unruly axis. (cited in Dalby 1988: 418) That the making of the other/difference/outside has much to do with the self/identity/inside implies that modern subjects are not sovereign voices that speak and act outside of history. By overturning or reversing such established discursive hierarchies, it becomes evident that other/

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difference/outside, as ‘inferior’ terms, are in fact of critical importance to their ‘superior’ opposites. In disturbing the natural order of these asymmetrical oppositions, it becomes possible to see them as arbitrary constructions and, in turn, to problematise the logocentric disposition intrinsic to modernity. But stopping at overturning established hierarchies is not sufficient, inasmuch as the condition of aporia obtains. With extra-historical subjects other than (in our context) the sovereign state in place, the problem of determinate causation remains. Indeed, to privilege one over the other is to re-establish logocentrism as the metaphysical exigency through a mere terminological exchange of ‘superior’ for ‘inferior’ and vice versa while preserving hierarchy. A second way in which subjects can be positioned is through the assignation of varying degrees of agency to different subjects (Doty 1993: 308). For instance, hear Hedley Bull on what, in his opinion, constitutes a ‘great power’ and what does not:

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Great powers … assert the right, and are accorded the right, to play a part in determining issues that affect the peace and security of the international system as a whole. They accept the duty, and are thought by others to have the duty, of modifying their policies in the light of managerial responsibilities they bear. States which, like Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, are military powers of the front rank, but are not regarded by their own leaders or others as having these rights and responsibilities, are not properly speaking great powers. (Bull 1977: 202) In constituting particular kinds of subjects, what this excerpt appears to have done here is to assign a greater or more complex degree of agency to so-called ‘great powers’ relative to powers such as Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. As ‘military powers of the front rank’ that neither accept nor are given the ‘rights and responsibilities’ to ‘manage’ international peace and security and, as such, fail to modify their bellicose policies, Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany are inscribed as warmongering states which do not reflect upon the consequences of their aggrandising behaviours. Although they would clearly constitute agents, positioned against the great powers – as reflective agents that know and accept their rightful obligation to determine the issues that affect the peace and security of the international system as a whole – Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany are nevertheless accorded a simpler degree of agency. Indeed, that the speaking subject in this instance (Hedley Bull) is a scholar associated with a great power (Britain) and the subjects/objects of this discourse the two belligerents in question already positions these subjects (the speaking subject/great powers and irresponsible military powers) with regard to each other.

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A third and final illustration of subject-positioning can be found in the way Bull’s excerpt positions great powers as those who know, accept and are given the obligations to manage international peace and security, but conversely positions Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany as states that reject those same obligations. As reflective and responsible powers – and, importantly, recognised by other states as the rightful guardians of international order – the great powers therefore have the right to deny the demands of other powers who do not subscribe to great power rules and, in effect, seek to revise them by challenging the status quo. Bull implies that Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, as the key revisionist – and hence ‘irresponsible’ – powers of their respective historical periods, are not included among great powers deserving of their ‘due rights’. That much of the non-European part of the world was either forcefully colonised or deemed uncivilised, and hence irrelevant, are assumptions that Bull, however, does not seriously question.

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Conclusion: Towards a Radical Constructivism This chapter has demonstrated how linguistic mechanisms in discourse operate to constitute a particular ontological reality. They furnish presuppositional information, both explicitly as well as tacitly presented, that furnish the background conditions. They supply predications that animate various subjectivities. Finally, they position or place subjects as unequal binary opposites that discredit otherness while privileging the self, when in reality the condition of otherness is vitally important to rendering the self possible at all. No representations of the Asia Pacific ‘as it is’ are free of their respective histories. Few representations of the ‘Asia Pacific’ that profess respect for history, contingency and practice seem prepared to take their own claims seriously. That some security intellectuals and most practitioners invariably treat such a constructed reality as given and self-evident – to which their analyses, policies and actions are simply to be understood as responses without, importantly, any apparent acknowledgement of their own complicity in the constitutive process – is something that should be of grave concern to students of security. Again, it bears reiterating that the aim of this book is not to unconditionally privilege texts and discourses over concrete human experience. Rather, it is to highlight the obvious fact that discourses of security, not least those by scholars and intellectuals whose business is to study and comment on Asia Pacific security, are not innocent exercises but are always and already saddled with political and ideological implications. It is to these representational practices put into effect by the region’s knowledge networks that we now turn.

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Representing the ‘Asia Pacific’

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What goes for production and disciplining of social spaces goes also for the production and disciplining of subjects. From a genealogical standpoint, there are no subjects, no fully formed identical egos, having an existence prior to practice and then implicated in power political struggles. Like fields of practice, subjects emerge in history. (Ashley 1987a: 410) The regional idea of the ‘Asia Pacific’, which arguably furnished its East/Pacific Asian proponents and purveyors with a cultural and political reach well beyond their region’s geographical limits, gained currency during the 1980s and enjoyed wide legitimacy especially during the 1990s. Following the 1993-1998 financial crisis that blighted East Asia, the consequent establishment in 1999 of the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) institution comprising China, Japan, South Korea and the ten ASEAN countries, regional perturbations over the apparent lack of solidarity and support shown by the United States (and USled international financial institutions) in response to East Asia’s plight during the financial crisis (Beeson & Islam 2005), and a propensity among North America-based analysts to use ‘Asian security’ rather than ‘Asia Pacific security’ as the preferred reference (Alagappa 1998, 2003; Simon 2001), the Asia Pacific idea has since waned somewhat in the face of stiff competition from competing regional visions and their supporting institutional architectures, specifically ‘East Asian’ regionalism (Camilleri 2005; Hund 2003; Stubbs 2002). But it has by no means gone away, not least because the label has been institutionalised in the names of regional organisations such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation – that is, APEC – and visions such as the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), which emerged in the wake of the faltering Doha Round of world trade talks (Morrison & Pedrosa 2007). In a crucial sense, the persistence and prevalence of the Asia Pacific idea have partly been the consequence of what Ashley (in the above epigraph) has referred to as the productive and disciplinary effects of not only social spaces – the ‘Asia Pacific’ being the imagined geopolitical/economic space in question here – but also the subjects, state and non-state ‘actors’, that

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ostensibly and ‘legitimately’ inhabit such spaces.1 Representing the Asia Pacific is indeed a complex operation! Here we enter Track 2. Although this book is less about the Asia Pacific’s Track 2 networks and their institutional achievements than the impact of their dialogical participation within a broader discursive economy, a short introduction of the knowledge networks in question here is in order. Three institutional developments in particular warrant attention, namely, the formation and ostensible policy contributions of the ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP and PECC. First, there was the exhortation in 1991 by the ASEAN-ISIS for the leaders of ASEAN to begin the process of a region-wide ‘constructive political dialogue’ among all the signatories to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) as the prelude to a new regional order and the collective push ‘from below’ for the formation of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). Likewise, much has been made of the efforts, ostensibly at the instigation of ASEAN-ISIS, to create an official diplomatic framework for an ‘Asia Pacific Political Dialogue’ and a ‘New Regional Order’ which culminated, at least according to Track 2 accounts of the causal story, in the ARF (ASEANISIS 1991). Formed in 1988, the ASEAN-ISIS’s founding member institutions included five leading security studies institutes from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.2 By 2011, its membership had increased to nine institutions, with think tanks representing Brunei, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam joining the original five.3 (As yet, there is no official agency representing Burma/Myanmar.) The remit of the ASEAN-ISIS is twofold: (1) ‘to encourage cooperation and coordination of activities among policy-oriented ASEAN scholars and analysts’, and (2) ‘to promote policy-oriented studies of, and exchanges of information and viewpoints on, various strategic and international issues affecting Southeast Asia’s and ASEAN’s peace, security and wellbeing’ (SIIA undated). The ASEAN-ISIS has also cemented its relationship with its governmental counterparts in ASEAN through institutionalising the meeting between the Heads of ASEAN-ISIS and the ASEAN Senior Officials since the ASEAN Senior Official Meeting (SOM) in Singapore in 1993. Moreover, there was a concomitant effort to establish an Asia Pacific version (or versions) of ASEAN-ISIS. In the security context, it led in 1992 to a region-wide assemblage of policy research and advocacy groups known rather cumbersomely as the Council for Security Cooperation for the Asia Pacific or CSCAP. According to a 1993 ASEAN-ISIS policy proposal to enhance region-wide multilateral security cooperation, the cardinal task is to establish ‘a community of security interests’ and to ‘promote the establishment of a region-wide non-governmental institution’ – not a military alliance or a pact but a supporting framework to the ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference process –

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initiated by ASEAN in the mid-1980s with its growing list of dialogue partner countries – of political-security dialogue in the Asia Pacific region (ASEAN-ISIS 1993a, 1993b). The CSCAP is the outcome of this process. Described as ‘the most ambitious proposal to date for a regularised, focused and inclusive nongovernmental process on Asia Pacific security matters’ (Capie & Evans 2007), the network aims to contribute to regional confidence building and to enhance regional security through dialogues, consultation and cooperation. To date, CSCAP has twenty-one full members of the Council and one associate member, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. Each member constitutes a ‘national committee’ centred upon an academic cum research institution, which serves as the local secretariat responsible for administering financial resources and mobilising the requisite intellectual capital and capacity for research.4 CSCAP has long established multiple ‘working groups’ whose mandate is to conduct research on specific policy-oriented themes and interests and to generate policy recommendations for multilateral security cooperation. At the first official gathering of the CSCAP Steering Committee in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, four dedicated working groups were commissioned in the areas of Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs), Concepts of Cooperative and Comprehensive Security, Maritime Cooperation, and the North Pacific. A fifth group on Transnational Crime started off in 1996 as a ‘study group’ and was upgraded to a working group a year later following acceptance by the Steering Committee of its perceived feasibility. No less than eight CSCAP memoranda (half of which came from the Maritime Cooperation working group alone) arose from their collective efforts produced primarily for the benefit of the ARF.5 In 2004, the Steering Committee of the CSCAP conducted a major overhaul of the working groups to better reflect contemporary changes in the strategic environment. It retired its working groups and instituted new so-called study groups, each with a tenure lasting two years. Groups that have since been dissolved include those responsible for fifteen research themes: (1) the ‘responsibility to protect’; (2) the establishment of regional transnational organised crime hubs in the Asia Pacific; (3) naval enhancement in the Asia Pacific; (4) safety and security of offshore oil and gas installations; (5) facilitating maritime security cooperation in the Asia Pacific; (6) safety and security in the Malacca and Singapore Straits; (7) a legal experts group; (8) energy security; (9) preventive diplomacy; (10) enhancing the effectiveness of the campaign against international terrorism with specific reference to the Asia Pacific region; (11) regional peacekeeping and peace-building; (12) Oceania; (13) human trafficking; (14) future prospects for multilateral security frameworks in Northeast Asia; and (15) capacity building for maritime security cooperation in the

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Asia Pacific. At the time of writing, CSCAP has four study groups in the areas of cyber security as a central strategy for securing the cyber environment in the Asia Pacific region, water resources security in mainland Southeast Asia, multilateral security governance in Northeast Asia/North Pacific, and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Asia Pacific (which itself has a subgroup, the Export Controls Experts Group). To date, these study groups have added another ten memoranda, making a total of eighteen memoranda produced by CSCAP by the end of 2011.6 Its impressive output notwithstanding, has CSCAP contributed to the regional policy process? The answer is a qualified ‘yes’, according to the grouping’s long-time emissaries who in recent reflections have identified the grouping’s ‘accomplishments’ while acknowledging its limitations. First, CSCAP, in their view, has succeeded in mobilising the diverse second-track communities in the Asia Pacific into ‘a cooperative enterprise to promote regional peace and security’. Its nonofficial orientation has facilitated ‘open and frank dialogue on matters that are often deemed too sensitive or controversial for discussion at the track one (official) level’ (Hassan & Cossa 2009: 41). On the other hand, they allow that the institution’s Track 2 status has not necessarily prevented the reliance by CSCAP national committees on their retired foreign policy and defence officials, including, in the case of the ‘Leninist’ states, party apparatchiks (Hernandez & Cossa 2011: 55). Second, they argue that CSCAP has sustained research productivity on substantive issues – attested by their numerous policy memoranda – and ‘added to the reservoir of knowledge and ideas’ on which the ARF and other related bodies could appropriate if desired (Hassan & Cossa 2009: 40-41, 46). Thirdly, its policy contributions are deemed to have direct relevance and utility to its Track 1 counterparts, specifically the ARF. This is due to CSCAP’s attempts ‘to go beyond the areas of immediate interest to the ARF in order to stay “ahead of the curve” in anticipating future security challenges’ (Hassan & Cossa 2009: 43). Other CSCAP colleagues concur: ‘Rather than simply echoing established positions of the Track One level, Track Two should be out in front of it, considering possible avenues of cooperation that are not currently being taken up by the region’s governments’ (Williams & Job 2007: 10). That said, other old CSCAP hands have conceded that CSCAP – indeed, Track 2 as a whole – needs to ‘promote a degree of flexibility in outside-of-the-box thinking that can lead to creative and effective management of policy issues’ (Hernandez & Kim 2012: 47). Finally, CSCAP has even advanced beyond the ARF in embracing a co-chair system wherein one co-chair from an ASEAN country and one from a non-ASEAN country serve concurrently – an apparent illustration of ‘shared leadership’ that the ARF lacks to this day.

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Notwithstanding the emergence of CSCAP, the creation of a crossPacific knowledge network was by no means a strictly ‘post-Cold War’ phenomenon in that it had already happened in the economic arena. The inclusion of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) in this study makes sense given its contributions to the construction and preservation of an Asia Pacific ontology that is more or less shared by its security-oriented counterparts, the ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP. The PECC was established in 1980, and its inaugural meeting, the Pacific Community Seminar (also known as PECC I), took place in Canberra with eleven economies in attendance. To date, PECC has twenty-three full members,7 two ‘institutional members’ – the Pacific Trade and Development Conference (PAFTAD) and Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) – and one associate member, the French Pacific Territories. The aim of the PECC has long been and remains the fostering of an open Pacific region and strengthening of the global multilateral trading system. To that end, the network has, in the view of one observer, become the Asia Pacific region's dominant forum on trade, investment and related economic issues (Cheit 1992: 116). Arguably, the PECC’s remit is best summed up by its San Francisco Declaration and Accompanying Statement of 1992 on ‘open regionalism’, a sort of rallying cry against what was perceived, at least in the early stages of the post-Cold War period, as a worrying global and divisive trend towards the formation of regional trade blocs, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA). As Arthur Dunkel, director-general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), once implored his audience at PECC IX (1992) to be on guard against the ostensible threat posed to the Uruguay Round of world trade talks by the rise of economic regionalism: ‘multilateralism and regionalism will either live together or die together!’ By the time PECC turned twenty-five in 2005, the region was again, with its proliferation of preferential trade agreements, flirting with economic bilateralism and regionalism (Dent 2010) and was, in former Indonesia trade minister Mari Pangestu’s words to the PECC, ‘no longer the champion for the multilateral trading system. It seems we lost the last bastion or champion for multilateralism in the trading area. We must now also deal with the world of multilateral, regional and bilateral free trade agreements. The question is how to make sense of these developments so that they do not take us away from the main game’ (cited in Elek 2005a: xvi). As a concept, open regionalism, adopted by APEC as a fundamental principle, remains contested, however. Beyond a basic consensus that international trade should be ‘free and open’8 and that, as such, regional trading arrangements should in practice be building blocks for further global liberalisation rather than stumbling blocks that

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deter that process, there really is little agreement among Asia Pacific countries over what the principle means substantively.9 That said, PECC members have clearly not allowed conceptual ambiguity to stand in the way of their enthusiastic advocacy of open regionalism – an Asia Pacific ‘contribution’, according to one reading (Garnaut 1996) – as the basic tenet of Asia Pacific regional economic (and also, by some accounts, political-security10) life. Taking a page from ASEAN’s series of Post-Ministerial Conferences, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke of Australia proposed in 1989 the creation of a new intergovernmental vehicle of regional cooperation for consultation on economic and social issues (Cotton 1990: 171). But it was PECC which – through its dialogue process, its facilitation of intensive consultations throughout 1989 and its advocacy for an institutionalised economic forum – primed the ground, as it were, for the consequent realisation of Hawke’s vision, the result of which was the formation of APEC (Park & Lee 2009: 98).11 Intriguingly, PECC, albeit a Track 2 organisation, arguably furnished a ready model for APEC. As one analyst has argued, ‘the issues and the constraints on involving governments directly in the process of economic cooperation in the Pacific were strikingly similar to those which influenced the emergence and structure of PECC’ (Elek 2005b: 66). At various times, task forces have been established by the PECC leadership to address a variety of policy concerns related to trade and investment – agriculture, renewable resources, minerals and energy, manufactured goods, technology transfers and capital flows. Subsequently, the PECC agenda was expanded to cover trade and investment in services, unemployment, social resilience, marine resources and the like (Young 2005). Ironically, PECC’s evident success at fostering the creation of APEC has also proved to be its bane, as even its ardent advocates concede, as it competes with APEC and other intergovernmental forums in the region for participants. It has had to face criticisms of institutional incoherence as well (Ravenhill 2006: 232). The foregoing analysis has highlighted the limits to, as well as possibilities of, Track 2 networks. They ‘bridge the gap’, as it were, ‘between the desire for multilateralism and the actual capacity to carry it out’ (Williams & Job 2007: 1). The ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP and PECC were neither the only knowledge brokers actively involved during the 1990s in representing the Asia Pacific and determining the region’s conditions of possibility, nor were their discursive contributions uniquely distinct with regards to other communities of intellectuals and practitioners of statecraft. Yet their proliferation marked the rise of a participatory regionalism which opened the door to a relatively small but not insignificant number of intellectuals whose expertise in security matters granted them access – limited for the most part, but access nonetheless

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– to the doorsteps of the policy world, long the highly exclusive preserve of those in power.

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‘Asia Pacific’: Whose and What? A central feature of the Asia Pacific security discourse – but one which, intriguingly enough, has received little analytical attention – is the productive power of ‘statesmanship’, socially and linguistically, to construct a fixed demarcation of a domestic realm that ostensibly contains a bound community linked together by bonds political in kind (Anderson 1983; Ashley 1987b; Campbell 1998). But as demonstrated in innumerable studies on complex interdependence, globalisation, transnationalism, ethno-nationalism and so on, the notion that territory, national identity and political community all share more or less the same geographical/cultural space and historical time – with the sovereign state as the embodiment of just such a modern political ‘imaginary’ based upon homogeneity – no longer holds today. Yet this empirical ‘fact’ – despite exposing the growing gulf between developments on the ground, on the one hand, and on the other hand tired but not retired concepts and constructs that lag behind12 – has not precluded state-centred political discourse from relying on suppositions and conclusions that continue to ultimately privilege the state. That Track 2 security narratives continue to treat states simply as given and in little need of critical accounting implies that practices of statecraft as especially exercised by security intellectuals can therefore be comprehended as practices aimed at ‘(re)territorialising’ the state – that is, insofar as global flows or movements of capital, contraband, commerce, information, and people are viewed as patterns that de-territorialise the space of the state (Agnew 1994; Connolly 1991; Doty 1996, 1998; Ruggie 1993b). Principally a political performance aimed at the production of boundaries, statecraft as such can no longer be comprehended purely in conventional foreign policy terms, namely, as interest-based political actions and reactions directed at other political communities – in short, behaviours that reflect and represent the aims and wishes of a pre-established community (Ashley 1987b). Hence statecraft is all about the production of spatial, temporal, social, cultural, economic and political boundaries as natural, given and thus in no need of explanation. From this standpoint, the sovereign domestic community and the space in which that community purportedly resides are therefore no more than an effect whose construction is, as we have seen, immensely problematic. This is so especially in the light of contemporary forces, all of which produce, among other consequences, disruptions to the effect of materialisation to which the discourse of international security studies refers as the sovereign state.

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With the foregoing concerns in mind, this chapter seeks to apply a radical constructivist methodology to two effects (by no means the only ones) particular to the contemporary world of Asia Pacific security as constituted by Track 2 narratives and the broader international relations academic debate regarding the immediate post-Cold War Asia Pacific of the 1990s (with which the former is inextricably and intertextually tied). This involves the production of the region as a given environment replete with an assortment of transnational challenges that potentially deterritorialise the state and to which security intellectuals and practitioners ‘respond’ but whose creation they presumably have little to do with. At issue here is the state whose very presence is increasingly politicised in a post-Cold War regional milieu regarded by security specialists as driven by change and uncertainty – a characterisation cast, more often than not, in opposition to the supposed continuity, certitude and predictability afforded by the Cold War. In a key sense, the two effects in question here – (1) the Asia Pacific as a realm of abjection and/or inferiority relative to a considerably more stable, settled and superior Europe and, (2) the Asia Pacific as a realm of strategic uncertainty, contingency and danger but also of unbridled opportunity which regional countries could conceivably exploit to their advantage – are symbiotic, with the latter acting as a counter-narrative of sorts to the former. Further, the first effect (abjection) has arguably been produced by a largely Western-based neo-realist cum neo-liberal narrative that portrayed the Asia Pacific at the end of the Cold War as an institutionally malnourished region and, as such, highly susceptible to the prospect of great power rivalry and even war. On the other hand, the second effect (uncertainty and opportunity) arises from the handiwork of Track 2 networks comprising ‘indigenous’ as well as extra-regional voices which, not particularly given to theoretical rigour and for the most part sympathetic to the region as a whole, acknowledged the risks posed by strategic uncertainty as well as the opportunities afforded Asia Pacific states to proactively fashion the region according to their terms.13

A Realm of Abjection To characterise the Asia Pacific as an abject region, clearly subaltern to the West, is neither to insist that it is an inert realm void of agency altogether nor to portray ‘Europe’ as without fault and weakness in the discourses circulated by largely Western-based knowledge communities. For instance, notwithstanding the rhetorical violence that pervades aspects of discourses on civilisational enmity in a post-9/11 world,14 one arguably would be hard pressed today to find blatantly racist statements such as the one by General William Westmoreland, which had made

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the press rounds in the United States during the height of the US occupation in Iraq as people sought to compare the Iraq conflict with the Vietnam War three decades ago: ‘the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient’.15 Rather, the implicit interpretive attitudes and practical dispositions that underwrite ‘scholarly’ accounts of the contemporary Asia Pacific facilitate and legitimise the making and naturalising of relative comparisons and contrasts, thereby producing similar effects to those created by Westmoreland’s statement. Against a backdrop of major advances made in security relations in Western Europe, the preconditions germane to that development, and the collective decision among European leaders to eschew ‘returning’ to bilateralism as the lynchpin of their post-war security cooperation, John Gerard Ruggie, in a 1993 essay, analyses prospects for multilateral institutionalisation in the Asia Pacific immediately following the Cold War’s ending: Security relations in the Asia Pacific region make the same points in the negative. It was not possible to construct multilateral institutional frameworks there in the immediate post-war period. Today, the absence of such arrangements inhibits progressive adaptation to fundamental global shifts. The United States and Japan are loath to raise serious questions about their anachronistic bilateral defence treaty, for example, out of fear of unravelling a fragile stability and thereby triggering arms races throughout the region. In Asia Pacific there is no European Community and no NATO to have transformed the multitude of regional security dilemmas, as has been done in Europe with Franco-German relations, for example. Indeed, no Helsinki-like process through which to begin the minimal task of mutual confidence building exists in the region. Thus, whereas today the potential to move beyond balance-of-power politics in its traditional form exists in Europe, a reasonably stable balance is the best that one can hope to achieve in the Asia Pacific region. (Ruggie 1993a: 4) Presupposition The background knowledge implied in the Ruggie excerpt presupposes that Europe and Asia Pacific are two distinct, hermetically sealed regions exhibiting diametrically opposite patterns of security relations. That these relations are inter-nation-al – hence demonstrating a commitment to a state-centred ontology – is similarly offered as a fact not open to question. Multilateral institutional frameworks are presupposed to be a good thing.16 That mutual confidence building cardinal to the

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peace efforts is also an unquestioned supposition is less interesting, however, than its link to the so-called ‘Helsinki-like process’ of confidence building that eventuated in the formation of the security conference which eventuated as the Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The unstated assumption here is that mutual confidence building is successful inasmuch as it follows a similar path as that taken by the original framers of the OSCE. A similar linkage is made in the excerpt with respect to the European Community (EC), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Franco-German relations. The implication these linkages raise is therefore unmistakable: were Asia Pacific security relations to travel a path divergent to that of European security relations, the outcome would likely be harmful. Without institutional arrangements commensurable to those in Europe, there can be no ‘progressive adaptation to fundamental global shifts’ in the Asia Pacific region. Moreover, Asia Pacific states apparently are fearful of change that may conceivably cause an already ‘fragile’ stability to worsen. Finally, the passage subtly makes a distinction between a ‘traditional’ form of the balance of power, on the one hand, and (although Ruggie does not explicitly say so) a ‘modern’ form on the other. Statist subjects in the Asia Pacific region as such remain mired in traditional powerbalancing – the stark Hobbesian image of a constant war-prone condition comes to mind (Smith 1995; Williams 1996) – whereas those in the European region practise modern power-balancing – something only a mature Europe irrevocably committed to regional peace can envisage.17 In sum, the construction of Europe as a superior region – and therefore European states as superior kinds of subjects, with those of the Asia Pacific as inferior – is repeated throughout the passage. The presupposition, then, is that international politics, far from homogeneous, is ‘in fact’ heterogeneous and hierarchical, consisting of superior and inferior political subjects. Predication The European region and the states that inhabit Ruggie’s statement are endowed, both textually and inferentially, with the following positive qualities: the ability to adapt progressively to fundamental global shifts; the existence of the requisite collective will to pursue institutional multilateralism as evidenced by the Helsinki process, NATO and the EC; the sharing of a long-term commitment to regional peace through an official multilateralism; and a maturity that, along with the requisite preconditions, facilitate their progress to an allegedly modern form of balance (‘… today the potential to move beyond balance-of-power politics in its traditional form exists in Europe’). The Asia Pacific region and its

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inhabitants, however, are endowed with the following negative attributes, all of which more or less appear to be the mirror opposites of attributes of Europe and European states: (1) the inability or unwillingness to adapt progressively to global change due to the absence therein of multilateral institutions; (2) the lack of a similar historical experience with multilateralism to that of their European counterparts – a position wherein Asia Pacific Track 2 multilateral diplomacy does not seem to figure much, if at all; (3) the lack of the requisite collective will to multilateralise their security relations due to their abiding predilection with parochial state-centred interests; and, (4) the misfortune of being condemned indefinitely, as a consequence of their apparent immaturity and lack of commitment to and expectations of peaceful change, to traditional balance-of-power politics. The European states therefore come off in this excerpt as enlightened, mature, peaceful and hence superior subjects relative to their narrow-minded, self-centred, immature, conflict-ridden and inferior Asia Pacific counterparts.

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Placement/Positioning of Subjects As demonstrated in the foregoing discussion on the first two textual modalities, the attribution of superior and inferior qualities in Ruggie’s statement helps to position the subjects in an asymmetrical relationship that grossly favours the European nations over their Asia Pacific counterparts. Regarding the construction of self and other, what is of utmost interest is the way in which the European self is constituted through a passage that textually concerns the Asia Pacific. These particular discursive formations are not unique to the excerpt in question, however. Note, for example, the inscribed effects of a statement by Aaron L. Friedberg in a much-cited essay that, despite Friedberg’s different theoretical orientation to Ruggie’s, nonetheless produced a similar set of meanings relative to those engendered by the latter’s passage just examined: While civil war and ethnic strife will continue for some time to smoulder along Europe’s peripheries, in the long run it is Asia that seems more likely to be the cockpit of great power conflict. The half millennium during which Europe was the world’s primary generator of war (as well as wealth and knowledge) is coming to a close. But, for better or worse, Europe’s past could be Asia’s future. (Friedberg 1993/1994: 7, emphasis added) In the quotation from Friedberg, the process of differentiation intrinsic to the construction of identity constitutes a stable and peaceful European self through the linguistic evocation of its ‘Other’: an ‘Asia’

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as the imminent as well as immanent ‘cockpit of great power conflict’. Intriguingly, as late as 2008, Asia-based analysts, in assessing the prospects for major war in the Asia Pacific, were in a sense still indebted to a near unbroken image of the Asia Pacific as a war-prone zone nurtured by Friedberg among others (Bitzinger & Desker 2008; Friedberg 2011). Likewise, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad (1996) once picked up on a similar refrain concerning the manner in which Europeans socially construct the ‘bogey’ of a rising Asia in the next millennium as a way to curb Asian economic growth and development: ‘The Asian Century is a myth, a scary myth for Europeans, but a myth nevertheless … The Asian Century, if indeed there be one, will pose no threat to anyone’. Of more recent vintage is the following invitation by Kishore Mahbubani, a noted Singaporean public intellectual and self-appointed spokesperson for Asia, to Europeans to embrace the ‘Asian Century’ and shape it in ways that would bring mutual benefit, rather than fight against it:

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An enormous strategic opportunity has opened up for Europe to shape the Asian century, and help ensure it will be a peaceful and happy one. Among the many experiences that Europe could share with Asia is its great achievement of putting an end to war between any two EU [European Union] member states. It could also share its experience of generating a high level of international cooperation and eliminating virtually all borders within the EU. In short, Europe has a lot of knowledge to impart at a time when Asia is keen to learn. (Mahbubani 2009) Certainly, the Friedberg excerpt concedes (if only indirectly) the existence of conflict and strife in Europe both in historical and contemporary terms. Nevertheless, it locates existing conflicts along the ‘peripheries’ of the European continent. By this, one may surmise that the author means the Balkans, wherein ‘inveterate’ communal conflicts that had conceivably lain dormant during the Cold War period have continued unabated through the 1990s – with the exception of a brief and tenuous cessation courtesy of the US-brokered Dayton peace accord of 1995 – since the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia (McMahon & Weston 2009). Yet an interpretation such as this is at best a prevarication in the glaring light of oddly unacknowledged instances of ‘civil war and ethnic strife’ smouldering not along Europe’s peripheries but at its centre – or, more accurately, what the quotation has designated by corollary as Europe’s centre – such as religious conflict in Northern Ireland, Basque separatism in the Pyrenees or Islam-inspired, home-grown terrorist bombings in London in 2005 (often referred to as ‘7/7’ because they

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occurred on 7 July), in what is ‘Western’ Europe. In this respect, juxtapose the above two excerpts that have described contemporary Europe as a relatively stable and peaceful region with the following statement by Sukhumband Paribatra, a long-time ASEAN-ISIS security intellectual and former deputy foreign minister of Thailand:

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However, the prevailing trends have also brought in their train a great deal of uncertainty in many areas, especially where the question of the future of new regimes arising from the ashes of communism and Sovietism is concerned. Continued economic malaise and outbursts of nationalistic or religious fervours in most of the eastern European countries and the member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have made Europe, for most of the post-1945 era an island of stability in the turbulent sea of international politics, potentially one of the most troubled continents in the world. (Paribatra 1992: 3) One is immediately struck by the different inscription proffered by this third excerpt: a Europe apparently destined for a bleak conflict-ridden future – ‘potentially one of the most troubled continents in the world’ – much in the same way as the Ruggie and Friedberg inscribe the Asia Pacific region. It could be said that the excerpts from Ruggie, Friedberg and Paribatra really refer to two different geographical regions: the former two are referring to Western and Central Europe, whereas the latter is referring to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Hence they are incompatible and should not be used to make the (rather unfair) comparison as attempted in the text above. This is an important observation but one that in no way nullifies the argument rendered: the peaceful and stable ‘Europe’ – Western Europe, no less – to which Ruggie and Friedberg refer exists in the discursive realm as much as it does in the material realm. The inclusion of Paribatra’s excerpt, albeit in reference to eastern Europe, is but another indication of the problematical usage of ‘Europe’ as a discursive or linguistic trope similarly deployed in the excerpts from Ruggie and Friedberg to inscribe Europe as peaceful and stable relative to the Asia Pacific – inscriptions that ignore conflict and instability in the very Europe of which they speak with such authority and confidence. That difference is mitigated nevertheless by certain presuppositions and predications shared by all three excerpts in question, such as the writing of conflict in what the Friedberg excerpt dismissively considers the ‘peripheries’ of Europe, or more importantly the Paribatra excerpt’s metaphorical inscription of post-1945 Europe as a region of stability and tranquillity in opposition to the rest of the world in turmoil. What the above different illustrations collectively portray, both directly and

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indirectly, is a Europe distinct from other regions. The Hobbesian anarchy that seemingly characterises not only an inferior Asia but parts of Europe as well, and that can potentially disrupt the positioning of European nations as superior subjects, must necessarily be marginalised (and/or externalised) in order to preserve a seemingly unproblematic centre and sustain the ‘reality’ of a civilised and peaceful European heartland far from the conflicts raging on its discursively drawn – rather than ‘actual’ – geographical borders. Sharing an ‘intertextual’ link with these interpretations, Richard Betts (1993/1994: 64) argues that a peaceful and stable Europe is more plausible due to ‘the apparent satisfaction of the great powers with the status quo’, whilst concomitantly and conversely asserting that the case of East Asia provides ‘an ample pool of festering grievances, with more potential for generating conflict than during the Cold War, when bipolarity helped stifle the escalation of parochial disputes’. Europe as the peaceful, stable and secure self is not conceivable apart from its other – a dangerous, unstable and insecure Asia Pacific. Secondly, the excerpt from Ruggie appears to assign a greater and more complex degree of agency to European than Asia Pacific states. Regional peace and stability was achieved in post-war Europe through the conflux of political wills, energies and resources of European nations sufficiently committed to the ‘collective quest’ to establish a security community (Job 1994). The passage’s litany of their achievements in building the requisite multilateral institutional frameworks – EC, NATO, OSCE and so on – inscribes the European state subjects, to paraphrase Madeleine Albright, as more than just audience and actors; they are, so to speak, the authors of the history of their age (Walker 1997). In contrast, consigned, so to speak, to ‘balance-of-power politics in its traditional form’ wherein ‘a reasonably stable balance is the best one can hope to achieve in the Asia Pacific region’, Asian statist subjects are thereby inscribed with a kind of quasi-impotence that relegates them to the role of audience in the global stage of international security management or that of brute actors caught indefinitely within a security dilemma, fearful that their ‘fragile stability’ would unravel and thereby trigger a region-wide arms race and outright war. Finally, related to the assignation of agency is a third way in which subjects are being positioned in Ruggie’s discourse. As nations that have experienced not only the brunt of two world wars but a long history of traditional power balancing as well, the European states are constituted as subjects who know and accept the obligations of regional conflict resolution and, as such, willingly sacrifice the short-term benefits of national interest for the long-term gains of regional peace. In contrast, the Asia Pacific states are constituted indirectly as less reflective and less responsible subjects such that the ideal of regional peace

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is usually supplanted by the overriding concern with national interests. As a prominent Singaporean public intellectual once mused, doubts especially among Western-based observers regarding the commitment of member nations of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) to long-term regional peace and stability were in fact raised at the very inauguration of the ARF in 1994, not least over the ARF’s lack of a plan for institutional progression beyond mere talk about confidence building measures and preventive diplomacy, linked to an evolutionary timetable, and so on (Koh 1995: 68). If ASEAN were no ‘autonomous regional organisation seeking to advance supranational ideals but … a vehicle for the implementation of national functions’ (Indorf 1975: 5), then the ARF, which evidently shares the same diplomatic conventions and security model as ASEAN’s (Leifer 1996), could likewise be understood as a region-wide vehicle for ARF member countries to achieve their national goals. In other words, sovereignty and non-intervention, which have had a longstanding emphasis in the region and are legal norms that many postcolonial societies and developing nation-states of the Asia Pacific view as key to regional peace and security (Acharya 2004a), are deemed inferior to the supra-nationalism of post-war Western Europe.

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‘It’s Europe, stupid!’18 Deconstructing the narrative on Asia Pacific security from the foregoing excerpts by critically reflecting on the presuppositions, predications and placement (or positioning) of subjects within discourses underscores the multi-tiered ‘nature’ of textuality. As a textual production of reality, the passage hence draws upon the three levels of subject formation identified by Todorov (1984) – axiomatic, praxeological and epistemological – in constituting a seemingly rich representation of an external reality in little need of critical explanation. At the level of axioms, value judgements are rendered with regard to the superiority or inferiority of particular subjects through all three textual mechanisms. At the level of practice, there is a simultaneous distancing of self to and from the other as evidenced by the construction of two interrelated effects. On the one hand, there is the effect of a present Asia Pacific that was once Europe’s past. On the other, there is the effect of a contemporary Europe that has successfully broken away from an unstable, conflict-ridden history wherein residual vestiges of those terrible times are now consigned to Europe’s ‘peripheries’. And at the level of epistemology, there is little doubt that the passage alludes, if only implicitly, to a self – ‘Ruggie’, the knowledgeable speaking subject – who knows intimately the subjects and objects constituted by his discourse and is therefore located in a position of power and authority to assess and adjudicate the ‘given’ world of Asia Pacific security that, paradoxically, he has

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constructed via language and interpretation. Here we are reminded indirectly of Frantz Fanon’s rejection of Jean-Paul Sartre’s narrow Hegelian account of ‘self-other’ relations predicated upon reciprocity, where (at least for Sartre) ‘white’ and ‘black’ are linked together as psychic others: the master needs the slave so as to overcome auto-alienation, which is necessary for mutual recognition and political accommodation to take place (Fanon 1952: 82). According to Diana Fuss, for Fanon, Sartre’s interpretation errs in assuming the black man figures prominently in the master-slave opposition when in fact the black stands entirely outside of the self-other binary appropriated and defined by the white man, for whom the ‘black man’ in the former’s inscription is but the master’s image of the other and bears little relation to the lived realities experienced by the latter (Fuss 1994: 22).19 In this sense, one may say Ruggie’s passage has more to do with Europe than the Asia Pacific. Indeed, the one-dimensional portrait of an abject Asia Pacific could also be understood as an Orientalist gesture in that it transforms the ‘real’ Pacific/East Asia into a discursive contemporary ‘Orient’ that serves as a surrogate or an underground version of Europe (MooreGilbert 1997: 36-37). Needless to say, not all Western security discourses about Asia Pacific make the same suppositions as those employed in the above excerpts. Nor do all Asia Pacific discourses categorically reject the suppositions held by them. Indeed, their potent portraits of abjection notwithstanding, it should be said that the Ruggie, Friedberg and other statements do not in any way deny the rising prosperity – and along with that, political power – that increasingly defines the Asia Pacific region. What the foregoing excerpts highlight is the interdependence among discourses and texts. But what they furnish is a shared prognosis with which students of development and modernisation would readily identify – namely, Asia Pacific’s future is Europe’s past. The juxtaposition of three different excerpts (one of which was distinct in its construction of Europe) in the foregoing discussion makes clear that although predicates and practices for each subject – Asia Pacific and Europe as regions comprising states – are not identical from document to specific document and text to local text, there is however a coherence among them. The predicates and practices appear to ‘hang together in a certain way’ so as to write into being a particular post-Cold War world whose chief political subjects are states, albeit of different qualities and agential prowess. It is not without reason that Edward Said once observed: The readiest account of place might define it as the nation, and certainly in the exaggerated boundary drawn between Europe and the Orient – a boundary with a long and often unfortunate tradition in European thought – the idea of the nation, of a

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national-cultural community as a sovereign entity and place set against other places, has its fullest realisation. (Said 1982: 8) Inasmuch as discourses describe a certain empirical state of affairs, it could be argued with equal force that they work, in highly regulated and reiterative ways, to produce the sovereign state (alongside other lesser subjectivities ascribed with varying levels of agential freedom and efficacy) as modern international subject par excellence.

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A Realm of Uncertainty and Opportunity The analytical efforts of Track 2 knowledge networks in the Asia Pacific have been described as involving largely empirically-minded and policy-oriented work that, for the most part, is neither theoretically sophisticated nor harbouring high-academic pretentions (Alagappa 2003: ix). Granted, their renditions of the Asia Pacific do not automatically guarantee a more representative picture of the region’s lived experiences – notwithstanding the claim many second-trackers could make concerning either their nationality with or residency in an Asia Pacific country – compared to their (mostly Western-based) counterparts who read abjection and little else.20 But their representations of the post-Cold War Asia Pacific as a realm not only of uncertainty, contingency and danger, but also of opportunity, implies a heightened sensitivity in their discourse to traces of heterogeneity as well as of heteronomy in their interpretations. Nevertheless, the Asia Pacific is continually treated by those same scholars, soldiers and statesmen alike as a realm replete with foundational categories and natural referents apparently in little need of critical explanation where the bulk of international security studies in general and Asia Pacific security studies in particular are concerned. Moreover, the centrality of these foundations or grounds for Track 2 security discourse are such that they provide a ‘fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten’ the peace and stability of the region (Bernstein 1983: 18). A discursive circularity thereby obtains. Intellectuals of statecraft, standing upon what ultimately are unstable grounds but claiming a certitude allegedly guaranteed by the state (or some other historical figuration of sovereign presence), designate such ‘vicissitudes’ as unfamiliar, dangerous and threatening to the state; mobilise and deploy the requisite resources to deal with such dangers and threats; and, in the process, reconstitute the state as that Cartesian ‘fixed point’ and ‘stable rock’ whose foundations must never be subject to critical questioning even as they are being affirmed.

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The social construction of strategic uncertainty cum opportunity is not unique to the Asia Pacific security discourse; the same was true in regional economic narratives, not least efforts by the PECC – the Track 2 brokerage in support of the APEC forum – to emphasise the Asia Pacific’s enormous economic potential in the immediate post-Cold War period (Clements 1992). Indeed, most IR perspectives today appear to regard uncertainty as a universal condition germane to the post-Cold War era. From a theoretical perspective, uncertainty may well be the articulation by a field of inquiry that has had trouble playing catch-up with the so-called ‘stunning changes [that] have occurred in the world’ with the Cold War’s conclusion (Viotti & Kauppi 1993: vii). From the more immediate vantage point of policy concerns, demands engendered by globalisation in concert with the dissolution of certain obligations to alliance and ideology have brought about new facets of the perennial problem of statecraft – notably, the making and remaking of the state. That is, the construction and instantiation of the state remains the principal task of statesmanship in which security intellectuals, among others, participate through discourse. This is equally true in the context of contemporary de-territorialisations of the state as it has been in past historical contexts, wherein the inscription or production of the sovereign state had proved as contingent a process as always. Significant in this respect is the overwhelming consensus among Asia Pacific security intellectuals as well as other epistemic and policy communities concerned with global scientific and technical affairs that ‘growing technical uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern’ have made the task of international policy coordination not only increasingly necessary but increasingly difficult (Haas 1992: 1). However, aside from this technical treatment of regional affairs which epistemic communities consciously adopt, it is safe to say, broadly so, that international relations scholarship in the main, especially positivist-rationalist variants, are equally technical in that they ‘[take] the present as given and [reason] about how to deal with particular problems within the existing order of things’ (Cox 1992) – ‘problem-solving theory’, in Robert W. Cox’s (1981) terms. The important point here is that any questioning of the essentially political nature of the inscriptive process is either deferred or excluded altogether. Technical treatments of this sort, in short, are in effect acts in domestication and de-politicisation (Gerstl 2010). Similarly, Richard Ashley (1995: 98) has also noted that the process of constituting something as a ‘danger’ or a threat involves decisions and solutions that are presented in technical terms. In social scientific terms, this involves the domination of rational calculability and planning and the celebration of instrumental or technical reason (Edkins 1999: 9). To do so, however, may be to ‘disavow reflection’, as Jürgen Habermas has put it.21 The

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disavowal of reflection, we might say, is a fundamentally political act deployed for the purpose of affirming and sustaining the limits of a discourse as natural and self-evident. The act of disavowal may not be consciously or deliberately performed; as Terence Ball (1987: 8) has observed, we have ‘been speaking positivist prose, though without knowing it’. Security intellectuals want to know how, amid apparently all-encompassing and rapid changes to the global fabric and in the absence of a ‘conductor’ or master strategist, international policy is to be coordinated (Bourdieu 1977: 72). In short, the security problematique commonly attributed to Hobbes of how order is to be established and maintained in the absence of an ‘orderer’ is raised. How, indeed, in the face of the anticipated ‘emergence of a multipolar situation in the not too distant future’ (Alagappa 1988b: 1; Lau & Suryadinata 1988) can regional order be assured? From a radical constructivist perspective, what is fascinating about all this is the rationale provided by Track 2 analysts that, in their view, renders the forms of multilateral security cooperation that they recommend as (in their words) ‘imperative’ to Asia Pacific peace and stability. The main challenge ‘is to deal with the uncertainties arising from the ending of the Cold War’ (ASEAN-ISIS 1993: 5, emphasis added). The perception of uncertainty was similarly shared by most regional security specialists. For example, in response to the issue of post-Cold War strategic uncertainty in Asia Pacific during the mid-1990s, a prominent Track 2 member intimated that uncertainty, in the view of the Malaysian national security establishment, constitutes the ‘major impediment to stability’ in the region, particularly the South China Sea.22 ‘In the Asia Pacific region’, another regular CSCAP participant wrote in 1996, ‘the initial sense of euphoria and optimism accompanying the end of the Cold War has now given way to uncertainty and apprehension about the new instabilities and disorder in the post-Cold War setting’ (Acharya 1996: 13). Still others argued that uncertainty renders foreign policymaking for ASEAN states more complicated in that they cannot, as perhaps in the case of some ASEAN members during the Cold War years, concentrate their policy efforts toward particular states such as the United States – ‘put all their eggs in one basket’, as one specialist put it – but must pursue a kind of omni-directional foreign policy in the sense that most if not all regional powers must be courted – ‘open regionalism’ coupled with ‘strategic hedging’, in short – even as existing relationships and structures are to be kept healthy and vibrant.23 All accept without question the alleged condition of regional uncertainty. This then makes it possible to establish policy proposals that take, as their starting point, the pre-existing state as an unproblematic fixed and stable ground upon which to survey, with deep concern, the uncertainties that threaten its identity and interests. This is a move which,

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paradoxically, must necessarily occur prior to the interpretation of uncertainty in order for that interpretation to be possible at all. In view of just such uncertainty and the perceived shift by the Asia Pacific to a multipolar strategic environment (Friedberg 1993/1994; Zhao 1997), the aim of multilateral dialogue and cooperation is, therefore, ‘to bring about a more predictable and constructive pattern of relations’ (as various Track 2 memoranda have put it).24 In short, regional uncertainty is expressed as an outcome, direct or otherwise, produced by the conclusion of the Cold War. Similarly, an ad hoc group of academics, policy analysts and government officials – a group well represented no less by numerous ASEAN-ISIS intellectuals – whose inquiry, conducted in the early 1990s, into the prospects of Vietnam’s induction into ASEAN, was framed within the following background conditions, stated: The post-Cold War world is a world of momentous changes. It is a world where within a brief period of time – no more than an instant when measured against the full expanse of mankind’s long history – the global strategic, political, social, economic and technological landscapes have undergone astonishingly rapid farreaching transformations. (ASEAN-Vietnam Study Group 1993: 9)

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Another example, taken from the opening remarks to the Tenth Asia Pacific Roundtable in 1996, begins with the observation that the Asia Pacific region, since the ending of the Cold War, has been undergoing ‘a time of momentous changes’: Relative stability and economic dynamism are not the only characteristics. The unresolved conflict on the Korean Peninsula, the tensions across the Taiwan Straits, the South China Sea dispute and the recent military build-up are potential sources of threat to regional peace and security. Thus the very timely convening of the Asia Pacific Roundtable, one of the most important ‘secondtrack’ forums for regional security-related issues, will make further contribution to the building of mutual trust, the enhancing of confidence measures, the promotion of self-restraint and rulebased behaviour among regional countries, and eventually, to creating in the future, some kind of security framework to serve the common interests of the countries in the region. (Hao 1997: iv) At the risk of labouring the point, the foregoing illustrations, along with other intertextually linked narratives, collectively demarcate a boundary separating two seemingly distinct historical phases, the consequence of which is not without important significance for the overlapping

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discourses on comprehensive and cooperative security. Track 2 contributions to multilateral security cooperation, as the latter half of the above excerpt contends, are timely. Indeed, the contemporary context of uncertainty and rapid change, the reasoning goes, permits if not necessitates and legitimises the multilateralisation of regional security relations into cooperative initiatives – for building mutual trust, enhancing confidence, promoting self-restraint and rule-based behaviour and the like – in order to ensure lasting peace and bring about resolution to the region’s post-Cold War related conundrums.25 Indeed, despite their ready acknowledgements of uncertainty and the not insignificant limitations standing in the way of security multilateralism, the shared sense of opportunism within CSCAP in 1994 is accompanied by confidence, if not conceit, that achieving effective regional cooperation in the Asia Pacific is only a matter of time: Security cooperation on a multilateral basis is still problematic, whether it be on a governmental or non-governmental basis. In the economic realm, the governmental APEC and the non-governmental PEEC and PBEC have development [sic] into useful fora for regional cooperation. In the security realm, the ASEAN Regional Forum and CSCAP are new, but they should develop into effective fora for dialogue and cooperative effort within a short period of time. (CSCAP 1994: 1) Over time, this euphoric assessment would come to be replaced by a considerably more measured and circumspect one (Hernandez & Kim 2012).

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Presupposition The background knowledge created in the statements examined above presupposes that the contemporary Asia Pacific consists of two distinct, hermetically sealed phases: a ‘Cold War era’ in which international attitudes and actions have proved more or less predictable, and a ‘postCold War era’ in which the inverse is true. Furthermore, amid the assertions of ‘momentous changes’, ‘far-reaching transformations’ and the loss of ‘old landmarks’ and manifestations of ‘strange novelties’ in what is now the ‘unfamiliar terrain’ of post-Cold War Asia Pacific, the unexpressed ‘fact’ not open to question is the metaphysical exigency of restoring faith in the sovereign state. More specifically, the ‘fact’ that the state is, in essence, a discursive artefact that owes its ‘materiality’ to the perennial workings of state-crafting practices does not appear to have affected severely the penchant among security intellectuals participating in Track 2 diplomatic dialogues to privilege incessantly the

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ontology of statist presence. In this respect, for all the disturbances and hence destabilisations that an accelerated and extensive process of historical change can and does create for state identity, strategic uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it provides sufficient manoeuvring space for the discursive re-territorialisation of the state – a reconstitution of state that is always in process and, as such, never completed. Witness, for example, the following statement expressed implicitly as an invitation to the scholarly and policy community to reconstruct an increasingly politicised perspective of international security so as to (it is implied) better deal with post-Cold War uncertainty as evidenced by the ‘emerging’ forces of globalisation, regionalism and ethno-nationalism:

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Amidst contemporary and emerging struggles for equity and ethnic and national identity, this period has spawned regional markets and agreements that are fast eroding national trade barriers … As the trite expression of the world as a global village becomes more of a reality in the next century, the mental maps we have held on to as a nation will have to give way to new perspectives evolving iteratively from our interaction with the world. In the area of international relations and diplomacy, the challenge is to chart directions and strategies for pursuing our national interest which recognise the interests and goals we share in common with Asian neighbours and countries in other continents. (Bautista 1994: unpaged, emphasis added) Noteworthy is the manner in which it reasserts closure by imposing the presupposition of statist ontology on the discourse, thereby effectively precluding other possibilities of collective existence. The provisos ‘we’ and ‘our’ employed therein are redolent with the supposition of homogeneity and consensus among all Asia Pacific security intellectuals, if not a wider enlightened community. Furthermore, that the invitation calls for state-centred ‘directions and strategies’ that draw upon an apparent convergence among state interests and goals connotes, in essence, that the ‘global village’ and fragmentary pressures referred to – in contrast to the radical implications they hold for IR study and practice – have, in effect, little relevance to the way security intellectuals continue to discursively construct the world of Asia Pacific security. Indeed, the provisos quoted hence refer not only to the transnational community of security intellectuals who already know themselves to be but also to the un-stated assumption purportedly shared among that community that the statist community in which ‘we’ have invested must continue to be protected from the most dangerous threat of all: imaginations that refuse to affirm the foundations and secure the limits that render viable a

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statist discourse, and in doing so ‘expose’ the state as little more than a social construction. Predication

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As a textual mechanism, predication endows a particular subject with certain attributes and qualities such that one may affirm that subject’s identity with little need of critical explanation. At the risk of oversimplification, one may say, in accordance with the supporting logic common to these and many other similar statements, that the end of the Cold War represents a watershed marking the conclusion of an era characterised by a stable political ‘imaginary’, on the one hand, and the genesis of a new era characterised by the struggle to define a new political ‘imaginary’ on the other. In brief, the Cold War period was apparently marked by continuity, certainty and predictability; conversely, the postCold War period is marked by rapid change, uncertainty and unpredictability. This is not to imply that all second-track security discourse participates in such simplistic reductions of historical change and diversity of Asia Pacific international life into the hermetic phases of ‘Cold War’ and ‘post-Cold War’. Other ASEAN-ISIS intellectuals, as in the case of an eminent Thai security intellectual, have seemingly demonstrated greater care, when commenting on the magnitude of change and diversity, to refrain from the problematic dichotomisation employed in the earlier cited excerpts: It is axiomatic that we are living in a world of rapid changes, a world where within a relatively short period of time the global strategic, political, social, economic and technological landscapes have undergone, and indeed continue to undergo, astonishingly far-reaching transformations in a manner perhaps unprecedented in the history of mankind. Certainly a Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep in the early 1970s and woke up after a two decade-long slumber, would find himself in a very unfamiliar terrain, where many of the old landmarks have disappeared and many a strange novelty abounds. (Paribatra 1992: 2) In one sense, the claim made is not unique, since others elsewhere have similarly defined the last two or so decades as a time of weighty changes in the manner, say, in which the advent of multinational corporations with their global business reach have redrawn some of the landscapes to which the above excerpt refers (Vernon 1971; McDonald 1992). But it does call into question the problematic penchant of the earlier cited statements to attribute uncertainty and change specifically to the ending of the Cold War, revealing as such the plausibility of

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discursive play in those statements. Although less transfixed by Cold War-based categories as evidenced by its use of the early 1970s as the implied starting point of ‘far-reaching transformations’, the above statement, not unlike the others above, uses the same premise of rapid and exponential flux, however, in order to construct the contemporary Asia Pacific region as an uncertain security environment. Much like the previous quotation from Paribatra, Noordin Sopiee’s ambitious, even grandiloquent, effort on the implications of the socalled New World Order for the Asia Pacific region, in which he described myriad transformations as well as continuities (‘unchanged parameters and new fundamentals’), constructs an effect in which uncertainty and change, in diametric contrast to those of the Cold War period, comprise the given conditions of the contemporary, post-Cold War Asia Pacific (Sopiee 1992). Again, my purpose here is not to assess the accuracy of Sopiee’s and Paribatra’s analyses. Indeed, from a radical constructivist standpoint, the disagreements between the two parties are minor relative to the similar effect that is produced from both accounts: the disparate yet similar inscription of regional uncertainty and, in turn, the rationalisation and legitimisation of multilateral security cooperation – albeit with allegedly ‘ASEANesque’ features – as the proper regional response. What these examples – more so, to be sure, in the case of those that have in common the allusion to a clear disjunction between Cold War and post-Cold War – share is the manner in which Asia Pacific security discourses, as a knowledgeable practice, socially construct the ‘post-Cold War environment’ as a realm of strategic uncertainty and unfamiliarity, wherein ‘old landmarks’ have disappeared and ‘strange novelties’ abound. Moreover, the aim here is neither to determine the exact historical moment wherein rapid and momentous change occurred nor, for that matter, to decide the analytical accuracy of Track 2 articulations of post-Cold War uncertainty. Nor is it about determining the intentionality of actors behind the above discursive performances. Contrariwise, the object here is to demonstrate a quirk of modern discourses and narratives of international relations in dealing with the inherent ambiguity, complexity and diversity of global life. The disjunctive categories of ‘Cold War’ and ‘post-Cold War’ can thus be apprehended as the vaunted ‘complexity’ of a modern security discourse that reduces the Cold War years, on the one hand, to the thematic constant of certainty and continuity, and the post-Cold War years, on the other hand, to that of uncertainty and ‘momentous changes’. By contrast, the Cold War years can also be, and have been, regarded elsewhere as a period fraught with much strategic uncertainty, historical change and unbridled hope for Asia Pacific peoples over a rich diversity of concerns: the spread of decolonisation en masse; the seemingly boundless energies of nationalism, albeit tainted in not a few cases by

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untutored institutional attitudes and actions of the ‘authoritarian’ kind; internecine struggles of a geopolitical and/or an irredentist nature; the chimera of ideological monolithicism in socialist and capitalist cliques; regional wars waged with superpower or regional power involvement; and most recently the proliferation of various radical Islamist groups that have engaged in terrorism (Gordon 1966; Jorgensen-Dahl 1982; Morrison & Suhrke 1978; O’Neill 1984; Pauker, Golay & Enloe 1977; Simon 1982; Tan & Ramakrishna 2002; Ramakrishna & Tan 2003). In the light of such a vastly complicated and heterogeneous history (or histories), how is it possible that regional security discourse has been so reductionist in its textual renditions of thematic continuity and predictability in terms of a region described, in one instance, as ‘a combination of complexities’ (Lau & Suryadinata 1988: 3)? How is it possible that just such a discourse has eluded having to account for its de-historicising of history? What is entirely possible, as such, is the fundamentally ‘doxic’ and discursive, not epistemic and factual, quality of just such hierarchical constructions (Derrida 1984: 24). In other words, the types of binary oppositions ubiquitous to Asia Pacific security discourses, such as ‘Cold War’ and ‘post-Cold War’, or even ‘post-postCold War’, are discursive rather than materialist:

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It is a structuralist fallacy to think of this narrative as having a ‘deep structure’ or a primordial set of binary oppositions – e.g. Old World : New World, despotism/totalitarianism : freedom – to which everything else can be reduced. As a discourse its existence is virtual not actual and is assembled and re-assembled differently for presidents and other intellectuals of statecraft. Such discourse freely fuses fact with fiction and reality with the imaginary to produce a reasoning where neither is distinguishable from the other. (O’Tuathail & Agnew 1992: 197) Second-track security intellectuals have discoursed widely on the myriad, highly difficult and vastly diverse issues germane to Asia Pacific security; they have expended considerable effort discriminating among historical differences and discontinuities as opposed to just searching for similarities and generalities.26 But in no way does all this detract from the contention here that modernist impulses invariably fashion the heterogeneity of Asia Pacific international relations into distinct if not hermetically sealed phases, each possessing a homogeneous and stable identity unto itself (Ashley 1989: 263-264). Moreover, lest such discriminations afford the creation of thinking space such that the imagination or inscription of alternative possibilities is allowed – an opening that, for all intents and purposes, could seriously undermine the very foundations that apparently secure and affirm those assertions

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– they are usually enframed and underwritten by an all-encompassing principle (i.e. a ‘paradigm of sovereignty’) that ultimately marginalises if not excludes rival narrativisations. As Maria Cynthia Rose B. Bautista, a Philippine scholar, has noted: At the same time, a narrative reasserts closure by imposing a central ordering principle whose categories and standards of interpretation are taken to express the essential and timeless truth integrating all of the historical times and places among which it discriminates. It constructs a story in which all time, all space, all difference, and all discontinuity are cast as part of a universal project in which the ordering principle is itself redeemed as necessarily, timelessly, and universally true. (Bautista 1994: unpaged)

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These interventions provide an alternative interpretation wherein the sign of post-Cold War uncertainty is apprehended as the inscribed other to the conspicuous certitude and predictability of the Cold War. In this regard, a couple of things become clear. First, as demonstrated in the previous chapters, it is next to impossible to demarcate the post-Cold War Asia Pacific as a realm of uncertainty without the concomitant demarcation of the Cold War Asia Pacific as its opposition. The inverse is therefore equally true. Second, that Cold War Asia Pacific can also be tendered as a period filled with the prodigious hope and promise of vibrant nationalism, as well as (particularly for Southeast Asia) the possibilities available for the convergence of intramural interests under the ASEAN aegis, implies that the above narratives are social constructions not necessarily divorced from social reality as much as exemplars of the ineluctable debt to language and interpretation in renditions of that reality. Placement/Positioning of Subjects As the aforementioned quotation from Bautista has demonstrated, the production of uncertainty has certain uses, chief among them the re-territorialising of the de-territorialised state. The three modes in which subjects are positioned in modern discourse are also to be found in the above statements. 1 Post-Cold War Era: Uncertain But Better Already discussed is the implied hierarchy between the ‘Cold War’ and ‘post-Cold War’ phases. In realist discourse, the former is generally inscribed in superior terms (i.e. certainty, continuity, predictability) in opposition to the latter’s inferior status (i.e. uncertainty, change, unpredictability). In liberal-oriented IR discourses, although the predicates do

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not differ widely, the realist-inscribed hierarchy is reversed, nevertheless, such that post-Cold War uncertainty becomes less of a threat but an opportunity afforded to those Asia Pacific (especially ASEAN and East Asian) voices eager to assert themselves in the contemporary diminution of the superpower-dominated Cold War ‘master narrative’. This is not to imply that liberal security discourses are thereby threat-free. On the contrary, fear and danger are also put to work, although in ways perhaps subtler than in realist discourse. This ambivalence was evident in regional security discourses in the 1990s in the aftermath of the Cold War. Take, for example, the following statements issued by Abdullah Badawi, Malaysia’s former prime minister. In particular, note how they construct, in tandem, the Cold War world as a realm characterised primarily by the apparent evils of balance-of-power politics:

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Now that the Cold War has ended, it is important to erase any lingering ‘Cold War mindsets’ such as the penchant for looking at others in terms of their threatening capabilities rather than their potentials for cooperation; or that stability requires a balance-of-power among nations. It is suggested that in order to prevent war, you have to prepare for war. This would only have the effect of turning your perceived enemies into real ones. (Badawi 1995: 5) I fear we will slip into belligerence and bellicosity in our postures. We will demonise others, and resurrect old prejudices. Principles will be made subservient to the dictates of narrow domestic interests, be they powerful military factions or popular elections. We will be seeking to bring back the old and adversarial threat and counter threat approaches to address situations. We will build and fortify alliances, action begetting reaction until cause and effect are blurred and clouded by irrationality and passion. In short, we will crawl back into the masonry and woodwork of the Cold War balance-of-power. (Badawi 1997: vii) Former Japanese premier Yasuhiro Nakasone (1992: 5) has offered a similar opinion: ‘It is time for us to forsake the Cold War mentality of confrontation and work to move forward toward global reconciliation and cooperation’. Despite the second Badawi excerpt’s unfavourable implication regarding ‘popular elections’ as a form of ‘narrow domestic interest’,27 these ‘liberal’ statements do not contest the themes of continuity versus change and/or predictability versus uncertainty inscribed in most other Asia Pacific security discourses. But they clearly reverse the realist-inspired hierarchy by privileging the post-Cold War world as one

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wherein the opportunity to transcend traditional power politics, if not quickly seized (as the caveat implies), could and would result in a steady regression to the ‘Cold War balance-of-power’. Likewise, Taiwan’s Ho Szu-yin (1996: 1) remarked, perhaps with premature optimism, in 1996: ‘With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, power politics in East Asia has undergone a complete about-face’. In so doing, Ho’s very brief comment takes the premise constructed in the Badawi excerpt a couple of steps further by inscribing the post-Cold War Asia Pacific as a radically different realm. By constructing the uncertain world of post-Cold War Asia Pacific as superior to the allegedly adversarial and irrational world of Cold War Asia Pacific – a temporary condition that, as implied, could quickly disintegrate if not exploited by an already given interpretive community – it becomes possible to advance multilateral security cooperation as the panacea to the dangers and threats that the return of Cold War-styled politics purportedly pose to the region in the post-Cold War period.28 This is not to imply that a realist discourse cannot be performed in such a fashion as to accomplish the hierarchical inversion attempted by its liberal counterpart. Indeed, where Asia Pacific Track 2 realist discourse is concerned, similar inversions as the one above are rather common, particularly where both realist and liberal narratives share the same desire in constructing multilateral security cooperation as the solution to regional uncertainty. Hear the following rendition by Jusuf Wanandi, Indonesia’s preeminent public intellectual in regional economic and security affairs: In the end, a cooperative security arrangement is only possible if there is a certain balance-of-power present in the region. This is not the old European balance-of-power concept of the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century, which is confrontational and ‘promiscuous’, but will involve the low-key presence of the four or five great powers in the region to prevent a real hegemon or the only superpower to develop and play its dominance without mercy. In this context, the US, which is accepted as a benign great power by the region, is vital to the region in the envisaged future balance-of-power. (Wanandi 1996a: 2, emphasis added) Realist in orientation, this quotation from Wanandi nevertheless inscribes the contemporary Asia Pacific environment as one in which a kinder, gentler balance of power prevails and where the United States is inscribed as a ‘benign great power’ along with the caveat that it, as the only superpower, should think twice before pursuing a regional strategy of dominance. Conjoined with liberal discourses, an interpretation of

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post-Cold War Asia Pacific as a realm of anarchy, interdependence and security cooperation among states is cast, against which few if any rivals compete.

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2 From Abject (or Inferior) to Superior Subjects Post-Cold War uncertainty as a social construction is an important discursive step that permits further the assignation of a greater or more complex degree of agency to the post-Cold War Asia Pacific statist subject, particularly East and Southeast Asian countries, to manage their own regional destinies. ‘No less puzzling’, as Alica Ba has mused, ‘is how this Southeast Asian organisation of lesser states [ASEAN] came to play a defining role in the creation and development of regional arrangements that now include much larger powers than they’ (2009: 3). In this sense, discourses on the relevance and centrality of ASEAN – the developing world’s most successful regional organisation, according to one enthusiastic observation (Acharya 2001a) – can and should be understood as a counter-narrative against abjection through inscriptions of ASEAN as a regional ‘actor’ capable of shaping and influencing the political and strategic milieu of the Asia Pacific through its words and deeds. Track 2 discourses are equally about the construction of opportunities as they are about threats. ‘A time of challenge’, as the eminent Malaysian statesman Ghazalie Shafie once opined, ‘is also a time of opportunity’ (cited in Rajendran 1985: 25). Post-Cold War uncertainty can be and has been written as opportunity rather than threat, although it should be said that the threat inscription is never completely eliminated, for it clearly has its purposes: [T]he prevailing realities of the present global security and political environment [demonstrate] that the world is one where there is abundant potential for both tranquillity and turbulence, for both order and disorder, for both peace and violent conflicts, a world of many opportunities that beckon and promise, on the one hand, and of many challenges that constrain and threaten, on the other. (Paribatra 1992: 4) The discursive juxtaposition of potential threat and opportunity is significant. For instance, a former Singaporean foreign minister had this to say about the dangers posed by institutional irrelevance to ASEAN – at a time, ironically, of peace: With the end of the Cold War, we cannot assume that the Western powers will continue to woo ASEAN. ASEAN must reassess itself. If ASEAN is inward-looking, then our strategic

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importance to our traditional dialogue partners, including the United States, Japan and the European Community, may very well diminish. We need to transform the substance of both ASEAN and our relations with the major economic and political powers. (Wong 1991: 3) Equally candid is the challenge issued by the former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, in the context of post-Cold War East Asia: We may not become the centre of the world, but we should at least be the centre of our own part of it. We must commit ourselves to ensuring that the history of East Asia will be made in East Asia, for East Asia, and by East Asians … But Asians must be critical of themselves, as well. We allowed ourselves to be overtaken by the West; we failed to maintain and develop the achievements of our forebears. To a certain degree our own success softened us. Now, Asia is awakening to a new era, and there is no reason we cannot regain our former glory. If we preserve our distinctive values and cultures as we master modern technology, I am convinced Asia will again be great. (Mohamad & Ishihara 1995: 16, 77)

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Here a past Asian glory is invoked, a greatness that was apparently lost due to personal shortcomings. But with an ‘awakening to a new era’, there are few impediments to Asians regaining their ‘former glory’ other than the lack of verve and gumption – all of which allude to a complex agency and robust subjectivity. Writing about Vietnam’s admission into ASEAN as a full member in 1994, a charter member of the ASEAN-ISIS has intimated: It is also evident that Southeast Asian leaders are inclined to forge a single community amongst them, to promote better regional political, security and economic cooperation, and provide a more credible basis for managing the rise of large regional powers which might destabilise the region. The recognition of interdependence in the political and security spheres is evident in the acknowledgement among the region’s policy makers and opinion leaders of the indivisibility of regional stability and security. (Hernandez 1994: 7-8, emphasis added)29 What these excerpts show is the generative capacity of discourse to subjectivise, empower and hence legitimate East and Southeast Asian states as full-fledged social actors that deserve the same kinds of ‘rights and privileges’ their European or North American counterparts enjoy.

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Furthermore, the notion that Southeast Asians have every inclination to, and can effectively, construct their own regional community – an indication that discursive and social labours are not simply forces that exist in the realm of words and rhetorical plays – has led to various efforts by certain norm entrepreneurs to elicit commitment among their fellow security intellectuals and practitioners in once pariah societies (the Indochinese regimes including Myanmar, arguably) to the ‘collective task’ of building regional community. This of course is not merely to emphasise the role of intentions on the part of security intellectuals, even though a not improbable case can be and has been made elsewhere.30 Rather, the aim here is to demonstrate how the very actions of second-track intellectuals, when deployed into the discursive economy and from whence, at the same time, they are consequently empowered to articulate, can construct a world of post-Cold War Asia Pacific in which social beings and groupings erstwhile inscribed as passive, even abject, targets at the receiving end of great-power cultural, economic and political imperialism, are now redefined as masters of their own fate. Such a re-inscription and repositioning of subjects is made possible through the construction of post-Cold War uncertainty, the solution of which is Asia Pacific multilateralisation. That being said, the substance and speed of the institutionalisation of multilateral cooperation are fiercely debated matters. Despite assuming and arguing the possibilities for enhanced and progressive agency, Track 2 networks can also be quite honest, brutally so in some instances, in their appraisals about the state of regional affairs. Take for example the following assessments on the state of regional cooperation and the contributions of the Asia Pacific’s multilateral institutions to that end. As the PECC concluded in its State of the Region 2006-2007 report: [T]here is considerable disenchantment with [Asia Pacific] regional institutions … PECC’s first survey of its membership on regional cooperation issues shows that among a group that strongly supports regional cooperation, there is concern that economies have not sufficiently invested in regional institutions and that the work of these institutions is not adequately meeting the needs of the region … Regional cooperation and well-functioning regional institutions are essential to meet the challenges of the early 21st century. We believe that Asia Pacific economies need to renew their commitment to institutions … and to take a fresh look at the architecture of regional institutions across the Pacific. (PECC 2006) And again in State of the Region 2007-2008:

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The institutional landscape of the Asia Pacific has become more complex in recent years. The East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Plus Three processes have added to the already numerous meetings of officials on economic and non-economic issues affecting the region. Our survey of opinion-leaders suggests there is considerable dissatisfaction with the current state of regional organisations at both the transpacific and sub-regional levels. In general, APEC and ASEAN come out better than their younger siblings the EAS and the ASEAN plus Three. (PECC 2007)

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The foregoing statements highlight the shared concern among secondtrackers, many if not most of whom are avowed supporters of Asia Pacific regionalism, over the perceived weak state of institutional arrangements in support of regional cooperation and integration. On the one hand, the poor report card on Asia Pacific regional institutions substantiates rather than challenges the abjection narrative. On the other hand, it could be argued that the ‘considerable disenchantment’ and/or ‘dissatisfaction’ among the regional elites polled by the PECC arose precisely because survey subjects harboured high expectations that regional institutions could have performed more effectively and efficiently – that is, exercised their agential prerogatives – but, for a host of reasons adumbrated in those reports, failed to. 3 Locating the ‘Essence’ of Asia Pacific Regionalism Finally, in order to empower political subjects and legitimate their postCold War roles as regional leaders, such repositioning also involves the discursive constitution of the ASEAN Way – the so-called ASEAN model of regional security (Leifer 1996) – as the sine qua non of viable multilateral security cooperation in Asia Pacific. The ASEAN Way, for former Philippine foreign minister Roberto Romulo, has to do with the ‘style and spirit’ of regional dynamics: ‘consultative, consensual, gradual, patient, non-contentious’ (cited in Chin 1995). In a 1995 CSCAP proposal on confidence and security building mechanisms (CSBMs), the drafters noted the following considerations deemed important for the application of CSBMs to the Asia Pacific region: a preference for informal structures and a tendency to place greater emphasis on personal relationships rather than formal structures; consensus building as a key prerequisite; a general distrust of Western (especially European) solutions; and a genuine commitment to the principle of non-interference in one another’s internal affairs which ‘cannot be dismissed as a mere excuse to avoid living up to international commitments’ (CSCAP 1995a: 3). Writing for a CSCAP Working Group audience, Simon Tay, an ASEAN-ISIS leader, noted that among ARF member nations:

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[T]here is a conscious pursuit of an ‘Asian [or ASEAN] way’. This ‘Asian way’ includes a caution among members against emphasising fixed institutions and rigid rule-based procedures. Some have criticised ASEAN and other associated institutions as being mere ‘talk shops’. But the governments involved have dismissed such criticism as misplaced. (Tay 1996) Employed generously by ASEAN intellectuals, policymakers and apologists as an explanation, justification and perhaps even exoneration for issues ranging from regional security policies and economic practices to concerns over democracy and human rights, the ASEAN Way notion has variously appeared in Track 2 security discourse within the context of discussions regarding strategic cultures, meaning the different ways in which cultural and/or geographical regions and states manage and resolve international conflict. Although the notion of the ‘ASEAN Way’ is analysed here in terms of subject-positioning, it is also an example of presupposition. Metaphysical presuppositions depend on the logocentric principle discussed earlier to effect binary oppositions and, in doing so, are able therefore to presuppose without question the existence of differences within social categories and classifications – the latter itself an effect of logocentric gestures. In her study on American foreign policy toward the Philippines in the 1950s as social construction, Doty (1993: 312) identifies the presupposition in US policy discourse that ‘ ‘‘Asian thinking” differs fundamentally from non-Asian thinking and [is] characterised by the prevalence of passion and emotion, in contrast to [American] reason and rationality’. Hence the notion of the ASEAN Way is an effect of a similar logocentric binarism that permits the presupposition that the ASEAN societies are fundamentally different in relation to other societies, particularly Western societies, but clearly in a way that reverses the inferiority and abjection with which Asian societies are drawn by Western-centric discourses. Returning to the context of subject-positioning, when tied to the social construction of strategic uncertainty and Asia Pacific multilateralisation, the ASEAN Way works to privilege ASEAN or Asian international subjects as the more reflective and responsible parties, in diametric opposition to the alleged lack of knowledge and sensitivity among Western powers regarding the ‘essence’ of regionalism in Asia Pacific. Criticisms regarding the state of multilateralism or regionalism in present-day Asia Pacific are well known and do not need to be rehearsed in detail: the ARF is ‘NATO’ (i.e. ‘no-action-talkonly’); Asians lack the requisite political will to implement serious institutional reform; everything is ‘business-as-usual’ in the region, and the like.

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But ASEAN leaders are prone to brush off such criticisms as clear indications that their critics have no real knowledge about how things apparently work in the region.31 Not unlike the manner in which John Gerard Ruggie (as we saw in the previous chapter) had constructed European international subjects that apparently know, accept and pass the real test of what multilateralism truly entails, a security discourse that either advocates or, even more fundamentally, simply acknowledges the existence of an ASEAN Way without necessarily endorsing it has, in effect, constituted an ASEAN or Asian self that already is. The foreclosure of just such a discourse is achieved via the imposition of a sort of central ordering principle, say, in the manner in which the individual or combined genius of political giants from amongst the first-generation leaders of postcolonial Southeast Asia – Lee Kuan Yew, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, Suharto, Adam Malik, Tun Abdul Razak, Thanat Khoman and so on – supposedly provided the firm foundation for managing and overcoming regional crises and established an institutional wonder in ASEAN, which some pundits have lauded as the most successful Third World regional experiment to date (Acharya 1992; Stubbs 1988). Sure and steadfast, the narrative proceeds to inscribe, these founding fathers have successfully guided an incipient organisation of nascent states through crisis-ridden times to its current position as primus inter pares in contemporary Asia Pacific: Starting on a very unsure footing in a crisis region, ASEAN has become what it is today, a ‘security community’, regarded by the international community as a credible and effective force for regional peace, stability and security, and economically, one of the world’s fastest growing areas. These are great achievements which testify to the astuteness of the founders and the first generation leaders of ASEAN who perceived the indivisibility of security and prosperity. Neither can exist without the other. (Habib 1996: 9) In a similar vein, an eminent ASEAN-ISIS security intellectual has remarked on what she calls the ‘ASEAN factor’ in the building of peace and stability in Southeast Asia. More precisely, the ASEAN factor, as Hernandez went on to elaborate, has to do with the ‘will and design’ of ASEAN leaders to establish Southeast Asia as a community of nations.32 ASEAN, of course, has had its fair share of criticisms from its detractors, and responses from its proponents have tended to take the form of the following observation by a Singaporean scholar-diplomat that ASEAN ‘may be unfairly criticised for not having accomplished what it was not intended to accomplish’ (Chan 1983: 1). The point to be made here is not the issue of the accuracy of this observation – indeed, it

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probably is historically accurate – but the effect that the statement produces when juxtaposed with the above excerpt. The perspicacity of the founding fathers is thereby re-inscribed; their modus operandi enshrined. Furthermore, what has apparently provided the teleological basis for the accomplishments of ASEAN from its inception to the present will, the argument logically continues, obviously do likewise and more for the future as well.33 For example, the opening statement of the twenty-ninth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, held in July 1996, similarly invokes the notion of ‘larger than life’ political visionaries:

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In the long run, as ASEAN moves inexorably toward a Southeast Asian community, we envision the evolution of a Southeast Asian civilisation while preserving our distinctive languages and diverse cultures. Such a civilisation would be rooted mainly in the great religions of Southeast Asia – Theravada and other forms of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, which have so much in common among them. Such a civilisation would be animated by the synthesis of the best values now cherished by Southeast Asians – freedom and discipline, growth and justice, individual rights and community responsibilities, renewal and stability, change and continuity, law and compassion, popular and decisive governance. When that civilisation has become a reality, then we can truly say that we have completed the creation of a Southeast Asian community and fulfilled the vision of ASEAN’s founders. (cited in Severino 1996: 7, emphasis added) In line with this is the view of Jose T. Almonte (1996: 8), security advisor to former Philippine president Fidel Ramos: ‘We must recast the vision of ASEAN’s founding fathers – by extending their vision of ASEAN as a community of peace and prosperity beyond Southeast Asia to embrace the whole of the larger Asia Pacific’. Another distinguished Track 2 intellectual is also of the opinion that ‘For ASEAN, the chance of establishing an ASEAN-10 is of paramount importance … because it has been a romantic dream at the creation of ASEAN in 1967’ (Wanandi 1996b: 2). The implication of intentionality on the part of ASEAN’s first-generation leadership in these excerpts can be substantiated, proponents argue, by the express aims defined in the ASEAN or Bangkok Declaration of 1967 in the name of the countries of Southeast Asia in their search for peace, progress and prosperity in the region. According to this reasoning, it is not too far a stretch to suggest that ASEAN’s founding fathers had at the least a ‘romantic dream’ to see all ten Southeast Asian states fall under the ASEAN rubric. The rub for such a contention arises, however, when one considers the final point of ASEAN’s founding declaration: ‘that the Association [in August

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1967] represents the collective will of the nations of South-East Asia to bind themselves together in friendship and cooperation’ (ASEAN 1967). Troubling assertions of ‘the collective will’ aside, this statement, properly understood, can only mean the five original signatories to the declaration, and clearly not the Indochinese nations (who today are part of ASEAN). While it is not to imply that the ascription of intentionality and vision are therefore wrong, it demonstrates, however, the difficulty of substantiating just such an assertion. Consider also, for example, the case of the institutional mandate given to ASEAN to develop economic cooperation: ‘to accelerate economic growth, social progress’; ‘to promote active collaboration and mutual assistance on matters of common interest in the economic, social, cultural, technical, scientific and administrative fields’ and so forth. It is no exaggeration to say that practically every available text on the history and politics of ASEAN argues that the raison d’être of the regional grouping from the time of its inception until the fourth ASEAN Summit in 1992 has always been political not economic. True enough, but to imply, as proponents of the ASEAN Way do, that this historical process is rational and teleological – as underscored by phrases in the declaration such as ‘intended to accomplish’, ‘vision’ and so on – and hence to justify the ASEAN Way as a tried and true model relevant to contemporary ARF regionalism, with seemingly little outward appreciation for the unique historical circumstances that brought about success for ASEAN, is to participate in the social construction of reality. To be sure, such statements can be and have been castigated by critics as little more than self-serving magniloquence. Linked intertextually to assertions regarding an ASEAN (or Asian) Way, however, it legitimates the oft-heard contentions in ARF and APEC sessions that multilateralisation – notwithstanding criticisms from Western powers that these forums constitute little more than ‘talk shops’ – cannot and must not proceed apace with formalisation or institutionalisation, for this is simply ‘not part of the ASEAN Way’, as it were. ‘We do not have a master plan or a rigid road map’, as Wong Kan Seng, Singapore’s foreign minister, noted regarding the ARF (in an interview with The Straits Times, Singapore’s English daily) in July 1993. ‘We do not want to force the pace. But we do hope that this modest beginning will evolve in a way that will preserve the peace and growth in the Asia Pacific’ (cited in Tan 2007a). His Australian counterpart, Gareth Evans, similarly opined, ‘You can’t impose structures or outcomes on a body of this kind. It has to happen naturally, but to the extent that preparation will help the process move forward, we’re happy to participate’ (cited in Tan 2007a). Moreover, has not the ASEAN Way, its advocates argue, been proven as the proper indigenous route to successful regionalism? Has this diplomatic convention and security model not contributed to the ‘long peace’

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enjoyed not only by Southeast Asia but indeed Pacific Asia as well (Kivimäki 2001, 2010, 2011)? Describing Southeast Asia during the 1970s and 80s as ‘an oasis of peace’ with the exception of ‘low-level insurgency’ in Cambodia, a distinguished Singaporean statesman has identified ASEAN as (in his phrase) ‘the secret’ to regional peace, prosperity and stability; later, rejecting the CSCE and NATO as apropos models for the ARF, he proceeds to underscore the reasons why the ASEAN model is the key to ‘the development of a true security community’ (Koh 1995: 66, 68). Sharing this line of reasoning, another Southeast Asian diplomat intimated: ‘Some commentators, particularly in Europe, wish that the ARF were something else, and then criticise ARF for not being that something else. I think the ARF is, for the moment, the only feasible way of evolving Asia Pacific cooperation in political and security matters, in the light of the disparities in interest, power and even diplomatic styles of the countries in the region’ (Severino 1996: 4). That said, that same diplomat proved almost disingenuous in that his construction of Southeast Asia as ‘an oasis of peace’ by way of the ‘ASEANisation’ of its politics also entails the unfortunate characterisation of the auto-genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which left close to a million Cambodians dead, as mere ‘low-level insurgency’ (Severino 1996: 4). But the belief in a kind of ASEAN exceptionalism, with ‘musjawarah’ and ‘mufakat’ (consultation and consensus-building) supposedly at the core of the practice (Thambipillai & Saravanamuttu 1985), runs aground when ASEAN’s oft-remarked proclivity against legalism and institutionalism – quintessentially ‘Western’ modes of regionalism, so the reasoning goes – is measured against ASEAN documents such as the 1995 Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (SEANWFZ) treaty, a legalistic document;34 the heavily institutionalised bilateral ties between member states (Acharya 1991); the hundreds of meetings and innumerable documents and papers produced annually under the ASEAN aegis;35 the resort by ASEAN member states to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to resolve island disputes (e.g. the Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh dispute between Malaysia and Singapore, and the Sipadan and Ligitan disputes between Malaysia and Indonesia) (Colson 2003; Jayakumar & Koh 2009; Merrill 2003);36 and the recourse to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to resist Western pressure in order to protect ASEAN markets. The establishment of the ASEAN Charter in November 2007 has also raised expectations about the legalisation of Southeast Asian regional diplomacy, although it should be said that not all are convinced that the charter’s provisions, if adhered to, necessarily constitute a radical break from the ASEAN Way; indeed, some argue the charter as it stands entrenches the ASEAN Way – particularly its ‘legal’ norms, state sovereignty and non-intervention/non-

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interference – rather than transform this longstanding regional convention (Desker 2008; Koh 2009). If the legalisation of intra-ASEAN diplomacy consists in the institutionalisation of extant norms rather than new ones, then it is arguable whether progress in Southeast Asian regionalism ‘beyond the ASEAN Way’, as the title of a book has it (Caballero-Anthony 2005), could ever be possible. On the other hand, legalisation as so conceived could be construed as a regression of sorts from the ASEAN Way, since it potentially elides the convention’s ‘social’ facets – namely, musjawarah and mufakat – thereby depriving ASEAN’s decision-making process of the flexible consensus on which its members have hitherto relied.37 That said, it is not entirely clear whether ASEAN countries are prepared to invoke the charter’s provisions in the context, say, of managing bilateral border disputes because this could force them to take sides formally, thereby undermining the ASEAN Way. Indeed, the regional organisation’s supporters have long defended the growing recourse by regional countries to external or third-party mediation and/or arbitration in dispute settlement – as also evidenced by the decision in 2011 to take the Cambodian-Thai dispute over the land surrounding the Preah Vihear temple to the ICJ38 – as an avenue explicitly allowed by the charter and hence does not constitute a contravention of the charter. At a CSCAP Working Group session on confidence and security building measures (CSBMs) in Singapore some years back, one security intellectual raised the concern of the ‘ASEAN Way’ as a ‘foundational myth’ necessary for imagining and constructing an Asia Pacific community. I take this idea a step further by emphasising the textual strategy of subject-positioning that employs the ‘ASEAN Way’ notion as a means to locate the ASEAN states in a position of superiority and privilege vis-à-vis their ‘Western’ counterparts, such that ASEAN may gain the upper hand in policy direction in the ARF. Scholars are right to note that there appears within Southeast Asian attitudes regarding multilateralism, in the words of one observer, ‘the reticence about creating political institutions that would entail policy-making based on legal procedures’ (Simon 1996: 37), thereby raising further the well-rehearsed rationalisation and/or objection among Asian and Western security intellectuals alike that Asia Pacific states are not quite ‘ready for a sophisticated and intricate concept of order’ (Dibb 1995: 23). The implication here is rather obvious: there exist ‘sophisticated and intricate’ forms of order in other regions, specifically Western Europe and the North Atlantic. Yet it appears that parts of Asia Pacific security discourse have appropriated this same implication, in the manner in which they have similarly appropriated the construction of regional uncertainty, to rationalise and legitimate the leadership role of ASEAN and the content and pace of multilateralisation to which ASEAN subscribes. In other

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words, the discursive construction of historical backwardness, burdensome as it is as a form of cultural imperialism imposed upon the Asia Pacific peoples and nations by those invoking a discourse of Western, European or ‘First World’ superiority, is neither a bad thing necessarily nor absolutised by those who appropriate it and other similar constructions. Representational practices possess a particular autonomy in that they are not, and never can be, under the total control of those who intentionally deploy them. Circulating in the discursive economy, they are also appropriated, say, by advocates of the ASEAN Way for an entirely different reason: to rationalise and legitimate the ‘ASEANisation’ of Asia Pacific security discourse as well as multilateralisation. What is therefore important to my present aims is that particular policies and courses of action – the turn to consultative, non-institutionalised ‘cooperative security’ forms of dialogue and confidence measures, and so on – would not be possible at all were it not for the ongoing social construction of strategic uncertainty in, and the apparent ‘historical backwardness’ of, the region which, in the view of various security intellectuals, rules out more ambitious or ‘sophisticated and intricate’ forms of institutionalised collaboration. All this, however, in no way contravenes the contention here that articulations of the ‘ASEAN (or Asian) Way’ perform the discursive task of positioning and privileging subjects, in particular the ASEAN societies in opposition to their Western counterparts and occasional critics.39 Emblematic of just this sort of illogical but oft-used identity construction are these words of former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad: However appropriate geographically it may be to include Australia as part of Asia, we have never regarded Australians as fellow Asians, and they have never regarded Australians as fellow Asians, and they have always considered themselves European. Consequently, I tell the Australians this: You can’t simply decide to be Asian. You must have an Asian culture. This means, for a start, changing your attitude and improving your manners. Asians don’t go around telling others what to do. But don’t think that a change of heart will be enough. (Mohamad & Ishihara 1995: 85, emphasis added) Contrast the above with what a Malaysian security intellectual says about Malaysia’s foreign policy: ‘In foreign relations, Malaysia continued to be vociferous in attacking several Western countries for inaction in Bosnia, their position on trade and human rights, and the irresponsibility and overbearing nature of their media’ (Rahman 1996: 8, emphasis added). Time and again, ASEAN or Asian discourses have sought to

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construct an ‘Asian’ identity that is supposedly the antithesis of the supposed crass nature of the ‘West’, as evinced in Mahathir’s tirade against the Australians. And yet, in so doing, Mahathir and other likeminded Asians undermine the very identity they construct by being so ‘unAsian’, not least by his definition of what being ‘Asian’ means. Indeed, that Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar have had to undergo a waiting period before becoming full-fledged ASEAN members due to ‘the strains on the process of decision-making and the unique “style” of ASEAN’s tolerance, consensus and political culture’, implies the collective perception among the older ASEAN members that the inclusion of the Indochinese countries could inevitably cause was, in a sense, an indirect admission that the ASEAN Way, for all its supposed unique links to Asian cultural practices, was at best a learned process and at worst pure and simple justification for preservation of the status quo (Wanandi 1996b: 3). At the wider Asia Pacific level, for ASEAN Way adherents seeking to essentialise a certain modality of thought and practice as intrinsic to and necessary for the ARF, the following words of a distinguished former ASEAN diplomat (and hence one of their own), spoken in 1974 in the context of possible future institutional expansion of ASEAN, deserve serious consideration:

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If ASEAN is to grow and extend its perimeter to include other states in the region, a common understanding leading to concerted responses by the existing members towards the multifarious internal and external problems of those states is imperative. With a new sense of responsibility ASEAN member states should be able to devise for themselves a new style if not a new methodology in promoting peace and prosperity for the region. (Shaffie 1974: unpaged, emphasis added) To be sure, although this excerpt clearly re-inscribes states as principal modern subjects of Asia Pacific international relations and, even more fundamentally, global political life, it nevertheless denaturalises, if only implicitly, the ASEAN Way as a model of security quintessential to the region.

Conclusion: Whither Asia Pacific Subjectivity? This chapter has highlighted two sets of relatively distinct yet interrelated interpretations about the Asia Pacific – as a realm of abjection, on the one hand, and a realm of uncertainty and opportunity, on the other – that coloured regional security dialogues of the immediate post-Cold

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War period. There is little question that aspects of the second interpretation, by complicating the at times nearly one-dimensional quality of the abjection discourse, functioned in part as a counter-narrative to the former. That said, to the extent that Track 2 discourses represented the Asia Pacific as a complex region comprising subjects (as we shall see in the following chapter) that enjoyed – considerably so in some instances – greater agential potential and power than the purveyors of abjection discourse were prepared to concede, their intellectual and intertextual debts to the latter cannot be completely discounted either.

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5

Representing Sovereign States

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If the sovereign state is to be an institution of material significance, this effect must be reliably and repeatedly produced in space and time, but the successful reproduction of this effect requires the problem itself never be explicitly posed, represented, or made visible in any other way. For the visibility of the problem is tantamount to the recognition that domestic authority, far from being a self-evident presence that might be represented in institutions of state, is itself a problematical institution that is produced through arbitrary practices … Practices of statecraft, to be effective, must proceed as if this source of authority is always there to be found and represented. (Ashley undated: 5, emphasis added) What I seek to do in this chapter is, as the fashionable expression goes, to ‘interrogate’ the tenuous construction and stabilisation of Asia Pacific state-oriented subjectivities. Subversive effects wrought by the forces of globalisation and transnationalism in late capitalism have complicated, possibly even undermined, the discursive formations that enable the sovereign state, thereby denaturalising a subjectivity that hitherto seemed familiar and self-evident to us. Stated differently, in the face of competing discourses, the capacity of discursive utterances regarding the state to conceal its ‘founding’ conditions has diminished. This study treats discourse as a reiterative and referential practice by which it – and the subjects who engage in and are constituted by it – produces the effects that it names. If so, then the sovereign states of the Asia Pacific region are not pre-established social facts whose materiality is independent of the discursive statecraft that go into their making. Hence ‘America’ and ‘China’, or ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Vietnam’ can all be understood as contested identities and subjectivities that must continually preserve the self-imposed limits (or boundaries) by which they are affirmed – limits that are conscientiously patrolled and enforced, in mutually reinforcing ways, by knowledgeable practices and their knowledge practitioners. As such, the sovereign state is better understood as ‘a social totality that is never really present, that always contains traces of the outside within, and that is never more than an effect of the practices by which … dangers are inscribed’ (Ashley 1989: 304; Scarth 2004).

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In much the same way, another formulation discussing the issue of subjectivity at large has it this way: ‘the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abject or inferior outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation’ (Butler 1993: 3). That traces of the outside can be found within the subject connotes a subjectivity or identity that is never whole or complete. Rather, ‘the subject is itself a site of power political contest, and ceaselessly so. The subject itself exists as an identifiable subject only in the precarious balancing and dispersal of plural interpretive elements resulting from the continuing strategic interplay of multiple alien forms’ (Ashley 1987a: 410). Accepting the radical constructivist position that representational practices constitute subjects, it stands to reason that the second-track security dialogues of the Asia Pacific are in effect rife with meticulous rituals of power and the ceaseless clashing of wills that have as their aim the constitution of a highly contested and contestable subjectivity. As the most enduring form of political identity in Asia Pacific discourse, the sovereign state is best understood as a heavily contested site of meaning and interpretation. In this respect, the ubiquitous supposition in much of Track 2 discourse that ‘China’ or ‘America’ constitutes a pure metaphysical presence can no longer hold. For security intellectuals to speak and write about states as if they are just so is a testament to the understated power of practices of statecraft to refuse most demands for a critical explanation.

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The State as a Constructed and Contested Identity How is it possible, in the light of the supposedly ‘enlightened’ discourse of post-Cold War Asia Pacific on redefining security in an increasingly interdependent world, that so much of Track 2 diplomatic dialogue preserves much of that same intellectual prejudice enforced by the statecentred thinking and doing? The answer proffered by radical constructivism to this question lies in modern security discourse as a kind of political performance seeking to re-territorialise political subjectivity and stabilise meanings. In the face of increasing politicisation of seemingly natural and self-evident boundaries, practices of statecraft are mobilised in disparate locales to reconstitute and instantiate boundaries that are almost always in danger of dissolution. The blurring or transgressing of boundaries may disturb but not disrupt; indeed, the very ontological commitment to the state in security discourse assumes the given-ness of just such boundaries and, in doing so, is disclosed as ‘always-in-process practices’ that construct ‘contingent, and never fully fixed, boundaries’ (Doty 1996: 175). In this respect, although the invitation by James

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Rosenau (1971: 309) for the deliberate ‘blurring of the boundaries between national and international systems’ was issued more than three decades ago, the theoretical implications such an invitation affords for the state and practices of statecraft, nevertheless, have for the most part not been pursued in any serious fashion, if the pride of place that the state continues to enjoy in contemporary realist and liberal lore is any indication. In the case of second-track security discourse, the lack of pretence over the need for theoretical justification usually means that intellectuals of statecraft from the ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP or other regional knowledge network have no reason to apologise for treating the state in their policy deliberations as a given fact of international politics (Ashley 1988: 204). Nevertheless, the inherent conundrum of security discourse is that social constructions of uncertainty, unpredictability, contingency and change as distinctive qualities of the post-Cold War world – useful as they have been and are in fabricating a particular understanding of Asia Pacific security – are not unlike double-edged swords that simultaneously threaten to undermine the effect of boundaries as fixed, natural and self-evident, even as they paradoxically affirm those same boundaries. For instance, employing the simile of a household for the state in a second-track discussion on foreign policy, a Singaporean security intellectual writes:

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There are important lessons concerning the nature of the dividing line between domestic and external. A household cannot maintain its stability simply by resting on its pre-existing walls and sunken foundations. To survive and thrive across time, it must devise creative ways to handle the challenges of the elements outside. In reiteration, domestic policy is practically the other face of foreign policy and vice versa’. (Chong 1996: 3) The passage makes no secret of the ‘complexity’ of global political life in its references, if only implied, to historical change, the inter-changeability of ‘domestic policy’ and ‘foreign policy’ and the challenges posed as such to the ‘stability’ of the so-called household or state. ‘Pre-existing walls’ and ‘sunken foundations’, when weakened, need restoration; creative ways must be devised to handle external challenges. At the same time, however, nowhere in the passage is there any concession that the state is an always-in-process effect, even though the very assumption (and illusion) of pre-existing walls and sunken foundations is itself a discursive effect of statecraft. In the same fashion, a Malaysian intellectual begins on a promising note with these words: ‘Foreign policy has been termed a “boundary” activity where the term implies that those making the policy straddle two environments’. He nevertheless

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reasserts closure to his narrative by treating ‘Malaysia’ as an ontological given (Rahman 1996: 3). For one must, in essence, always regard the state in a priori terms even as one speculates, say, about its interdependence with other equally pre-given states or its present or anticipated demise. Distinguishing the social-cum-communitarian logic of ‘heteronomous responsibility’ from the autonomous freedom assumed of given material and hence sovereign entities, Ashley writes:

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In international relations literature, interdependence is taken to be the result of empirical transactions between previously autonomous and sovereign states. Notwithstanding the fact that those transactions are of importance, there is a prior and more fundamental sense of interdependence that is significant here: the sense in which the origin of an agent or subject – whether that agent or subject be an individual or a state – is to be found in the relationship between self and Other, and not in the uncovering of some autonomous sovereign ground of being removed from that relationship. (cited in McCormack 1997: 23) Despite the sensibility of this observation regarding the problematic ontology of states, modern security discourse necessarily depends on the rather insensible notion of the state as that autonomous sovereign ground: ‘Prior to any meaningful idea of a national interest or the ascription of value to various international exchanges’, Doty writes, ‘there must be in place a society, a self, with a distinct and meaningful identity that is represented by the state’ (1996: 179). In other words, whether inscribed in axiomatic terms of ‘country’, ‘nation’, ‘political community’, ‘domestic society’, ‘economic or military power’, ‘small state’ and various other appellations linked to statist presence or identity, practices of statecraft are really about a kind of community. In other words, if ‘international political community’ has to do with ‘a widelyshared readiness to interpret community ahistorically and monistically as a fixed thematic unity, a kind of essence’ and ‘an identity transcending and uniting manifest differences in the world of human practice’ (Ashley 1987a: 406), then refusals to privilege the universalisms of modern discourse and narrativisation in the innumerable sites wherein interpretations and wills contend for dominance would lead to the failure of international political community at the inter-subjective dimension. And the breakdown of that community – a community, that is, of interpretive dispositions and practical attitudes, of knowledgeable practices – as such ensues and the state becomes ‘exposed’, glaringly so, as a social construction:

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That the formalisation and legitimation of boundaries are the effects of coordinated state practices is most evident when … coordinated practices break down. Diplomatic practice, much like international relations theory, assumes boundaries as accomplished facts of global political life. As in international relations theory, diplomatic practice assumes that global political practices are not imposed by some supranational coordinator. Rather, whatever coordination occurs among practices is worked out in practice, and thus is the effect of practice. (Weber 1992: 318) As the previous chapter has shown, such a breakdown has not yet occurred, or, perhaps more accurately, not one so severe that statecraft could not be remobilised and deployed quickly enough to shore up boundaries and exclude difference from identity, other from self, international from national, and anarchy from state.1 How, then, has the coordination and shoring up of such practices of statecraft worked in the context of Asia Pacific second-track discourse? The tables below display the predicates and practices employed in Track 2 dialogue and writing activities. Conference papers, publications and newsletters from various ASEAN-ISIS forums, annual Asia Pacific Roundtable discussions organised by the ISIS Malaysia, CSCAP Working Group sessions as well as author interviews with selected security intellectuals have been culled for the purpose of analysis.2 Consistent with the radical constructivist methodology introduced earlier, the data compiled are comprised of specific descriptive characteristics, adjectives, adverbs and capabilities attributed to various international subjects. Importantly, the data is not taken to represent the social cognitions of given actors or subjects nor of specific participants to the Asia Pacific security discourse. Instead, by emphasising the inscriptive or productive aspect of language and interpretation rather than the linguists or interpreters themselves, what is examined here is that which is communicated not through but in language. In particular, the data provides multiple interpretations of particular modern statist subjectivities in post-Cold War Asia Pacific. Furthermore, although the predicates and practices for each international subject are not identical from document to document, they nevertheless connect in a loosely coherent manner so as to construct a particular identity in each grouping. Presupposition The first two loosely-held collection of statements in tables 1A and 1B are rather consistent with the bulk of the security discourse from Southeast Asian and Taiwanese policy communities in which seemingly contradictory but, in effect, complementary constructions of what China

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Predicates and Practices on ‘China’ (Set 1)

A kind of regional policeman offering a pax sinica to Southeast Asia (Yahuda 1986) All big states are potential devils (Sopiee 1985) Early Ming emperors sought to impose on Southeast Asia a regional order in keeping with their vision of world order (Yahuda 1986)

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Considers the South China Sea to be its own ‘lake’ as a matter of historical legacy (Mak 1990) Desire to influence the [ARF] process by active participation (Cossa 1996)* If the post-Deng leadership in Beijing … believes … that only China’s security is important, then it is almost certain to take measures that will increase insecurity among its neighbours (Jordan 1996) In the Chinese mind (Scalapino 1989) Cannot be ignored but must be monitored (Bunbongkarn 1996)* A potential threat (Hernandez 1996)* Neither is China as benign a power as some would like to believe (Mack 1996)*

Aggressively pursuing he [sic] claims [in the South China Sea] (Zain 1992) As a trespasser in the [Southeast Asian] region (Yahuda 1986) China’s primary approach … is a negative one: to weaken, break up, or prevent the emergence of Asia Pacific states with an actual or presumptive anti-PRC bias (Wang 1990) Possibility of [Chinese] threats emanating from [the South China Sea] (Tanjung 1996)

Assertiveness of China in the South China Sea is a new threat (Ronas 1996)* All big states are potential devils (Sopiee 1985)

Has the element of unpredictability (Mak 1990)

Has to prove to be willing and able to become a responsible great power (Wanandi 1996a) Most significant impediment to stability in the South China Sea is the inscrutability of Chinese intentions and policy, or lack of transparency (Hernandez 1996)*

Those of us outside of China welcome economic development in China … because it directs China’s attention to domestic matters and encourages cooperative relations with neighbours (Harris 1997) Is the primary regional security concern (Hitchcock 1994) Is nowadays considered by Southeast Asia as a challenge (Wanandi 1996a) More comfortable with ASEAN chairing the ARF (Cossa 1996)* Not considered a threat but an enormous challenge (Hassan 1996a)*

The idea of one China or the unity of the Chinese realm goes back to the beginning of Chinese history … China’s unity, in short, is an attribute of Chinese-ness itself (Scalapino 1989) We need to encourage China … to reduce strategic weapons in order to regulate China’s nuclear and missile development (Morimoto 1997)

We need to encourage China … to reduce strategic weapons in order to regulate China’s nuclear and missile development (Morimoto 1997)

The new dominant South China Sea actor will undoubtedly be the PRC (Mak 1990)

Too intoxicated with her own sense of centrality in the cosmos (Hassan 1996b)

Possible attempt to instil balance-of-power politics in the [ARF] multilateral framework with Japan and the U.S. as the other players (Cossa 1996)*

Continues to assert that it intends to solve the problem in the South China Sea unilaterally (Bandoro 1996)

The PRC, unlike India, seems to know what it wants to do with its own navy (Mak 1990)

Is the primary regional security concern (Hitchcock 1994) Is nowadays considered by Southeast Asia as a challenge (Wanandi 1996a) Not a threat but an enormous challenge (Hassan 1996a)* Refuses to negotiate the question of sovereignty [in South China Sea claims] (Morimoto 1997) The China factor will always be there. The China factor is always in the consideration of everyone’s mind (Djalal 1987)

Chinese assertiveness over the disputed area and its past involvement in military skirmishes with other claimants are matters of serious concern (ASEAN-ISIS 1993b)

Note: * denotes statements that may not necessarily have been transcribed verbatim.

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exactly is abound. Most obvious is the overall treatment of China as an unequivocal presence even as disagreements continue over Chinese motives and policy regarding the South China Sea and, by implication, the Southeast Asian region. This is supported by references such as ‘in the Chinese mind’, ‘one China and the unity of the Chinese realm’, ‘the beginning of Chinese history’, ‘China’s unity’, ‘an attribute of Chinese-ness itself’ and so on – all of which allude to an ontological existence to which epistemic and policy communities, whether in concurrence or disagreement regarding the attribution of particular motives, behaviours and/or policy implications germane to the (in Foucault’s phrase) ‘material instance’ they construct and hence know as China, can and do simply accept as given with no need of critical explanation. These discursive constructions of China serve an additional purpose, however: the social constitution of the states to which their disseminators claim allegiance. Underlying the attributes and practices displayed in all three groups (tables 1A, 1B and 1C), we can locate ontological presuppositions based upon binary oppositions in discourse. The .

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Table 1B

Predicates and Practices on ‘China’ (Set 2)

Once burgeoning liberal school of thought has dwindled in China and realism is now the theoretical construct of the foreign policy community (Ho 1996) [Taiwanese independence is] one of the few issues over which Beijing has repeatedly indicated its willingness to go to war (MacWha 1998) Primary concern [of East Asian members of ARF] is how to contain Beijing’s ambitions (Chang 1996) When national interests are at stake, China will not hesitate to act firmly and decisively (Shi 1997) Claims poses [sic] a major threat to the region (Chou 1996) Can afford to be a wayward regional power (Ho 1996) Rising power is a major concern for the region (Chang 1996) Needs to be balanced (Ho 1996)

Collapse of the Soviet Empire has given China the possibility of becoming Asia’s next hegemonic power. There is no doubt that it harbours such intention (Chang 1996) Policy toward Taiwan is clearly a product of realism and nationalism (Ho 1996)

Claim to Taiwan is based on an illusion held by China’s leaders, not on reality; nor is it justified by international law (Chang 1996)

Military muscle was used not only to back up its territorial claims in the South China Sea (Chou 1996) Territorial and sovereignty integration is the supreme goal of security policy (Ho 1996)

Seems rather uninformed about Taiwan’s democratic changes and the aspirations of its people (Chang 1996) Paranoia that Taiwan could become hostile (Chang 1996)

Is governed primarily by men, not law (Scalapino 1989)

To intimidate the people in Taiwan (Chou 1996)

Muscle flexing in the postCold War era (Ho 1996) Refuses to acknowledge Taiwan for what it is (Chang 1996) Recent sabre-rattling (Ho 1996)

Role is ambiguous as well as ambivalent (Chang 1996) Military expansion is threatening to its neighbours (Chou 1996)

A strong and united China has historically sought influence beyond its borders (Chang 1996)

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Predicates and Practices on ‘China’ (Set 3)

We are preoccupied with out [sic] own economic build-up, whereas others are thinking about ‘the China threat’ (Ji 1994) Has adhered to ‘civilized’ rules of behaviour far more than most other major powers (Hassan 1996b) Recent gestures by China to accede to multilateral process and to allow a limited internationalisation of issues it is involved in suggests China is being ‘socialized’ (Mack 1996)* Is, by right ought to be, a major actor in both the Asia Pacific region and the world (Wang 1990) [U.S.] is not only antiCommunist but anti-China (Wang 1997) Has many justifiable grounds to consider herself a victim of other powers (Hassan 1996b) Is always reactive and victimized (Wang 1997)

Wrong to raise fears of malign nationalism [in China] when the U.S. itself is a highly nationalistic state (Wanandi 1996) Development is of significance to the formation of multilateral-isation in Pacific Asia (Ji 1994) [China] is ready to make full use of and strengthen the mechanisms of dialogue and consultation provided by ASEAN (Qian 1993)

Pursues a defence strategy with no ambition for expansionist aggressions or for maritime hegemony (Ji 1994)

Increasing concession to Taiwan’s participation in the [CSCAP] working groups (Cossa 1996)* Stands for the peaceful settlement of disputes (Ji 1994)

Has shown its support to the establishment of regional security mechanism (Ji 1994)

Growing commitment to the ARF (Cossa 1996)*

As every country, is fully entitled to a modern military force for self-defence (Shi 1997)

Has neither the intention nor the necessity to develop a blue-water navy (Ji 1994) Most American critics of China see the government as fairly monolithic, with policy decisions determined by fiat and through a hierarchy (Choate 1997)

Rarely sought military expansion (Hassan 1996b)

Most Asians welcome a stronger China (Wang 1997)

Note: * denotes statements that may not necessarily have been transcribed verbatim.

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Table 2

Predicates and Practices on ‘Taiwan’

If the PRC were to respect the wish of the Taiwanese people to retain their independence, as in the case of Singapore … Taiwan would only harbour feeling [sic] of friendship toward China (Chang 1996)

Any objective observer will have noted that Taiwan has conducted a policy of constructive engagement toward China since 1987 (Chang 1996)

Drive to more international space … is only a natural outgrowth of its democratisation process (Ho 1996)

Willing and able to provide economic and technical aid to assist China’s modernisation (Chang 1996) Is not a province of the PRC (Chang 1996)

Adopts a liberal approach toward China (Ho 1996)

Seeks peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, not conflict or confrontation (Chang 1996)

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Table 3

Predicates and Practices on ‘America’/‘United States’

A benign superpower (Chang 1996; Hernandez 1996*) Asians know that America did not fight those [three wars in East Asia] in pursuit of territory or natural resources or to impose its hegemony upon other countries (Chang 1996)

A Pacific power in its own right (Wanandi 1996a) Only if an American military presence remains, can new security measures for cooperation and confidence building be successfully put in place (Chang 1996)

Has not developed a clear idea of how to structure its relationship with the whole of Southeast Asia (Wanandi 1990) Sentiments favouring Taiwan and against China are especially strong in Congress (Ho 1996) Has enjoyed a reservoir of good will in the Asia Pacific region (Wanandi 1990)

Has been a buffer force and the ultimate security guarantor in Asia against the threat or invasion of the communists (Chang 1996) Current U.S. military and political presence in Asia is ‘indispensable’ (Chang 1996)

The supreme military power in Asia (Chang 1996) As a distant major state, the U.S. poses no threat to the PRC (Scalapino 1989) Is engaging, rather than confronting, China (Ho 1996)

The American people have always demanded a moral foundation for U.S. foreign policy (Scalapino 1989) Remains a Pacific power (Mak 1990) Most important external power for ASEAN in economic terms (Wanandi 1996)

A trustworthy chaperone to a dance (Chang 1996) Has demonstrated to the world that it is willing and able to use its military might to safeguard peace and protect what it considers to be its vital security interests (Chang 1996) The shock felt in the U.S. at all levels by the inhumanity of Chinese leaders toward their own people (Scalapino 1989) Dampen the threat posed by the backlash authoritarian [sic] and anti-liberal states (Ho 1996) Responded swiftly and decisively to China’s military intimidation (Chang 1996) Only the United States can bring about a balance-ofpower (Paal 1997) Most idealistic of the great powers (Chang 1996)

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Note: * denotes statements that may not necessarily have been transcribed verbatim.

presupposition rendered in tables 1A and 1B statements is the existence of certain metaphysical differences – between China and Southeast Asian states on the one hand and, on the other hand, Taiwan – that can be located on particular axes, namely, reason/passion, responsible/irresponsible and moral/immoral axes. Consider, first, the reason/passion axis: ‘China’s primary approach [to the South China Sea disputes] is a negative one’; it is ‘too intoxicated with her own sense of centrality in the cosmos’; it suffers from the ‘paranoia that Taiwan could become hostile’; Chinese behaviour ‘has the element of unpredictability’; China is ‘governed primarily by men, not law’; and Chinese ‘policy toward Taiwan is clearly a product of realism and nationalism’. Hence, such statements inscribe China as a highly unreasonable power ruled by the passions of megalomaniac ambitions, a rising virulent nationalism3 and an unhealthy dose of paranoia. Indeed, the presupposition of a power ruled by such passions thereby furnishes the consequence that logically

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follows such a reading: ‘It is the long-term growth of China’s power that causes the most worry’ for Southeast Asian societies that themselves have enjoyed phenomenal economic growth – until the regionwide financial meltdown of 1993-1998. Closely linked to this is the responsible/irresponsible axis, or what Shapiro (1987) has called the ‘ruly/unruly axis’: ‘All big states [but more so China than the United States] are potential devils’; China ‘has to prove to be willing and able to become a responsible great power’; it is ‘a trespasser in the region’; it is ‘almost certain to take measures that will increase insecurity among its neighbours’; ‘its use of overwhelming power to assert its sovereignty’; it ‘can afford to be a wayward power’; it engages in ‘muscle flexing in the post-Cold War era’; ‘territorial and sovereignty integration is the supreme goal of security policy’ in China; it ‘refuses to acknowledge Taiwan for what it is’; and its interactions in the regional arena are marked by a ‘lack of transparency’. Indeed and quite ironically, as some table 1C statements evince, China apologists seeking to revise such negative productions may subvert their own efforts by assertions to the effect that China ‘has many justifiable grounds to consider herself a victim of other powers’ or is ‘always reactive and victimised’. The haunting spectre of a militarising and modernising China out for requital is thereby added to the particular ontology portrayed in ostensibly objective Track 2 accounts. However, there is evidence to suggest that China is seeking to be the reasonable and responsible power that some aspects of Track 2 discourse seem to acknowledge.4 Such evidence notwithstanding, ‘threat’ and/or ‘challenge’ discourse remained a mainstay in second-track venues. Interestingly, a cursory glance at recent defence ‘white papers’ produced by the ASEAN states make few if any explicit allusions to China as a ‘threat’. If Track 2 is understood as venues in which to deal with ‘issues that government officials are too busy to staff themselves or on problems considered too sensitive to raise in official international conclaves at the time’, then it logically follows that both epistemic and policy communities in ASEAN states, regardless of taboo topics or not, are beholden nevertheless to just such constructions of China. Quite the inverse is (discursively) true of the Southeast Asian states or Taiwan. By contrast to China’s apparent lack of reason in motives and policy, one may surmise that those of the ASEAN states and Taiwan are relatively reasonable and responsible. Their foreign policies are evidently less contaminated by the paroxysms of passion that engulf the ‘aggressive’ behemoth; also, they have demonstrated a greater degree of moderation in their international behaviour. This presupposition is, however, challenged by statements by Chinese security intellectuals (table 1C): ‘as every country, [China] is fully entitled to a modern military force for self-defence’; it ‘pursues a defence strategy with no

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ambition for expansionist aggressions or for maritime hegemony’; its ‘development is of significance to the formation of multilateralisation in Pacific Asia’; ‘we are preoccupied with out [sic] own economic build-up, whereas others are thinking about “the China threat”’, and so forth. Such attempts by the Chinese second-track community to defend China’s militarisation find a small measure of support in the ongoing militarisation by ASEAN states (Acharya 1994; Gill & Mak 1997). In table 2 – a compilation of statements culled from the same Taiwan-sponsored documents that constructed an aggrandising and bellicose China (i.e. table 1B) – ‘Taiwan’ and Taiwanese motives and behaviour are drawn using the binary opposites of those axes. By contrast to China’s realism and nationalism, Taiwan ‘adopts a liberal approach toward China’ and, as such, ‘seeks peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, not conflict or confrontation’ – the implication here being that China has predominantly engaged in conflictive and confrontational actions toward Taiwan. ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ are hence inscribed as pregiven ontological entities with, to be sure, quite different political identities as evidenced above. By contrast to the largely negative inscriptions of China in tables 1A and 1B (but not 1C), the social constructions of the United States in that same discourse tend to hold metaphysical presuppositions different altogether from those that defined China in table 3. As in the case of China and Taiwan, the United States is treated as an unproblematic metaphysical presence but with quite a different political identity from that of China. By way of the same textual strategy of binary oppositions, the United States is inscribed not as the ‘trespasser’ that China allegedly is but ‘a Pacific power in its right’, the ‘supreme military power in Asia’, ‘a buffer force’ and ‘the ultimate security guarantor in Asia against the threat or invasion of the communists’. Indeed, security discourse goes so far as to assume, rather sweepingly, that Asians know that the United States evidently ‘did not fight [three East Asian wars] in pursuit of territory or natural resources or to impose its hegemony upon other countries’. From here come subsequent assertions that the United States ‘has enjoyed a reservoir of good will in the Asia Pacific region’ and is the only actor that ‘can bring about a balance-of-power’ therein or, more accurately, the only major power welcomed to have a hand in regional affairs. Where the discursive axes introduced above are concerned, the United States as ‘honest broker’ (in the oft-used phrase of international security discourse) is clearly constructed as the reasonable and responsible great power of the Asia Pacific region. The ‘America as honest broker’ presupposition is significant, without which the following two very similar statements – the first regarding China and the second concerning the United States – would not produce the different understandings they apparently do in Track 2 security

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discourse: first, ‘when national interests are at stake, China will not hesitate to act firmly and decisively’ (table 1B); second, ‘[America] has demonstrated to the world that it is willing and able to use its military might to safeguard peace and protect what it considers to be its vital security interests’ (table 3). On the one hand, already inscribed as unreasonable and irresponsible, Chinese actions in the South China Sea can thereby be apprehended not as the proper acts permitted to a state that has the right to protect what it regards as its national interests, but as those of a ‘trespasser’ who has no rightful claim. On the other hand, the allegedly reasonable and responsible America, as ‘a Pacific power in its own right’, is accorded pride of place in a region where, from a geographical-cum-historical standpoint, it may be viewed, in a sense, as equally if not more a trespasser in the region than China. But as far as Track 2 discourse goes, this evidently is not the case, for the United States is written as having the ‘right’ to forcefully protect what it regards as its national interests in the region. In this regard, the United States, as a journalist once noted, retains ‘a lot of frontage on the Pacific lake, and most Asians like it that way’, arguably even the Chinese. But having interests in the region is not quite the same as being in – or, for that matter, of – the region, even as America is a now a part of, say, the East Asia Summit (EAS) and, as Barack Obama, the self-styled ‘America’s first Pacific President’, asserted during his visit to Australia in late 2011, the United States regards the Asia Pacific region as its top security priority and is there ‘to stay’ (Lothian & Jansen 2011; The Economist 2011). Thus we find statements such as this: ‘The truth for America is clear: It is a Pacific power but not an Asian power; the task now is to accept the difference’ (Smith 2011).

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Predication Regarding the statements from table 1A, the regional concern with strategic uncertainty appears to be linked inextricably with the streak of cautious approbation amid what are more or less suspicions and even paranoia regarding Chinese intentions and foreign policy toward Southeast Asia. Not ‘as benign a power as some would like to believe’, China is inscribed as ‘aggressively pursuing’ its territorial claims in regional waters where it is but a ‘trespasser’; its growing ‘assertiveness’ is best evidenced by its use of ‘overwhelming power’ in the South China Sea disputes and its refusal to negotiate sovereignty claims. The Chinese are hence constructed as pursuing a megalomaniac foreign policy oriented toward establishing a ‘pax sinica’ in their ‘own lake’ much as their Ming forebears sought allegedly to impose their will on the Southeast Asian region.5 Another common interrelated line of argument is the notion of a Chinese claim on the archipelagic Southeast

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Asian region by virtue of the many overseas Chinese therein – a crucial theme during the Malaysian Emergency in the 1950s and the Indonesian Confrontation (konfrontasi) in the 1960s. As Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew noted in 1994, ‘China should … avoid causing unnecessary fears’ such as commenting on anti-Chinese riots in Medan, Indonesia in April 1994, as this may revive ‘old fears’ that China has not abandoned its claim to the loyalties of all ethnic Chinese wherever they are. Although ‘unpredictability’ still rules in view of the ‘inscrutability’ of Chinese motives and behaviours and their ‘lack of transparency’, one indisputable fact remains in discourse: ‘the China factor’ will continue to dominate the considerations of Southeast Asian policymakers for the reasons given above. Neglect of China as an ‘enormous challenge’ to Southeast Asian security by unsuspecting policymakers can only prove inimical to Southeast Asian interests. Where table 1B statements are concerned, their construction of a clear and present China threat, although evidently a shift from other renditions of China as simply a security ‘challenge’, share nevertheless a common intertextual basis with statements from other boxes dealing with China. Voiced primarily by Taiwanese security intellectuals in the aftermath of the Sino-Taiwanese ‘missile crisis’ in March 1996, this latter collection of statements differs from those of the former only in terms of the level of intensity, namely, the notion of China as a security ‘challenge’ has been upgraded in severity via a predominantly threatbased discourse. Herein the predicates attributed to China take on a brutish, if not bestial, quality: ‘wayward’, lawless, ‘hostile’, intimidating, ‘muscle flexing’, ‘sabre-rattling’ and ‘uninformed’.6 This is not to imply that any difference between these two aspects of discourse regarding China is therefore superficial; on the contrary, a second-track dialogue session between ASEAN-ISIS academics and their counterparts from CSCAP-Taiwan (officially ‘Chinese Taipei’) some years back proved highly contentious at several points, with security intellectuals sympathetic to Taiwan providing ample grist about a China supposedly bent on achieving, by force and other equally nefarious means, regional hegemony and those faithful to the more ambiguous ASEAN position(s) berating the alleged Taiwanese push toward independence. For those sympathetic to Taiwanese concerns, the problem had to do with the manner in which East and Southeast Asian (read ASEAN) countries purportedly reacted to the missile crisis of March 1996. As Ho argued, ‘Right now, East Asian countries try to paper over the Taiwan issue, simply pretending that Taiwan does not exist, at least in international diplomacy and security’ (1996: 18). In return, those sympathetic to Southeast Asian positions charge Taiwan for supposedly reneging on the ‘one China’ policy by agitating for de jure political independence.7 Notwithstanding such a diversity of policy opinion, the intertextuality

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between Southeast Asian and Taiwanese discursive constructions produce a China that ‘cannot be ignored’ precisely because of its status as the ‘primary regional security concern’. As alluded to in the preceding discussion on presupposition, a different set of qualities in table 2 are attributed to Taiwan that contrasts significantly with those used by ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP-Taiwan security intellectuals to construct China. Whereas China’s modernisation has apparently produced a malign nationalism and an ‘expansionist’ foreign policy, Taiwan’s ‘drive to international “space” … is only a natural outgrowth of its democratisation process’ and for geopolitical reasons. In other words, the lateral pressures engendered as a result of ‘developmental processes’ in both China and Taiwan are to be understood differently: while Chinese modernisation raises concerns regarding Chinese motives and policy, Taiwanese ventures in ‘pragmatic diplomacy’ so as to garner support from the international community for an official Taiwanese voice in international affairs should not be perceived as threatening for, after all, they are merely the outgrowth of democratisation. A quick word on presupposition in this respect: here we find in this discourse the existence of a moral/immoral (or good/evil) axis. As far as the Taiwanese intellectuals’ construction of Taiwan’s lateral pressures as the outgrowth of democratisation are concerned, such pressures are inscribed as a moral or good thing, whereas the inverse is therefore true for China’s lateral pressures: Chinese motives and policy in the region are apparently immoral, ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ given its unreasonableness and irresponsibility as a great power. As in the earlier cases of the reason/passion and responsible/irresponsible axes, the moral/immoral axis fits into what Todorov (1984) calls the axiological level, where value judgments are rendered. But where the identification of Taiwanese political identity with democracy is concerned, another level of discursive activity can be discerned – what Todorov calls the ‘praxeological’ level, namely, where identification takes place between self and other or, in our case, Taiwan and the United States, as liberal democracies. Moreover, that some non-Chinese CSCAP security intellectuals have issued criticisms of former Taiwan president Lee Teng Hui’s pragmatic diplomacy efforts in 1996 suggests – the positive consequences of democratisation aside – a concern over adverse Chinese reactions to Taiwanese aspirations that have the potential of destabilising the Asia Pacific region. The concern over the destabilising pressures born supposedly of the outgrowth of liberalisation and democratisation is not new: witness, for example, the concern that British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1967) had over the French Revolution and the implications it held for regional peace and stability in a Europe comprised primarily of monarchies. For sure, by such a comparison I

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do not mean to imply that the two entirely unique historical contexts – historical Enlightenment-period Europe on the one hand and contemporary Asia Pacific on the other – are therefore to be regarded as one and the same. But the discursive constructions of danger and threat in the discourses of, on the one hand, Burke and his contemporaries and, on the other hand, Asia Pacific security discourse suggest analogous dynamics where practices of statecraft are concerned. Quoting Burke, James Der Derian makes the following point regarding the reflections of the former on the Revolution:

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Burke’s indictment of the French revolutionary regime today reads like a report from some member of the Committee on the Present Danger on US Defense-spending: ‘Our present danger from the example of a people, whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy’. (Der Derian 1994: 173-174) Here we see Burke employing the same logocentric gesture to inscribe binary oppositions – reason/passion, ruly/unruly and possibly even, in the light of Jacobinic excesses, good/evil – such that the bourgeois revolution is constructed as a horrendous event, which in a way it was.8 On the other hand, we may infer from Burke’s reflection that revolutionary France is markedly different from the monarchies of Great Britain and other European powers. In much the same way as demonstrated above and in the following pages, the social construction of states is accomplished through representational practices of the sort illustrated here. By contrast to the largely negative attributes assigned to China, the United States (in table 3) is inscribed as ‘a benign power’, ‘a trustworthy chaperone to a dance’ and ‘the most idealistic of the great powers’. Arguably, such idealism has meant a moral superiority that, in one Chinese security intellectual’s view, ‘always find[s] fault with China and exert[s] high pressures in order to weaken China’ (table 3). Indeed, contrast the generally positive inscriptions of the United States or Americans to a small grouping of statements that construct them in terms pejorative or negative: Americans ‘are untrustworthy’, they ‘fear the rise of a strong Chinese nation’ or they ‘always find fault with China and exert high pressures in order to weaken China’. Yet the intimation that ‘the American people have always demanded a moral foundation for US foreign policy’, coupled with the claim that Americans ‘at all levels’ of American society, with respect to the 1989 Tiananmen debacle, were shocked ‘by the inhumanity of Chinese leaders toward their

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own people’ promptly elevates the United States on the moral/immoral axis relative to China, locating America on the moral high ground. Notwithstanding the ‘unethical’ nature of certain US foreign policy actions – the sweeping support of dictatorial, anti-communist Third World regimes in Latin America and Asia during the Cold War years, and most recently its excesses in Afghanistan and certainly in Iraq in the name of the post-9/11 war on terror – the writing of America as the knight in (albeit) less than shining armour to the Chinese dragon adduces a fascinating contrast in the construction of seemingly diametrically opposed identities and interests.

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Placement/Positioning of Subjects The constitution of subjects along the oppositional dimensions raised in the preceding discussion simultaneously positions those subjects in a hierarchical arrangement. As demonstrated above, the construction of China as an unreasonable, irresponsible and (more implicitly) immoral state positions China as inferior to the more superior subjects – Taiwan, the United States and the ASEAN states – all of whom, in the view of the bulk of second-track security discourse, have shown themselves to be reasonable, responsible and ethical subjects relative to China. The binary oppositions mimic a self/other discourse that, in one scholar’s words, ‘almost invariably amounts to the constitution of that Other as a less than equal subject’ (Shapiro 1987). The so-called ‘modes of otherness’ constructed upon multiple discursive axes pose a clear and present Chinese ‘challenge’ (for ASEAN states) or ‘threat’ (for Taiwan) that suggests, for all intents and purposes in a post-Cold War Asia Pacific ostensibly defined by strategic uncertainty, that instead one can be relatively certain about just what China is.9 The assignation of varying degrees of agency to different subjects can also be ascertained in the predicates and practices listed in the tables. The notion of a speaking, writing and knowledgeable subject connotes an extensive and complex kind of subjectivity that encompasses a whole array of interconnected ideas, values and goals, thereby amounting to some sort of a ‘worldview’ (Doty 1993: 313). Simply put, at the local dimension of the Track 2 discourse examined in this chapter, there is the sense, by no means absolute, that a couple of foregone conclusions regarding the relations among these given states can be arrived at quite easily. Both China and the United States are inscribed as powerful actors understandably endowed with a significant degree of agency, and both constitute complicated kinds of subjects who possess ideologies and interests. However, when juxtaposed against China (on the three axes discussed above), America nevertheless occupies a higher position in the hierarchical arrangement than does the People’s Republic.

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Written as the more reasonable, rational, responsible and moral of the two subjects, America is doubtless the more reflective of the two. Notwithstanding the existence of minority views sympathetic to China, the position of America as privileged subject relative to China is relatively consistent throughout Asia Pacific security discourse. When both these powers are juxtaposed against Taiwan and the ASEAN states, an interesting paradox emerges, however. In the case of Taiwan, the discursive construction of China as unreasonable (or irrational), irresponsible and immoral could also be understood, relative to an otherwise apparently hapless Taiwan in the face of a belligerent China, as a not particularly complex subject. In other words, given its known disposition toward realism and nationalism as the driving forces behind its foreign policy and its intention ‘of becoming Asia’s next hegemonic power’, China, contrary to the claim of a CSCAP-China analyst, has evidently not adhered to the civilised rules of behaviour ‘far more than most other major powers’. Instead, it still has to demonstrate proof that it is ‘willing and able to become a responsible great power’. Similarly, while the United States is privileged in discourse as superior to China, its discursive construction as an equally known and knowable entity also includes a simplistic quality, rendering it open to admonition by allies as a way to provoke a more determined American stance toward an allegedly threatening China. In one respect, statements (in table 3) to the effect that America ‘has not developed a clear idea of how to structure its relationship with the whole of Southeast Asia’ or the ‘unclear picture of US policy towards China’ inscribe an innocent but inherently good America: a moral, well intentioned and powerful but otherwise unsophisticated subject which requires some guidance and encouragement to assume seriously its obligations as the foremost Pacific power to balance all aspiring challengers for regional dominance and, at times, deserving rebuke when it oversteps its bounds and plays the role, rather selectively and (to not a few Asian observers) hypocritically, of the moral conscience of the world (Kwa & Tan 2001). Paradoxically, as the most responsible and reflective of the great powers in the Asia Pacific security environment, the consequent contention logically ensues: the ‘current US military and political presence in Asia is “indispensable”’ (see table 3).

The China Threat and the Writing of ‘America’ The promise has not been fulfilled, but it was precisely its un-fulfilment that kept it alive and effective … Paradoxically, the key to keeping the promise alive is to invent more fears (provided these are nice, little, manageable fears – ghosts that appear only

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together with foolproof recipes for exorcism), to make life busier, more difficult, until the whole life-space is filled with worries. (Baumann 1993: 29)

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Clearly, the discourses of knowledge networks in the Asia Pacific do not stand alone. Linked inextricably and intertextually to other discourses, their effectiveness depends on how ideologically robust the discourses to which they are affiliated are. Conversely, they frame the conditions of possibility on which still other discourses rely. In this regard, nowhere more developed are the themes of the indispensability of American exceptionalism – promoted mostly though not exclusively by non-Chinese Track 2 participants as crucial to the preservation of the strategic stability of the Asia Pacific (Tan, S.S. 2011a) – and of rising and threatening Chinese revisionism, which follow from the preceding discussion, than in the example of the ‘China threat’ discourse. Quite apart from emphasising rising power capabilities as a near-sufficient condition to merit the justification for an upsurge in US military spending, the ‘real goal’ of the Chinese, accordingly, ‘is to change power relationships in a fundamental way’ (Wolfowitz 2000: 40). A prominent Washington-based pundit has made a similar assertion: ‘states such as China … if given the chance, would configure the international system quite differently’ (Kagan 2001: 7). In short, China is discursively constituted as a revisionist rather than status quo power. Take, for instance, the following assessment furnished by a US congressional leader. Citing extensively from just one study on China (Gertz 2000), Senator Jon Kyle of Arizona offered the following view: [T]he former [Clinton] administration believed that China could be reformed solely by the civilising influence of the West. Unfortunately, this theory hasn’t proven out – the embrace of western capitalism has not been accompanied by respect for human rights, the rule of law, the embrace of democracy, or a less belligerent attitude toward its neighbours … China is being led by a communist regime with a deplorable human rights record and a history of irresponsible technology sales to rogue states. Furthermore, Beijing’s threatening rhetoric aimed at the United States and Taiwan, as well as its military modernisation and build-up of forces opposite Taiwan, should lead us to the conclusion that China potentially poses a growing threat to our national security … We should also be concerned with China’s desire to project power in other parts of the Far East. (Kyle 2001) In Kyle’s discourse we encounter, first, the partisan criticism levelled against the Clinton administration for its allegedly erroneous belief that

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China could be ‘reformed’ by the ‘civilising influence of the West’. That this statement proceeds immediately from there to demonstrate why ‘this theory hasn’t proven out’ is not to imply that the text insists the entirety of the Clinton administration’s purported logic is thereby flawed. Indeed, his discourse enacts precisely the same exclusionary practice, present in the logic that he has just criticised, so as to position China as a ‘lesser subject’, so to speak, relative to the United States. Butler’s thoughts, cited earlier, can be reprised here: ‘This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’ (Butler 1993: 3). I would suggest that Butler’s ‘abject beings’ that are ‘not yet subjects’ may possibly be construed as what I have termed lesser or inferior subjects. Hence in much the same way that Orientalist discourses produced subaltern subjects in order to be known, domesticated, disciplined, conquered, governed and of course civilised – and here we are indebted to the oeuvre of Edward Said (1979, 1993) – the figuration of ‘China’ in Kyle’s discourse, evoking a genre of otherness most moderns prefer to think has disappeared with the passing of colonialism, is that of an uncivilised barbaric nation and people. The previous Democratic administration, according to Kyle, erred in believing that the Chinese could be reformed and civilised, but no such hope – and it is, after all, a liberal hope – need be entertained by conservatives who know better than to even attempt to civilise ‘the natives’. This representation allows for the simultaneous production of the properly constituted subject – ‘America’ – where human rights, the rule of law, democracy and a track record of good neighbourliness are fully embraced along with free markets. Here we may note that although this inventory of criteria has long been associated with how Americans tend to perceive themselves – and, to be sure, how the world perceives America, positively as well as negatively – their own national history, however, is littered with as many spectacular failures as there have been successes in these very areas. Furthermore, what is interesting to note, in terms of the redeployment – or as Foucault might put it, the ‘re-incitement’ – of Orientalist tropes in security discourse, is the shift from the sorts of axiomatic and practical axes that structure interrelated discourses on communism during and prior to the Cold War, to the axes that configure contemporary readings of communism or, more precisely, the latest variant of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. As Campbell has pointed out, one of the dimensions upon which pivoted the construction of Soviet communism as the West’s other was that of the organising of economic relations: notably, in its most simplistic terms, central planning and collectivisation on the part

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of the communist bloc; and laissez faire-cum-mixed economy and private ownership on the part of the Free World (Campbell 1998). In the case of the Kyle narrative – which, in a key respect, reiterates and references norms and tropisms already present in security discourses on China during the Clinton presidency – that particular axis has become irrelevant in the wake of China’s ‘embrace of western capitalism’ and growing integration with the global economy.10 For a replacement, contemporary security discourse has mobilised other representational resources that, as we have seen, function within the senator’s discourse to domesticate and constitute China as a threat. And although China is described therein as ‘being led by a communist regime’, the choice of this particular adjective, deliberately circulated to invoke past articulations of fear, no longer refers to the same thing. Hence, much as China has ‘embraced western capitalism’, much as communism in its economic sense is no longer adhered to throughout all of China, the discursive construction of Otherness, to the extent that the figuration of communism is still being employed, now proceeds along the democratic/authoritarian axis, as well as along other axes around which rogue states are constituted. From this fragment of discourse – reliant as it is on other discourses ranging from developmental, humanitarian, juridical, ethical, economic, political, ideological and cultural concerns in order to be effective – ‘emerges’ a China that can be perceived in no other way than as a threat to America. Kyle (2001) concludes with a stirring endorsement of what may be for others emblematic of American hubris and ethnocentricity: ‘We should hold China up to the same standards of proper behaviour we have defined for other nations, and we should work for political change in Beijing, unapologetically standing up for freedom and democracy’ – words that today resonate ambivalently as Washington waged its ‘global war on terrorism’ (GWOT)11 in the name of freedom and democracy while, at the same time, having to infringe upon the civil liberties of some Americans of particular ethno-religious backgrounds in the name of that war. Finally, it is not entirely clear why Chinese ‘military modernisation and build-up of forces opposite Taiwan’, much less ‘Beijing’s threatening rhetoric’ – as if Chinese leaders, unlike their US counterparts, do not ever employ rhetoric for purposes of domestic consumption – should automatically lead Americans to ‘the conclusion that China potentially poses a growing threat to [US] national security’ (Kyle 2001). While US administrations have mostly sought to avoid any forthright labelling of China as a threat, the conditions of discursive possibility for such labelling are clear and present, so much so that policy options of containment, confrontation and engagement, in an important sense, do not constitute fundamentally distinct ways of conceptualising China but

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rather overlapping approaches to managing an already presumed Other, both dangerous and threatening. As Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush’s secretary of state, argued shortly before joining the Bush administration as national security advisor, ‘China is not a “status quo” power [because it] resents the role of the United States in the Asia Pacific region’ (Rice 2000: 56). Rice’s inscription is an ideological reduction that not only constitutes China as incorrigibly revisionist but refuses the possibility that China may in fact accept (or, as a former Chinese diplomat has it, ‘tolerate’12) the international status quo owing to the benefits Beijing has accrued and desires to continue accruing, thanks largely to America’s apparent stabilising influence in the region.13 Rice’s inscription also refuses the possibility that America may well be both a revisionist power and a rogue state (Heisbourg 1999/2000; Van Ness 2002; Kwa & Tan 2001). Moreover, as one analyst has averred, ‘Beijing has a history of testing US presidents early to see what they’re made of’ (Kagan 2001: 11). As in the above illustrations concerning rogue states, exclusionary practices along various axiomatic and practical axes construct a particular China that, in turn, legitimates the view of the Chinese and their missiles as threats. All the while, the contemporaneous production and reproduction of a particular American identity proceeds apace by way of the reiteration and reference of boundary-producing performances that form the constitutive ‘outside’ domain of abjection, danger, threat and vulnerability. The key, not least where liberal and neo-conservative discourses are concerned, lies precisely in the perceived differences between China and America.14 On its part, realist – its ‘offensive’ face (Snyder 2002; Taliaferro 2000/1), to be precise – discourse acknowledges difference but by-and-large disregards it, relying instead on the assumption that all great powers are ‘tragically’ similar in their quest for power and security; as such, Sino-US rivalry is inevitable not because they are different as much as they are alike (Friedberg 2011; Mearsheimer 2003). But the effect nonetheless remains the same, implying perhaps a symbiotic relationship between those supposedly distinct discourses.15 In an article written when he was the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps unfairly reviled as the ‘neo-con’ architect of the Iraq War of 2003, distinguished between ‘democracies’ and a certain breed of ‘leaders’: Here there seems to be a persistent difference between democracies, which look constantly for pragmatic solutions to resolve concrete problems in isolation, and those more ruthless and avaricious leaders who see every such effort as a sign of weakness and whose real goal is to change power relationships in a fundamental way’. (Wolfowitz 2000: 40)

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Note that no explication is given for why the above statement turns on a reported difference between two distinct levels of analysis in international relations: the state/regime-as-actor level (democracies) and the individual-as-actor level (leaders of authoritarian and/or rogue nations). Further, we can see that the creation of otherness here occurs along several axes. Take, for instance, what may be termed the rational/irrational axis. In the former case, the individual-as-actor has been effaced, thereby leaving only a regime type (democracy) that is purportedly predisposed to technical problem-solving – I noted earlier the readiness by which mainstream analysts of regional life see themselves as ‘technicians’ and problem ‘fixers’ – and incessantly in search of ‘pragmatic solutions to resolve problems’. No politics – and with it any attendant irrationality and uncertainty – need apply in a society in which history or ideology ‘have ended’, in which problems are solved ‘in isolation’ (Fukuyama 1989; Weber 2001). Positioned against this rational, democratic institutional subjectivity stands a lesser, rather loathsome individual subjectivity: a coterie of socalled ‘ruthless and avaricious leaders’, all of whom hail presumably from non-democracies and who purportedly regard rational-cum-technical problem solving – the ostensible focus of democracies – as ‘a sign of weakness’. This blanket inscription of the authoritarian other as illdisposed and even hostile toward rational problem solving disregards the writings on the rational technocratic elites of, say, the bureaucraticauthoritarian regimes of Latin America (O’Donnell 1979) or those of the dirigiste economies of East Asia – many of which used to be (or in some cases still are) of the ‘soft’ authoritarian variety (Morley 1999). Otherness in Wolfowitz’s discourse is also discursively constituted along a moral/immoral (or, alternatively, responsible/irresponsible) axis. Equally interesting is the notion that authoritarian or rogue-state leaders, besides lacking in rationality and viewing problem solving as a form of weakness, are ‘ruthless and avaricious’ – an intentional, not accidental, choice of predicates. That (and here we are left to infer) ‘North Korea’ or ‘Iraq’ is ruled by such roguish elements can only mean that such states can, indeed should, therefore be properly referred to as rogue states. Against these inscriptions of immorality or amorality stands in diametric contrast a moral ‘United States’. And here the unequal adoption by Wolfowitz’s discourse, in the case of ‘democracies’, of the analytical level of state/regime connotes that all America, and not only its leaders or certain individuals, is thereby kind, compassionate, altruistic – the polar opposite of all that rogue states, and possibly even China and Russia, represent. Granted, nowhere in his words does Wolfowitz imply that there are as such no immoral or irresponsible Americans. Nor does he ever hint that all citizens of rogue states are therefore roguish. But the discursive effect is such that we are left with

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the impression that leaders of rogue nations epitomise the darkest of the dark metaphysics of human nature.

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Conclusion: Are States What States Make of Them? In this chapter I have sought to show how nonofficial texts create and instantiate a world by constructing a particular reality that must be accepted in order for various statements in those texts to be considered intelligible. Indeed, the more reasonable and unremarkable the discursive construction in question appears to be, the more powerful and successful the constitutive effects of such discourses as practices of statecraft are. Combined with the preceding section’s analysis of uncertainty as a social construction, the paradoxical certitude with which the political subjectivities of ‘China’ and the ‘United States’, among others, are written into ontological existence is hence an effect of practice. As part of a discourse linked intertextually to the adjacent and overlapping discourses on uncertainty and multilateral security cooperation that comprise security discourse in the Asia Pacific region, these other inscribed statist identities are intrinsic to the burgeoning discourses on non-traditional security or counterterrorism. Hence we find statements to the effect that ‘only if an American military presence remains, can new security measures for cooperation and confidence building be successfully put in place’ (from table 3) or that China ‘is ready to make full use of and strengthen the mechanisms of dialogue and consultation provided by ASEAN’ (from table 1C). Coming from a Taiwanese and Chinese security intellectual respectively, both the above statements can doubtless be construed easily in terms of particular political motives and policy: Taiwan requires a strong US presence in the region to balance China, while China seeks to placate ASEAN, jostle for strategic advantage in the ARF or merely engage in rhetoric without commensurate action.16 States are what states – or, more accurately, the intellectuals and practitioners of statecraft – make of them. To recapitulate, what interests this study is the complex manner in which international subjects with quite different if not diametrically opposite aims are themselves – their identities and interests – constructed via discourses in which they too are participants. The illustrations given above demonstrate that identities and interests may differ markedly in the extent to which processes of social construction render them to be. Nevertheless, those differences do not disturb, much less discredit, the ongoing process of constituting the state; indeed, they are intrinsic to that process. This, then, is where ‘international community’ exists: the communal, albeit uncoordinated, penchant, by way of knowledgeable practice, to create and instantiate the sovereign state as – figuratively as

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well as literally – the state of continuity, fixedness and permanence against the vicissitudes of global life (Ashley 1987a). Inasmuch as one can refer to an unorchestrated coordination of representational practices – say, in the way Bourdieu (1977) has spoken elsewhere of ‘conductorless orchestration’ or Foucault has mused about intentionality without subjects and strategies without strategists (Sewell 1991) – the most plausible recourse in the absence of just such a conductor or strategist or an orderer in international politics is to be found in the practices themselves – autonomous, indeterminate, ungrounded. Whatever coordination occurs among practices is an effect of practice (Weber 1992: 318). It is in this sense, in view of the theoretical difficulties incurred in the problematic search for a scientific language and interpretation that best corresponds with or best represents an independently existing world, that states and other modern subjectivities are better understood as the discursive effects of that very language and interpretation.

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6 Representing the ‘In/Human’ Faces of Asia Pacific Security

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In a ‘world’ some of the inhabitants may not understand or hold the particular construction of them that constructs them in that ‘world’. So there may be ‘worlds’ that construct me in ways that I do not even understand. Or it may be that I understand the construction, but do not hold it myself. I may not even accept it as an account of myself, a construction of myself. And yet, I may be animating such a construction. (Lugones 1987: 10, emphasis in the original) Among the host of knowledgeable practices circulated by Track 2 networks that seek to affirm the post-Cold War Pacific Asia as a region in which an ethic of obligation and responsibility – coloured, for sure, by local variations and idiosyncrasies1 – has a place, few examples stand out more than regional discourses on ‘non-traditional security’ (Caballero-Anthony, Emmers & Acharya 2006; Dosch 2006; Emmers 2005; Emmers et al. 2006; Jones 2011; Tan & Boutin 2001), ‘human security’ (Acharya 2001b; Axworthy 1997; Caballero-Anthony 2004a; Evans 2004; Khong 2001; Paris 2001; Peou 2009; Thiparat 2001) and ancillary concepts such as ‘the responsibility to protect’ and/or the protection of civilians (Bellamy & Beeson 2010; Bellamy & Davies 2009; Bellamy & Drummond 2011; Caballero-Anthony & Chng 2009; CSCAP 2011; Evans 2004; Haacke 2009a; Tan, S.S. 2011b). As chapter 4 has shown, a serendipitous confluence of neo-realist and neo-liberal perspectives in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War facilitated a portrait of the ‘Asia Pacific’ as a realm of abjection, inferiority and subalternity – a site where great powers play out their strategic rivalries while the weaker residents in the region, ASEAN included, look on haplessly, supposedly unable to influence regional affairs in directions they might have otherwise preferred. Beyond ‘conventional’ strategic considerations, Asia Pacific security intellectuals and practitioners have begun perdurable conversations on non-traditional security (or ‘NTS’, the acronymic shorthand employed in the literature2) and human security, not least since the Asian financial crisis that blighted Pacific Asia in 19971998. Other than economic crisis, these conversations include persistent references to a host of ‘challenges’, ‘risks’ and ‘threats’ (take your

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pick of terms) ranging from natural and climate-related disasters, viral pandemics, piracy and armed robbery at sea to domestic and international acts of terrorism inspired by religion.3 Described by Javier Solana, foreign policy commissioner of the European Union, as ‘diverse, unexpected in the main, and multifaceted’ (cited in NTS-Asia 2007: 3), NTS concerns are seen to have impacted Asia Pacific societies to varying extents. At the same time, an effect of just such conversations has been the exacerbation and perpetuation of the Asia Pacific – its double-digit growth figures and relatively swift recovery from financial crises notwithstanding – as a place/space of abjection. Accordingly, the logic presumes, not only is the region deemed as potentially unstable in the strategic sense, it has equally been rendered unsound – ‘crippled’, a commonly used predicate (Johnson 1999; Ramiah 2004) – by natural forces and a host of manmade problems of a non-militaristic character. Indeed, the ‘triple disaster’ at Fukushima, Japan in March 2011 – a frightful blend of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant meltdown – underscored the potential in the Asia Pacific for ‘perfect storm’ scenarios wherein massive scale calamities are triggered by a chain reaction involving multiple smaller ‘hazards’.4 Moreover, it is not only on the basis of material and/or power considerations that the region has been judged as inferior or lesser to Europe and the West in general. Value-based considerations have proved equally salient in the immediate post-Cold War milieu. At the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna, Austria in June 1993 (commonly known as the ‘Vienna Conference’), the European countries and their counterparts from Southeast Asia clashed over the latter’s alleged emphasis on cultural relativism and their perceptibly weak records in human rights protection and democratisation (Bell 2000; Posner 1997; Tan, H.L. 2011).5 Arguably, the publication by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) of its Human Development Report 1994 (UNDR 1994), whose formulation of the human security concept and agenda spawned widespread debate and deliberation in academic and policy discourse in the Asia Pacific, furnished a useful and presumably more politic point-of-entry for regional knowledge networks to raise issues germane to human rights without having to reference the term directly.6 At the same time – despite indigenous affirmations of ‘Asian values’, ironically – human rights have undoubtedly emerged as the normative battleground over which state-centric non-traditional security practices and individual-centric human security have purportedly clashed. Accordingly, particular policies and measures adopted by Asia Pacific countries in dealing with non-traditional challenges, aimed at alleviating human insecurity and privation, have likely aggravated those same conditions. In particular, the ‘wars’ on militancy and terrorism prosecuted by regional governments have, in some

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national cases, contributed to human rights abuses through flawed strategies that exaggerate the presence of Al-Qaeda within regional locales and/or alleged links between local insurgencies and Al-Qaeda, on the one hand, while overemphasising the use of force without redressing legitimate grievances on the ground on the other (Foot 2004; Gearty 2005; Gerstl 2010; Hamilton-Hart 2005; Tan 2007b; Thayer & Fealy 2009). Against this backdrop, the construction and instantiation of regional discourses on NTS and human security in the Asia Pacific, in which Track 2 knowledge networks have played a role, could arguably be grasped as attempts at counter-narratives against representations that portray the Asia Pacific region as inherently abject, inferior and inhuman – given the poor human rights records of its illiberal/authoritarian regimes – as well as inhumane – given the regional ‘tolerance’ shown other regimes (through invoking the non-intervention/non-interference norm) for the abusive treatment of their populations. The region is depicted not only as a likely cockpit of great power rivalry where self-help logics ensure one’s neighbours are better beggared than helped, but also as a cauldron of seething unconventional forces and pressures which, if left unattended, could boil over and debilitate and damage the region – an ‘Age of Nature’, as some pundits are apparently calling the twentyfirst century Asia Pacific (Stacey 2011: 10). Crucially, while those counter-narratives might aim to contest these ominous visions, they do not cancel them out; indeed, it is safe to say that they themselves are partly responsible for such dark representations. At the same time, they hint at an emerging sense – an ethic, if you will7 – of trusteeship among regional states and societies for the peace, prosperity and security of their regional commons. But far from the old Indonesian mantra of ‘regional solutions for regional problems’ (Leifer 2000) which, at least rhetorically, informed the regional aspirations and modalities especially of the Southeast Asian countries during the Cold War years, the post-Cold War period,8 the context for most of the ‘new regionalisms’ (or ‘new multilateralism’, according to another formulation) which helped in part to define the Asia Pacific (Dent 2008; Frost 2008; Green & Gill 2009), has been defined by the collective embrace of ‘open regionalism’, in economic as well as political-strategic terms.9 Thus understood, much as Track 2 discourses have sought to depict the contemporary Asia Pacific as a realm of uncertainty and opportunity, they have also sought to depict regional states as responsible players which, despite the manifold hindrances and constraints in their way, are nonetheless developing the requisite conventions, capacities and confidence to address pressing regional concerns and manage their own neighbourhood.10 As the following discussion shows, such a contention is not especially surprising in the context of NTS, which, despite the conceptual

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enlargement of security beyond the military dimension that ‘non-traditional’ securitisations have engendered, remains wedded to the state. On the other hand, human security is more difficult to pin down, not least given its focus on the individual. Likewise, the responsibility to protect principle, adopted by the UN in 2005, with its revisionist interpretation of state sovereignty and accountability, resists crass efforts at a realist caricature. Ultimately, as significant a counter-narrative as their representations have been to more negative representations of the region, they cannot really be considered as an alternative to the statist meta-narrative that has hitherto enthralled Asia Pacific security. If anything, protestations against portraits of an abject and inferior indigeny, insofar as they preserve the fundamental ontology behind the particular ‘world’ of Asia Pacific security promoted by both the oracles of abjection, on the one hand, and the champions of agency on the other, arguably animate a durable ideological construction and may even raise embarrassing questions of it but in no way undermine it. In a sense, the idea of an Asia Pacific as always and already subaltern to Europe and/or the West is preserved insofar as the former is depicted as always trying to ‘catch up’ or having ‘caught up’ with the latter.

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Asia Pacific Security: Reset or Redux? The post-Cold War context has proved an intellectually stimulating time for discussions on Asia Pacific security. As chapters 3 and 4 have shown, partially liberated from the ideological straitjacketing of the Cold War and fuelled by a ‘participatory regionalism’ that inducted (albeit selectively) nongovernmental voices in security discourse, Track 2 efforts at a limited redefinition of national and regional security have had the effect of introducing into the region’s policy dialogues concepts such as comprehensive security and cooperative security as the ideational bases for the regional institutional architecture of the Asia Pacific (Acharya 2003, 2004a; Alagappa 1988a; ASEAN-ISIS 1993a, 1993b; CSCAP 1995a, 1995b; Emmers 2003; Dewitt 1994; Rolfe 1995). NTS and human security are equally a part of that regional conversation. Their appropriations involve securitising acts that, just as other securitisations have sought to achieve, render various issues into security concerns through investing them with security implications.11 In this regard, I am less interested in the concepts themselves than in the effects of their deployment and subsequent circulation in regional security discourse. Regional attempts to localise and innovate those concepts, as Acharya (2001b: 459) has noted, go well beyond earlier efforts by Asia Pacific security officials to redefine and broaden their own conventional understandings of security in terms of protection of sovereignty and

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territory against military threats. But precisely how far do regional interpretations of NTS, human security or the responsibility to protect deviate from a statist ontology in contrast to the localisations of comprehensive and cooperative security that were undertaken a decade before? How far do they take us toward a fundamental remaking of the region’s and its subjects abject images? Not very far, it has to be said, although some inroads have arguably been made in re-visioning statist sovereignty and subjectivity in terms of responsibility and accountability to one’s own population. Non-Traditionalising Security: Expanding State Purview and Control? Let us begin with non-traditional security, whose intellectual and policy impact on the region has been regularly emphasised by the region’s knowledge networks. As claimed in one of the earliest research projects on NTS issues undertaken in the Asia Pacific:

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… research and dialogue on security in Asia, which has traditionally centred on the nation-state, external threat perceptions, military balances and capabilities and other conventional defence issues, have changed. New efforts to rethink security agendas have emerged, and security analysts and scholars now take much greater interest in the linkages and implications of non-traditional factors for national and regional security, and how to cope with them. Concepts of non-traditional security and discussion of the issues have begun to appear in the speeches of government ministers and continue to be the basis for formal regional meetings. (Watson 2006: vii) Discussions of NTS challenges in the Asia Pacific and regional initiatives to address them have become a cottage industry, not least because of the relative acceptance of the NTS idea by regional states which do not find it as threatening to their sovereignty and subjectivity as traditional security cooperation and the latter’s overt diplomatic-strategic implications. For example, following the inability of the ASEAN Regional Forum to implement preventive diplomacy out of concern over the perceived intrusiveness of preventive diplomacy (PD) measures, the ARF’s agenda shifted noticeably to the pursuit of ‘practical cooperation’ in NTS concerns (Emmers & Tan 2011; Haacke 2009b; Severino 2009; Yuzawa 2006). Likewise, the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus Eight (ADMM+8) is a framework aimed partly at strengthening and improving the capacity of regional defence establishments to respond to particular NTS challenges.12 Of the fifteen study groups established by CSCAP since 2004, ten of them are nominally considered NTS and/or

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human security-related.13 Another two, Oceania and Northeast Asian multilateralism, could arguably be added to the list given the comprehensiveness of the challenges and threats confronting those regions. Although counterterrorism did not merit a study group of its own in that overhaul in 2004, it nonetheless merited at least a mention in the contributions by the other study groups. Indeed, even the APEC, a trade and investment forum at heart, has a taskforce on counterterrorism, a permanent working group on emergency preparedness, and has begun looking into aspects of food security (Freeman et al. 2010; Muradov 2011). Crucially, any of these ‘unconventional’ concerns could have potential military-strategic implications. Another Track 2 research network, the Food Security Expert Group convened by a Singapore-based think tank, has been proactively promoting and planning for Southeast Asia’s future food security in the light of the region-wide shortage experienced in 2008 and has evidently had some success at mobilising the ASEAN governments into action (Teng et al. 2010). Be that as it may, intense debate has occurred over whether regional conventions and practices have in fact been transformed. According to Jörn Dosch (2006: 179), despite ASEAN’s commitment to NTS and acknowledgement of the necessity of joint regional efforts in dealing with NTS challenges, its deeds have rarely gone beyond declarations and ratifications of agreements. The agreements arrived at on disaster management are not insignificant; ASEAN’s 2005 agreement on comprehensive disaster management is the world’s first legally binding treaty of its kind (Freeman et al. 2010: v). But the problem remains very much the hitherto inability of the ASEAN states to implement its agreements and to measure up to its own benchmarks. As two CSCAP intellectuals have lamented, ‘For the most part, regional reactions to non-traditional security threats have taken the form of ambitious declarations of multilateral cooperation that have failed to materialise into significant action’ (Williams & Job 2007: 2). It has also been noted that NTS studies on East Asia, consisting of a principally normative discourse, constitute in fact a highly circumscribed domain that examines only ‘a limited range of independent variables and security threats’, in Hamilton-Hart’s words (2009: 49). A recent CSCAP report shares this view, arguing that while regional efforts at dealing with ‘sudden-onset disasters’ have been focused and relatively positive, ‘slow-onset disasters’ – effects that combine the adverse effects of climate change and myopic development policies – have acquired far less attention and evoked minimal interstate cooperation (White 2011). And while the scope of security policy among ASEAN states has widened dramatically from the 1980s onward (Alagappa 1998; Simon 2001), they have equally been criticised for ‘failing to translate this discursive shift into concrete regional cooperation to tackle these new threats’ (Jones 2011: 403). Another critic has argued

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that the reason the scholarly and Track 2 enterprise in general has been unable to account for the gap between talk about NTS and actual interstate cooperation in NTS is ‘due to its fixation on security discourse rather than practice’ (Jones 2011: 403). Finally, the pursuit of regional interstate cooperation in a particular NTS issue could, inadvertently or otherwise, discourage interest in or attention to other equally critical issues. For instance, generally speaking, undue emphasis on counterterrorism has led to excessive securitisation – or, in some cases, militarisation – at the expense of attention to local socioeconomic conditions and other development-related considerations that could have fostered the turn to militancy by some religionists (Cady & Simon 2006; Ramakrishna & Tan 2003; Smith 2004). NTS discourse, not least Track 2 contributions, has predominantly emphasised a top-down, state-centric approach to security that significantly expands the national security agenda of Asia Pacific states. The key referent in that conversation is principally the state, government and society at large rather than individuals and/or particular communities within a state. The justification for this is usually technical: the state is, by default, ‘the only actor capable of responding effectively to non-traditional security issues’ (Emmers 2005: 82). Few as such see any significant difference between the NTS concept and that of comprehensive security, since both comprehend security holistically; Indonesia’s doctrine of ‘national resilience’ (ketahanan nasional) and Singapore’s ‘total defence’ philosophy are commonly cited examples (Alagappa 1988a; Emmers 2009). Where they differ is in the former’s acknowledgement – rendered almost without exception by regional NTS experts – of the limited capacity of any state by itself to handle the complex mesh of transnational challenges, including conventional ones, which confront them and its advocacy of multinational cum multilateral ripostes to those challenges (Caballero-Anthony 2007).14 As the editors of the CSCAP Regional Security Outlook (CRSO) 2009-2010 cautioned: Key decisions will be required of leaders, in both global and regional fora, concerning cooperation on climate change, halting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regulation of global financial markets, response to natural disasters, addressing the plight of displaced populations, and dampening the pace of destabilising competitive arms build ups. (Job & Williams 2009a: 2) The PECC State of the Region 2006-2007 put it more bluntly: ‘No significant issue in the region can be resolved solely by unilateral action’ (PECC 2006).15 Indeed, contributors to the CRSO 2007 could not have been more explicit in insisting that multilateral cooperation is ‘imperative’ (Williams & Job 2007). For sure, the numerous references to

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transnational challenges foster the impression of regional countries under incessant buffeting by forces that regularly elude states’ attempts to control them, with severe ramifications for the integrity of national sovereignty.16 On the other hand, despite this concession, the statist ontology remains intact, not least when the policy effect of NTS discourse is to legitimise the expansion of the state’s security agenda to accommodate a broader gamut of threats and extension of its purview over more areas (Kolodziej 1992; Walt 1991) – limited, to be sure, by the state’s capacity and political will to do so. As Doty (1997: 175) has reminded us, while the blurring of national boundaries wrought by transnational forces clearly poses problems for notions of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, the extent of their subversion is limited so long as people maintain an ontological commitment to the state and to the existential reality of national borders and boundaries. Fidelity to the state – despite seemingly damning exposés about states as failed/failing, states being quartered by secessionist pressures or states pooling their respective sovereignty for some transcendental collective purpose – is therefore preserved.

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Humanising Security: Who’s Responsible? Relative to NTS, human security as a concept has not enjoyed as warm a reception from Asia Pacific governments, for whom the conceptual and policy debate on human security – particularly the Canadians’ emphasis on ‘freedom-from-fear’ considerations as opposed to the more amenable (to many Asians, at least) Japanese focus on ‘freedom-from-want’ concerns17 – evoked residual suspicions over the construct, in the wake of the Asian values debate, as a launch pad for yet another Western ideological assault on Asian political practices and cultural sensibilities (Acharya 2001b; Tadjbakhsh & Chenoy 2007: 123-139). Not unlike their comprehensive security and NTS counterparts, human security proponents advocate a holistic interpretation of security; the UNDP report, for example, identified seven dimensions.18 They call for a new paradigm of security; in his incarnation as a security intellectual and prominent Track 2 voice, Surin Pitsuwan, the security general of ASEAN and member of the UN-sanctioned Commission on Human Security, made this appeal: ‘I am submitting to you this notion that traditional tools with focus on the security of the state are no longer adequate and fully relevant. We need to shift the analysis to the security of the human person, i.e. human security’ (2007). Against the ‘top-down’ approach of traditional conceptions of security – and, for that matter, of comprehensive security and of NTS – human security is understood as a ‘bottom-up’ approach that emphasises people and their well-being. Or, as Dekker and Faber (2008) have it, human security constitutes the domain ‘from

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below in a Hobbesian environment’. According to the much-cited 1994 UNDP study on human development:

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The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of nuclear holocaust. It has been related to nation-states more than people … Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives. For many of them, security symbolised protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards. (UNDP 1994: 22-23) States’ amnesia and neglect of humanitarian privations confronting citizens and populations is unconscionable in the view of human security proponents and should no longer be rationalised away as ‘natural’, using the reason that the Asia Pacific region is ‘Hobbesian’. In short, the humanising of security accentuates the perceived inhumanness of the international system in the treatment of individuals by the system’s most privileged subjectivity, sovereign states. Needless to say, the casting of the security net to cover as many issues and/or sectors as possible, coupled with the drilling down to the level of the individual, has opened the human security concept to criticisms ranging from its perceived conceptual incoherence to a lack of analytical rigour (Khong 2001; Paris 2001). But this has not discouraged regional knowledge networks, including research and advocacy initiatives such as the NTS-Asia consortium, from proactively promoting a human security agenda for Asia Pacific countries. As Sorpong Peou has noted, human security may be a highly contested concept, but it enjoys ‘staying power’ (2009: 1). Human security has furnished regional institutions, governments, civil society organisations and Track 2 actors alike with, if not quite a policy (certainly not a regional policy), then at least a discursive-linguistic context within which to highlight perceived socioeconomic privations caused by economic crises (the 1997 financial crisis, for instance), complex humanitarian crises caused by natural disasters (the 2004 tsunamis or Cyclone Nargis in 2008) and, crucially, the appeal to regional governments to take such challenges and their associated grievances a lot more seriously than they might have hitherto done. At the same time, it is not unusual to encounter alarmist tendencies in Track 2 narratives on human security – allusions to ‘empty rice bowls’ (i.e. the global food ‘crisis’) and ‘coming storms’ (i.e. the region’s dire need for emergency preparedness against natural disasters) are not uncommon (Bannon 2008; Williams & Anthony 2008) – given the role, selfappointed, of some security intellectuals as advocates-cum-activists. As

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in the case of NTS, the extent and depth of cooperation and coordination among regional organisations, national governments and agencies, and civil society actors required to tackle human insecurities are, needless to say, immense. The following conclusion by CSCAP intellectuals on what is needed to contain and mitigate severe humanitarian crises posed by large-scale climate change and related concerns underscores the magnitude of the task facing Asia Pacific societies:

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This includes a review of existing national policies to identify gaps, areas for improvement, and areas where better integration across sectors and scales are required. It also includes enhancing coordination among institutions working at regional, national and local levels, across policy domains, and between the public, private and community sectors. For example, improving food access may require new national strategies, such as stockpiling in times of surplus production, and improved coordination between trade, agricultural and rural development policies. Meeting the humanitarian needs of people displaced by disasters requires planning to coordinate the efforts of local, national and regional agencies working to provide shelter, food and water, and to assist with resettlement. (CSCAP 2010b: 2-3) In advocating ‘whole-of-nation/whole-of-region’ strategies for tackling not only the consequences of humanitarian crises but also their causes, human security proponents are not unaware of the political tensions that could and likely would arise between states and their regional and non-state partners – not least because states would have to collaborate with actors whom they might regard as ‘subversive’ and do so in security spaces states once treated as their exclusive preserve.19 Such concessions are likely to be accompanied by the recognition and acknowledgement of states’ failures as providers and/or protectors of their citizenries. Addressing the NTS-Asia consortium of research communities in 2007, Surin Pitsuwan, highlighting the tension between national and human security, puts the onus for human security squarely on states. He begins with a caveat to those who would humanise security: But that will put you into conflict with those who are jealous of the primary role of the state in all things security. Your contributions toward better accommodation between the two concepts of security in the face of mounting pressure from all the non-traditional threats facing us at present will help us prepare ourselves for the danger and the disruptions that will surely come. And I put my case before you now that failing to deal with these non-

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traditional threats to our security is a failure of states in their primary responsibility. (Pitsuwan 2007, emphasis added) In other words, human security may be ‘from below’ but that should not – must not – put it in opposition with the ‘from above’ if states are to succeed in their ‘primary responsibility’ to establish and ensure human security. States today may no longer be able, on their own strength and by their own devices, to manage the complex challenges that contribute to human insecurity, and they increasingly require the assistance of other states and organisations in multilateral collaborative settings to get the job done (Job & Williams 2009b). Yet, increasingly in human security discourse, the state remains as crucial as ever, more so in its current predicament than before. Arguing that good reasons exist as to why the state’s role in human security is in no way diminished despite the existence of ‘rival’ referent objects for security (i.e. the individual), Barry Buzan makes the following observation:

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States may not be a sufficient condition for individual security, and they may even be the main problem … But they are almost certainly a necessary condition for individual security because without the state it is not clear what other agency is to act on behalf of individuals. Because states hold this position, they can claim their own right of survival over and above that of their individual citizens. (Buzan 2000: 1, 8) However, it is not entirely evident why the state automatically constitutes the ‘necessary condition for individual security’. For Buzan, there are few if any agents that could act on behalf of individuals or, say, the human race, in lieu of the state. Accordingly, ‘individuals or small groups can seldom establish a wider security legitimacy in their own right’ because their attempts to speak security on their own behalf tend to fall on deaf ears; subalterns cannot speak and mermaids remain silent (Hansen 2000; Spivak 1988). ‘Versions of human security that seek to reduce all security to the level of the individual,’ Buzan continues, ‘have somehow to confront the dilemma that bypassing the state takes away what seems to be the necessary agent through which individual security might be achieved’ (2000: 8). Thus understood, while acknowledging that individuals and sub-national groups are legitimate referents of security, he nonetheless insists it is ‘the middle-scale of “limited collectivities”’ that, in his view, has ‘proved the most amenable to securitisation as durable referent objects’ (ibid. 4-5). His readers are therefore left in no doubt that Buzan is in fact making a reference to states. Buzan simply accepts that ‘middle-scale collectivities’ are ultimately reducible to the sovereign state at the expense of other forms of human communities.

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How is it possible that a security concept that prides itself on securitising human beings through humanising security thinking and doing ultimately ends up privileging the state? Through an a priori commitment to a statist ontology despite rhetorical support for other subjectivities, whose relevance is defined in terms of their utility to states in the shared service to their societies’ well-being. Whether one conceives of the state’s role as the overarching institution, lead agency or merely a policy coordination centre in that endeavour, it remains the prism through which the contributions of other subjectivities are framed and ultimately judged. ‘My argument in this paper is from this international perspective’, Buzan clarifies, ‘and it is within that frame that I will try to understand what “human security” might mean’ (ibid. 3; emphasis added). That is, his starting point – his categories, presuppositions and terms of reference – at the ‘middle-scale’ influences what he would see and the conclusions at which he would arrive.20 As William Tow has argued, ‘although securitisation claims to prioritise society as its key referent, its actual focus on the state tends to belie the claim and to render it nothing more than national security – realism in different trappings’ (2000: 11). That said, Buzan’s focus on the international dimension, as we have seen, is not only a realist orientation but also a liberal – particularly neo-liberal – one, since the neo-liberal institutional agenda is essentially and narrowly circumscribed owing to its fealty to a levels-ofanalysis approach and, ultimately, a metaphysical commitment to the state.21 In a sense, the state constitutes the effective point of convergence between the ‘middle-scaling’ advocated by Buzan on the one hand and, as we saw earlier, the ‘better accommodation’ between national and human security urged by Pitsuwan on the other.

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From ‘Right’ to ‘Responsibility’: Re-visioning Sovereignty? The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) and ‘protection of civilians’ (POC) are notions that, according to the Outcome document of the UN World Summit 2005, concern the protection of populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity (UN 2005). The R2P principle was reaffirmed subsequently by the UN Security Council in 2006 (UN 2006). Despite their unanimous adoption of the R2P principle at the 2005 World Summit, Asia Pacific countries’ reception of the principle has been lukewarm (Bellamy & Beeson 2010; Tan, S.S. 2011b). The region’s ambivalence is understandable. According to a CSCAP report on the R2P, paragraphs 138 and 139 of the Outcome document reinterpret the R2P in ways more robust than previous conceptions have allowed, for the following reasons (CSCAP 2010a: 6-7).22 First, by adopting a ‘narrow but deep’ approach on four specific ‘crimes’ (genocide, war, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity), the

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document excludes other humanitarian concerns such as natural disasters – concerns on which regional states, as the earlier discussion on NTS showed, have arguably placed more attention and to which they have devoted more resources. Second, it commits its signatories to the prevention of those four crimes. In Southeast Asia at least, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) seems an appropriate regional mechanism to monitor and mobilise regional efforts at implementing the R2P. That said, the terms of reference (TOR) of the AICHR, despite its aspiration (articulated in article 4.1) to ‘develop strategies for the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms’ in Southeast Asia, overwhelmingly focuses on promotion rather than protection, while the AICHR itself has neither the capacity for evaluation, enforcement nor early warning (Drummond 2011: 6). Third, whereas previous articulations spoke of the obligation of states to protect their ‘citizens’, the document extends that obligation to ‘populations’, that is, all peoples residing within a state’s territory – a tall order for most Asia Pacific states, some of whom have not only failed to protect their people(s) but actively persecute and violate them. Fourth, the document stresses the need for enhanced cooperation between the UN and regional mechanisms in building states’ capacities to prevent and protect, and the resort to the full range of tools available under chapters VI, VII and VIII of the UN Charter, with the provision that these activities must fall clearly within the parameters of what is permitted under the Charter. It is this final point – the expectation to employ the full range of ‘weapons’ at the states’ disposal – at which most Asia Pacific countries balk, out of concern for the political and security ramifications this could have on state sovereignty and non-interference. For the same reason, when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released his 2009 report on ‘Implementing the Responsibility to Protect’, which introduces the three non-sequential pillars – (1) protective responsibilities of states, (2) international assistance and capacity building, and (3) timely and decisive response, including military action (UN 2009) – it was the third pillar that unsurprisingly proved the hardest for many if not most Asia Pacific states to accept. Regional rejoinders to the R2P vary, of which at least two are especially noteworthy. The first readily accepts the UN’s definition, aims, functions and modalities with regards to the R2P and argues for enhanced regional frameworks and conventions that facilitate the progress of Asia Pacific states towards full implementation of the R2P in their respective security policies. To that end, the CSCAP study group on R2P has furnished a list of recommended policy responses that the ARF could consider adopting in order to help its member states assume, in time, the responsibility to protect – including, arguably, the (for Asia Pacific states problematic) third pillar of timely and decisive action

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(CSCAP 2011). At the same time, while regional countries are presumably gearing themselves up to implement the responsibility to protect, security intellectuals have argued that regional initiatives such as the promotion of human rights via the AICHR and the strengthening of regional capacities for managing natural disasters and humanitarian crises via the ADMM+8 are proof positive that regional governments, their limitations and mutual distrust notwithstanding, are in fact taking their obligations in human rights promotion and disaster-cum-crisis management fairly seriously (Tan, S.S. 2011b).23 A second rejoinder to the R2P differs markedly from the first in that knowledge networks other than the CSCAP have urged for the revision of the R2P principle to include the provision of humanitarian relief as well as protection. Reminiscent of the older preference among some for widening the human security concept and agenda, R2P revisionists argue that if the ultimate aim of the R2P is precisely the protection and promotion of human security, then there ought to be serious consideration for different kinds of human security threats, not least those caused by state neglect in times of natural disasters (Caballero-Anthony & Chng 2009; Haacke 2009). At the same time, this enlarged understanding was aimed at reconciling the UN’s narrow interpretation of the R2P and one arguably more attuned to the political context of the Asia Pacific.24 Together, the regional debate on and institutional responses to the R2P form an interesting counterpoint to abjection representations that portray the Asia Pacific as an inhuman and inhumane region. The effort by knowledge networks to reinterpret state sovereignty from its longstanding conception as a principally rights-based principle to one that is equally responsibilities-based carries with it not insignificant consequences for sovereignty and non-intervention/non-interference. But as we have seen in the cases of the NTS and human security discourses, the ways in which security intellectuals have been deliberating the R2P furnish opportunities to redefine and revise the identity, remit and roles of the state, but to do so without undermining the long-held notions of state sovereignty and subjectivity. If the region has become (or is becoming) more human and humane in terms of its treatment of peoples and populations, it is because states are assuming new identities and missions as responsible protectors and providers and, as a consequence, have become (or are becoming) more human and humane themselves. (En)Countering Terrorism: Abjection and Agency at the ‘Second Front’ This discussion is not complete without a look at the counterterrorism discourse and efforts in the Asia Pacific. The Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ has been described as constituting not only a set of

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policies but also ‘a powerful security narrative that informed the way that threat was understood and constructed post-9/11’ – with crucial security implications for the Southeast Asia region (Mustapha 2011). Following the arrest in Singapore of members of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a group that reportedly has ties to Al-Qaeda, the Bali bomb attacks that took place in October 2002 and the early success of the Americans’ anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan, various Westernbased security intellectuals readily christened Southeast Asia as the ‘second front’ in the GWOT (Ellings & Friedberg 2002: 4).25 To be sure, the notion that the GWOT has multiple fronts implies the prospect of multiple ‘enemies’; at the same time, an indirect ancillary of the second front discourse has been the persistent insistence by some counterterrorism ‘experts’ that many, if not most, local militant groups in Southeast Asia are ‘affiliates’ and ‘franchises’ of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network (Abuza 2002; Jones, Smith & Weeding 2003). The combined effect of these disparate threads – Southeast Asia as the second front, Southeast Asian Islamic groups as mere appendages of ‘AlQaeda Central’ (Sude 2010), and the apparent weak attempts by ASEAN countries at bringing about effective counterterrorism cooperation26 – has contributed to the image of Southeast Asia as abject and subaltern, whose governments are relatively ineffectual in dealing with a major threat and whose indigenous expressions of militant Islam exist merely to provide local colour or flavour to a global corporate-like enterprise (Gunaratna 2002; Tan & Ramakrishna 2002).27 According to Zachary Abuza, Southeast Asia possesses all the requisites by which Al-Qaeda has conceivably grafted its own network onto pre-existing Islamic movements and found common cause with them, such as JI, the Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), among others: the region proffers ‘countries of convenience’ which became AlQaeda’s ‘back office of operations’ for the wholesale manufacture of jihadis and is host to a growing Islamic fundamentalism, Wahhabism and Deobandism (Abuza 2003: 135-137). Regional and country specialists have strongly rebutted some of these claims, which they regard as poorly substantiated, especially the inference that local insurgencies in Indonesia, southern Philippines and southern Thailand, or specific groups in Malaysia are serving as fronts for Al-Qaeda (Byman 2003; Collier 2006; Connors 2006; Huxley 2004; Liow 2006; Pongsudhirak 2006). For the most part, such rebuttals neither contend that Al-Qaeda has no presence whatsoever in the region nor do they insist that local militant groups, or some of them at least, harbour no malevolent aims. But what they take issue with is the readiness of some counterterrorism analysts to resort to a paradigmatic approach,28 more often than not predicated on the assumption of an ostensibly omnipresent AlQaeda, and/or a ‘top-down’ and ‘kinetic’ (force-dominant) strategy that

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disregards legitimate socio-cultural, economic or political grievances that ethno-religious minorities might have. In the first instance of an oversubscribed paradigm of convenience, knowledge communities engaging in counterterrorism research (and, presumably, advocacy activities as well) are more often seen as highly ideological rather than objective in their approach. As Greg Sheridan, a prominent journalist and pundit, has opined, ‘The strategic community has failed because of its continued paradigm paralysis, its chronic paradigm paralysis, its chronic inability to regard terrorism as a serious strategic issue’ (2007). By their taking comfort in ‘the chummy common room embrace of dead paradigms’, Sheridan warns that think tanks and academic institutions that ‘do’ counterterrorism in fact do a huge disservice to their nations. A related criticism takes umbrage with counterterrorism discourses that are predominantly self-referential – so-called ‘experts’ circulating each other’s opinions – rather than based on painstaking empirical research or ground experiences (Crelinsten 1998; De Graaf 2011; Hamilton-Hart 2005). As a consequence, they construct existential threats that may have little to no material or indeed, if you will, corporeal basis (Liow & Pathan 2010; Tan 2003). Nor is Al-Qaeda the only entity to be accorded mythic status. At the domestic level, similar propensities to confuse and conflate are equally endemic. For example, two analysts have taken umbrage with the widespread portrayals, by official sources and the media, of the ‘Abu Sayyaf’ in the Philippines as a militant Islamic ‘group or organisation’ responsible for most atrocities in the southwest of the country. To label the Abu Sayyaf using organisational terminology, they argue, is irreconcilable with the many available descriptions of the armed groups collectively referred to by that name (Ugarte & Turner 2011: 397). In the second instance of the overemphasis on a kinetic approach, some knowledge communities have been taken to task by critics not only for their ostensibly poor scholarship but also for their implicit roles in advocacy regarding the use of force. For example, while the Thai authorities during the premiership of Thaksin Shinawatra reportedly eschewed portraying the Malay-Muslim insurgency in Thailand’s southern provinces as Al-Qaeda-led, their reliance on a strategy of force and intimidation, informed by a national security culture that treats pluralism as a threat and the use of dubious surveillance policies and tactics – resulting in the Krue Se Mosque massacre in July 2004 – likely posed the most significant obstacle to pacifying the restive south (Liow 2007). That said, the work of a Singapore-based team of terrorism analysts – christened the ‘Singapore School’29 – in southern Thailand has come under fire from critics, who dismiss it as an exercise in ‘terror-mongering’, woefully replete with ‘significant factual and interpretive errors’ (Connors 2006: 175; Pongsudhirak 2006).30

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Mindful of that hotly contested debate, various CSCAP policy recommendations have argued that a holistic and integrated approach combining contributions from state and civil society – with human security as its guiding principle and long-term aim – should logically drive the counterterrorism enterprise in the Asia Pacific: A fundamental principle of a credible and sustainable international response to both terrorism and transnational crime will rely on observing principles of human security whilst upholding the rule of law. Human security advocates a holistic state and civil society approach that targets the actual problem, crisis, or threat rather than the rhetoric of the dilemma. An appropriate response, in keeping with a human security perspective, may involve the military, may even involve ‘war’, but will be most mindful of the long term security and well-being of citizens and broader communities. (CSCAP 2003: 2)

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The campaign against international terrorism entails both shortterm political-military measures as well as long-term politicaleconomic-social solutions. It must be a sustained effort aimed at accomplishing enduring results. There should be no let [sic] or complacency … The campaign must be a comprehensive one, employing all relevant instruments and effective measures. These should be both preventive and remedial in nature, and encompass efforts in the political, socio-economic and security spheres. Ultimately, the terrorists must be defeated in the ideological struggle. Governments and civil society both have an obligation to engage in this contest of ideas. (CSCAP 2005: 2) These and other similar attempts have been made by members of regional knowledge communities to call attention to flaws – very serious ones, in some cases – in ostensibly ‘authoritative’ accounts by their fellow security intellectuals and to advocate holistic strategies that address the ‘root causes’ of militancy (socioeconomic deprivations, ideological drivers and the like), accommodate legitimate political interests of hitherto disenfranchised communities, but without sacrificing the use of force where appropriate. However, the shared proclivity toward ideological absolutism in militant discourses as well as state-sanctioned and expert-supported counterterrorism discourses – with potentially devastating consequences for the democratic space of civil society – cannot be discounted (Acharya 2004b; Bendle 2006). Much as we have seen in this book how statist discourses persist in treating the state in essentialist and reified ways, so too the ‘colliding thought-worlds’ of the sacred and the secular (Booth & Dunne 2002: 1), of militant Islamism and the

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equally militant worldly states and regimes that govern them, seem hell-bent on presupposing opposing idealised subjectivities that seek to subdue each other (Chatterjee 1987: 17).

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Conclusion: Domesticating Security, Sovereignty and Subjectivity Arguably, contemporary Asia Pacific security discourses on issues such as non-traditional security, human security, the responsibility to protect and counterterrorism have, in their limited ways, served as a kind of counter-narrative to the abjection thesis. At the very least, they have complicated the predilection of abjection narratives towards one-dimensionality. That said, for all their theoretical promise, these have in practice remained ultimately centred on the state. As Edward Said once noted, ‘the readiest account of place’ for many even from colonial times has been ‘the idea of the nation, of a national-cultural community as a sovereign entity and place set against other places’ (1982: 8). This has certainly been the case with the post-Cold War Asia Pacific, despite the host of transnational flows and movements that affect populations and the environs and that, in many instances, make a mockery of state sovereignty. What this implies about the practice of securitisation is essentially the domesticating/depoliticising, through ‘technicalisation’,31 of a field, an event, a person or a community as a way of securing it from the potentially disturbing if not devastating effects of critical questioning.32 This is not to imply that all Track 2 research and advocacy is thereby driven by rationalism-positivism and, more crucially, held accountable to its exacting standards.33 As noted, Track 2 contributions have been roundly criticised, not unfairly, for their remarkable lack of sensitivity to formal paradigms-based analysis – a common ‘shortcoming’ of policy analysis in the view of theoretically minded international relations specialists. That said, the pervasive exercise of ‘epistemic realism’ – the belief that the social world comprises subjects and objects the existence of which is independent of ideas or beliefs about them (Campbell 1998: 4) – in Track 2 narratives, as the textual analyses conducted in this book have shown, mirrors a primitive and tacit positivist-like logic and dynamic not unlike its formal and more sophisticated counterpart in the social sciences. It is this subconscious positivism that arguably facilitates and legitimises the domesticating/de-politicising moves in regional discourses on NTS, human security, R2P and counterterrorism. Seen as such, a securitised discourse serves to depoliticise the dimension/domain/being in question – the environment, the economy, the human, the population ostensibly under threat, the militant – through foreclosing critical reflection that may subvert and undermine the incessant

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exercise of affirming and sustaining the discursive boundaries that render possible a naturalised and particular state of affairs – a self-evident world of sovereign subjectivities in which the state is preeminent. The readiness and vigilance of intellectuals of statecraft to corral and curb critical reflection and hold it in conformity and obeisance to raison d’état seems to stand at odds with the aim of humanising the Asia Pacific. Nor have their contributions challenged, much less undermined, the persistent essentialism of conventional treatments of sovereignty and subjectivity in the Asia Pacific security discourse.

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7 Representing the ‘Authority’ of Knowledge Networks

This study would not be complete if we did not revisit the question of modern political ‘non-state’ subjectivity and the attendant conceptual problems of such a perspective – a concern that returns us to the issue (considered in the first chapter) of knowledge brokers and entrepreneurs as epistemic agents. Rather than the problematic subjectivity of the sovereign state, we retrain the spotlight in this chapter on the security studies communities that socially construct the world of Asia Pacific security but whose subjectivity – as ‘rational’ and ‘legitimate’ interpreters and articulators of that same world ‘summoned’ to help policymakers make sense, assess and navigate the ‘unfamiliar terrain’ of the post-Cold War Asia Pacific – is also a construction. In other words, the presupposition of epistemic agents as exogenous to history and practice, even as modernity acknowledges their historicity, is equally suspect – a concern which returns us to the issue (considered in the second chapter) of whether constructivist approaches to Asia Pacific security truly focus on process and practice as they claim to. In the preceding chapters, we have seen how Asia Pacific states are not the pre-established, self-evident entities that regional security discourses presume them to be. Instead, they are socially constituted effects produced via the interpretive and linguistic practices of individuals and institutions, not least the coterie of security intellectuals and practitioners who make up the region’s knowledge networks. By focusing on the dialogical activities of these communities and national security establishments throughout the Asia Pacific, as I have sought to do in the preceding chapters, the analytical attention placed on these transnational communities and their members may, quite understandably, foster the impression that the argument being advanced here is that such epistemic agents constitute an unproblematic collective subject – a singular subject, more often than not – and blessed as autonomous origins of meaning and as ‘irreducible agents of history’s making’ (Ashley 1988: 245). However, as we saw earlier, simply to aver that the historical and contemporary international structure of given sovereign states is but an effect that is always in the process of being constructed in history and through the representational practices of these ‘communities of practice’ (Adler 2005: 15) – only to leave things at that – is, at best,

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unsatisfactory and, at worst, smacks of ‘the rankest subjectivism’ (Fish 1980: 11). To view the world of Asia Pacific security in this fashion is to disregard the equally problematic subjectivity of knowledge networks themselves by treating them as instrumental agents armed with pregiven identities and interests. That is, as ‘speaking subjects’, ASEANISIS, CSCAP and PECC policy intellectuals, among others, generally deliberate and write as if their own subjectivity – and indeed the collective subjectivity of Track 2, despite the disparate opinions that exist among second-trackers – is in no need of account. In other words, there is clearly something more to the notion of knowledge networks’ representations about the world of Asia Pacific security to their audiences, for in so doing these communities, in a manner of speaking, also ‘represent themselves to themselves’ (Said 1994: xv). This point is better explained by way of an illustration. Consider, for instance, the ongoing debate over whether or not a regional community truly exists in the Asia Pacific region. On the one hand, there are the growing assertions among security intellectuals of an ‘emerging civil society in the Asia Pacific community’ given the growing transversal linkages among non-governmental groups, research centres, policy communities and philanthropic organisations throughout the region (Yamamoto 1995). For former CSCAP co-chair Nobuo Matsunaga (1996: 1), there is ‘the growing sense of community in the Asia Pacific region’, thanks to the formation of formal mechanisms such as the APEC and ARF (and, it might be inferred, the second-track network to which he is affiliated). Elsewhere the former Australian foreign minister and current head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), Gareth Evans, has insisted that the Asia Pacific is ‘beginning to see the development of a consciousness of community, with a small “c”, a sense of an Asia Pacific community’, whereas Singapore’s envoy-at-large Tommy Koh (1997/8) has argued that the concept of an Asia Pacific community is no myth but a reality. Moreover, as we saw earlier, there are the ubiquitous claims at the intergovernmental level to the effect of the advent of a Southeast Asian community or ‘one Southeast Asia’ (Chin 1997), or more recently the East Asian Community. On a more recent note, a noted scholar of the region has sought to ground a ‘one Southeast Asia’ argument in the concept of mandalas – concentric zones of influence – which presupposes a pre-colonial form of regionalism (Acharya 2000, 2001, 2011). On the other hand, there are claims to the contrary that no true community exists in Southeast Asia, much less in the Asia Pacific, due to the absence of common values and interlocking histories, and the immense difficulty of coping with a ‘still fluid Pacific dynamism’ that evidently took a turn for the worst when a financial meltdown hit the region in 1997 (Inoguchi 1980; Simon 1996). To make matters worse, the economic crisis fuelled interstate tensions between the

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ASEAN members, which, coupled with too rapid an expansion in the grouping’s membership, led to enervated regional leadership (Tan 2000). The bone of contention here is evidently over the alleged presence or absence of community in the Asia Pacific. In the terms of theoretical analysis in the main, what common interests or convergent norms, if any, exist among sovereign political communities in the region so as to provide the basis for the claim that no community truly exists in the Asia Pacific beyond the realm of rhetoric? As I have sought to show, which of the above two assessments better represents contemporary international realities in Asia Pacific should not really be a question germane to the concerns of constructivists, particularly if they are serious in pursuing the ramifications of constructivist logic. What is of interest are the practices that make possible the background conditions and un-stated assumptions that both the above counter-claims appear to share and surely do not question. What possibility is there for considering that a form of regional community conceivably and arguably exists, but in the interpretive attitudes and practical dispositions held and circulated by knowledge networks and the national security establishments which the former variously support and at times critique – representing practices that constitute and instantiate a regional reality that privileges the sovereign state (Ashley 1987a)?

Deconstructing the Imagined Community

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To an extent all I’m suggesting is that one turn back on history as a production of various kinds of narratives, and that one then not offer the idea that there will be an objective analysis which will then be an end of narrativisation, because one is also caught within narrating oneself. (Spivak 1990: 34, emphasis added) Unlike their rationalist counterparts, constructivists who focus on discursive or textual practices want to insist that foremost among the assumptions regarding given subjects and objects – indeed, amid the disagreements over ‘community’ – is the equally untenable supposition that a community of interpreters already exists to provide the requisite interpretive standards and norms against and by which the motives and behaviours of sovereign states and other local and international subjects, not least regional knowledge networks, are to be assessed, judged, praised, feted or conversely criticised, condemned, possibly even punished. Indeed, this would only serve to draw us into long endless debates regarding who or what constructs the constructor and so forth. As Campbell has noted, ‘The state is not the author of “man” and “man” is not the author of the state. Neither agency nor structure is prior or

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determinant. “Man” and the state are simultaneously constituted; each is constitutive of the other and cannot be without the other’ (1998: 5657). In the same fashion, we can say that knowledge networks and the state are simultaneously constructed in the way Campbell has postulated about ‘man’ and state. As proposed earlier, a way towards a non-essentialist, non-rationalist version of Asia Pacific constructivism must necessarily account for how constructors construct themselves – how they are also caught within narrating themselves, à la Spivak – even as they construct the world. The following observation by Cynthia Weber has already been mentioned in this study, but it bears repeating here. On the one hand, state practices encounter interpretive standards that are always already in place before practices occur, and these standards emanate from an already existing interpretive community. On the other, knowledge (or, in Weber’s case, interpretive) communities appear to exist prior to state practices because in explaining commonly held dispositions and shared values, the a priori assumption of both sovereign states and knowledge networks must first be made. According to Weber, few analysts bother to ask ‘how interpretive communities can be said to exist before interests converge’ (1995: 4-5). The same observation can be made of intellectuals in security studies communities throughout the Asia Pacific. In part constrained by the shared interpretive disposition to privilege the state, their security discourses are therefore less inclined to accept as legitimate or rational interpretations that do not respect the imagery of bounded and boundable state-centric communities. Hence, although there could have been, as Yamamoto (1995: xii) has indicated, ‘a distinct development of civil society, i.e. noneconomic and non-governmental interactions, in the [Asia Pacific] region in recent years’, derogators of the community notion have little difficulty accepting Yamamoto’s contention of emerging civil society while, at the same time, rejecting the claim that the Asia Pacific consists of a real community for the very reason that the interpretive standards or norms against which community must be measured ultimately relegates other dimensions of transversal interactions to interstate relations. But as we have seen, the state is an effect born of knowledgeable practices of statecraft that go into its ongoing constitution – practices mobilised and circulated in part through the regional dialogical activities of security intellectuals. Hence, for the rationalist constructivist enamoured by the modern belief (beginning at least with Kant) in the transcendental subject, she could either, as a realist, hold to her conviction in the sanctity of the state as an ontological priority and firstorder causal agent or, as a liberal, incorporate non-state actors without sacrificing the ‘hardcore’ assumption of the state’s significance to international relations theory and practice. Such a belief could also lead

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one to locate within the Track 2 networks and their users that transcendental, albeit collective, subject. In other words, the ASEAN-ISIS and the CSCAP, according to this logic, are identified as pre-existing knowledge networks that not only generate the interpretive standards and norms against which the motives and actions of states are to be measured, but also discursively construct their very identities and interests. However, neither the source of meaning nor social register of value can conceivably be located in knowledgeable communities whose very own subjectivity is in question and under construction via the presupposition, in discourse, of ontologically prior interpretive standards put forth by still ontologically prior interpretive communities. In short, the notion of ‘non-state’ epistemic agents as pre-established subjects granted the privilege to constitute the state in a position outside of history is troubling. The assertion that ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP socially construct the world of Asia Pacific security, or PECC the world of Asia Pacific economy, can easily fall within the same problematique identified in this study. As such, while the hierarchy of state over non-state has been reversed in favour of the non-state – Track 2 agents constitute and reconstitute the state via statecraft – the new hierarchy must subsequently be displaced in order to ‘escape’ the ultimate determinacy of a groundable causation.1 To adopt such a position is therefore to accept the undecidability among the opposing explanatory propositions adduced, be it the regional structure, multilateral norms, the state or knowledge networks.2 In contrast, my emphasis has to be on representational practices that constitute, simultaneously, the state and interpretive communities participating in ‘state-making’ discourses. To this end, at least two noteworthy concerns – the tendencies towards self-productive/self-promotional performances (what I shall call self-formation), on the one hand, and self-surveillance/self-regulatory actions (or self-government) on the other deserve attention. A qualification is in order: by self-formation and self-government I do not mean that legitimisation is thereby always self-referential. Endorsements clearly come from the ‘other’ as well. For example, the diplomatic contributions of the ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP to regional security cooperation have received official acknowledgement in the form of joint communiqués issued by the foreign ministers of ASEAN during their annual Ministerial Meetings (AMM) in July 1993 and July 1995. In the 1993 communiqué, the ministers ‘commended the efforts of the [ASEAN-ISIS] to explore and develop ideas for promoting and enhancing security cooperation’ among ASEAN members and, by extension, the growing Asia Pacific-wide security dialogue (ASEAN 1993). The 1995 communiqué proved even more candid in its appraisal of the contributions of the ASEAN-ISIS (and the CSCAP) to diplomacy:

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Foreign Ministers noted with satisfaction the closer cooperative relations between ASEAN and non-governmental bodies such as the ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS) and the Council for Security and Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP). They also noted that these bodies had continued to provide ASEAN with useful ideas and proposals with regard to political and security cooperation in the region. (ASEAN 1995) But as we shall see later, such endorsements ‘from above’ are likely not possible if knowledge networks’ interpretations and recommendations do not comport with already inscribed boundaries within regional discourse which affirm not only states but also non-state subjects who themselves are intimately involved in that discourse. In this respect, the self-formative and self-governing performances of knowledge networks are not to be dissociated from the circularity of discourse.

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Self-Formation Foucault once intimated that he felt ‘obliged’, as it were, ‘to study the games of truth in the relationship of self with self and the forming of oneself as a subject’ (1990: 6). Likewise, it might be said that within the knowledge claims that Track 2 epistemic brokers make about various aspects of Asia Pacific security can be found the kinds of practices that form not only state identities but those of Track 2 agents themselves. How, then, do Asia Pacific knowledge networks come to know themselves as subjects? How have they been inscribed and empowered as speaking subjects, legitimated their existence, and privileged their role – indeed, inscribed as a collective subject and thus as a singularity – as the accepted articulators and interpreters of Asia Pacific security? The following widely held view of the Track 2 process is a good place to begin: ‘Multilateral security dialogues [in the Asia Pacific region] no longer need to be legitimated at either the non-governmental or governmental level; but they do need to produce more concrete results’ (Evans 1994a: 128). The assertion that the process no longer requires legitimisation is not without basis, as the ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP and PECC presently enjoy formal recognition from the first-track regional institutions they support, including ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the APEC or the ASEAN Plus Three or the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus Eight. However, as a consequence of the regional economic crisis of 1997-98, which saw hard-hit East Asian governments embroiled in managing (barely in some cases) their own houses, Track 2 security proposals fell quickly on deaf ears as warnings about potential

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region-wide retreats toward military nationalism and internal navelgazing abounded.3 Understandably, these developments led many to conclude that the empowerment and legitimisation of regional knowledge networks find their grounds in the readiness of states to acknowledge their unofficial contributions and, in doing so, provide them with, so to speak, a raison d’être. Moreover, as critics of ASEAN were quick to point out, the institution itself – and, presumably, some member nations too, given that some of the harder-hit economies came close to becoming failed states – was less ‘imagined (security) community’ as envisioned by Acharya (2001a) than the ‘imitation community’ of Jones and Smith (2002a). I have already argued that the dismissal of Track 2 discourse as irrelevant by some critics possibly reflects their liberal humanist ethos (Jones & Smith 2001b: 58). More importantly, their premature dismissal of second-track forums as irrelevant talk shops – relevance being measured, we may surmise, by the production of ‘more concrete results’ (Evans 1994a: 128) – misses out on a fundamental ‘truth’: that all nations and societies, as imagined communities – social totalities that are never quite present, that invariably contain ‘traces of the outside within’, and that are never more than an effect of the practices by which fears and dangers are inscribed (Ashley 1989: 304) – are, in a sense, imitation communities that incessantly require constituting, buttressing and reinforcing. As has also been suggested, quite possibly the most acute observation on this persistent and unremitting ‘purpose’ of statecraft in the Asia Pacific context – states are what states make of them – was rendered not by constructivists but by a realist scholar whose remarks, I propose, can also be understood in terms of the self-formative and boundary-producing activity of statecraft. The following observation on ASEAN bears repeating: ‘It is well understood that conservation cannot be achieved by standing still … Nonetheless, regional order in the practical sense for ASEAN will depend on adequate attention being paid to the commonplace, which requires special attention because it is commonplace and, therefore, in danger of being taken for granted’ (Leifer 1987: 21). Thus understood, the conservation of the commonplace refers to the constant remaking of the ideational, institutional and ideological boundaries that hold up the purported ontological integrity and primacy of states and, by extension, the state system. It is the reaffirming and sustaining of the limits of state-centric discourse by which political communities can be imagined as and invested with sovereign qualities (Tan 2005a: 83). Yet it is precisely through this sort of commonplace conservation that knowledge networks, equally imagined into existence as collective subjects, are constructed; ‘Track 2 is what Track 2 makes of it’, as it were. Hence, whenever the ostensible successes of the second track are trumpeted or its failures decried (Hernandez 1994; Katsumata

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2003b; Kraft 2000b; Simon 2002), or whenever well-intentioned appeals to ‘bridge the divide’ between Tracks 1 and 2 are made (McGann 2005: 3; George 1993), the fundamental effect of these cumulative utterances is that out of such practices ‘emerges’ the subjectivity known as ‘Track 2’, endowed with certain agential prerogatives. In this regard, discursive utterances that refer to boundaries as being ‘bridged’ or ‘blurred’ or ‘transgressed’ ironically ensure, by their ontological commitment to subjectivity as essentially given, that the notion that boundaries exist ultimately remains intact and given rather than as contingent effects of always-in-process practices (Doty 1996: 175). Again, my intention here is not to deny any prior materiality – ‘the material substrate of agency’, so-called, that remains ‘once the constitutive properties of the self are stripped away’ (Campbell 1998: 220) – to the region’s security studies communities and the personnel that staff those agencies. Moreover, nowhere does my contention that the Track 2 subject ‘emerges’ from regional security discourse insist that discourse ‘originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes’. Rather, I simply make the point that there can be no reference to a ‘pure body’ – be it ‘Track 2’, ‘CSCAP’ or ‘ASEAN-ISIS’ – which is not at the same instance ‘a further formation of that body’ (Butler 1993: 10).

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Self-Governance Perpetual surveillance is at the heart of disciplinary power. But surveillance involves much more than the crude observation afforded by a guard in a central watchtower. It consists of a complex set of simple instruments … [These] include hierarchical observation, normalising judgement, and the examination. These are the principal disciplinary mechanisms for the political objectification and subjection of individuals. Modern disciplinary society is a society of the gaze. (Clifford 2001: 48) What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: ‘Is it a science’? Which speaking, discoursing subjects – which subjects of experience and knowledge – do you then want to ‘diminish’ when you say: ‘I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? (Gordon 1980: 85) Self-appointed or otherwise, Track 2 communities and/or networks act as the gatekeepers of the Asia Pacific security discourse and have been

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known to marginalise certain nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and advocacy groups whose interests are perceived as running counter to theirs. This is anecdotally illustrated by separate private communications in which two prominent Track 2 participants intimated to this author their concerns over the potential widening of the current ambit of regional security discourse to include other voices: special interest groups, social movements and NGOs emphasising either civil liberties and human rights or the environment, to name but the two most common topics long considered taboo by ASEAN policymakers. The option of including certain NGOs, it was highlighted, had been debated by the ASEAN-ISIS and found unacceptable out of concern that the ‘hardearned legitimacy’ achieved by the former as well as its agenda might be severely compromised.4 In both cases, the reason summoned to explain the ‘temporary’ deferral of otherwise legitimate concerns was their alleged irrelevance to regional security matters – irrelevant in large part due to worries that these issues would complicate if not impede existing Track 2 efforts to influence policy. In other words, by all means let ‘a hundred flowers bloom’ (à la Mao), so long as they belong to the same species – a discourse that continues to privilege the provincial concerns of security (notwithstanding efforts at conceptual redefinition or enhancement) which, in turn, privilege the state. In so doing, knowledge networks, far from being open-ended receptacles or clearinghouses for the objective building and accumulation of security knowledge, engage, knowingly or otherwise, in acts of surveillance and regulation which accomplish two things: either to exclude ideas, individuals or institutions deemed too radical or subversive, or to domesticate those deemed germane to its aims. Thus understood, surveillance is performed, albeit in ways that hide its coerciveness, for example, in polite reminders and remonstrations about the need for ‘policy-relevant’ contributions. The following passage highlights one way by which second-track communities decide which social beings deserve recognition and which do not: If the theorist wants to represent the state as a rational identity under the sign of ‘sovereignty’, then he must pick up his pen and inscribe its boundaries as absolute and fixed independent of practice, and with this stroke, he must say that the predicament just outlined addresses what is not a political problem but a technical problem. This predicament, he must say, is a problem that emerges only because some non-state actors … hold to false or illusionary interpretations of the true state boundaries that the theorist, in his majesty, already knows and has already inscribed. Those non-state actors whose interpretations comport with already inscribed boundaries of the state might be counted as

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rational agents whose understandings of political life are to be taken seriously in theoretical discourse. Those non-state actors who hold to discrepant and hence ‘illusionary’ interpretations, he must say, are not really rational sovereign beings whose interpretations must be listened to, given credence, and reconciled in the domestic political discourse that the theorist, professing the uniquely sovereign voice of the state, is prepared to take seriously in his representations. (Ashley 1988: 249-250) Of course, not every member of Track 2 is a theorist, and even then most theorists participating in Track 2 dialogues would know better than to include theory in their contributions.5 That said, the modalities of ‘perpetual surveillance’ – hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and examination – also operate in implicit ways in second-track activities, helping thereby to affirm and sustain already inscribed, statecentric boundaries that allow for and legitimise settlements as to what counts as rational and what does not. Thus understood, one can surmise that knowledge networks are drawn in discourse as legitimate and rational Track 2 actors whose articulations of Asia Pacific security are taken seriously for two principal reasons. First, the notion that these communities are considered rational nonstate actors that regional security discourse can properly acknowledge precisely because their interpretations, as ‘boundary-producing political performances’ (Ashley 1987b), are intrinsic to that process of inscribing (always tenuously so) and granting ontological priority to sovereign states before non-state (certainly lesser or inferior) subjects. At the same instance, the second more basic move of constructing the state and, simultaneously, concealing the traces of that construction is a performance that must necessarily evade acknowledgement by the intellectuals and practitioners of statecraft. Second, non-state actors such as the interpretive communities of interest here are legitimated and endorsed by state elites because the so-called ‘serious’ questions of Asia Pacific security they raise and the ‘out-of-the-box’ answers they proffer tend to ‘comport with the already inscribed boundaries of the state’, so to speak. Importantly, the claim here is that not all or most security intellectuals are realists, if by this we mean robust commitment to the theories and methods of political realism. Whether they orient themselves theoretically to realism, liberalism, constructivism or another objectivist/positivist-inspired ‘ism’, the point here is simply that their epistemological and ideological commitments, despite significant differences and competing interest for alternative forms of collective existence, ultimately encourage a shared adherence to the state as political subject par excellence.

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Track 2 Discourse: Revolution or Re-incitement? Against this backdrop, do the expansion of the regional security discourse and the proliferation of security ideas in the Asia Pacific since the end of the Cold War truly constitute a revolutionary shift away from traditional concerns, or is this merely what Foucault has called ‘an incitement to discourse’ (1978: 34): while inviting greater participation, the discursive ‘expansion’ also imposes upon its new members a regime of self-governance (as well as self-formation)? For example, the argument can be made that the Track 2 intellectual and policy agenda has co-opted a wide array of ‘post-Cold War challenges’ (economic, environmental, social, cultural, technical and military) under the rubric of a non-traditional but nevertheless state-centred understanding of security – a move which all but expands and legitimises the disciplinary gaze of the state over more and more areas and sectors. At the same time, the agenda has mobilised particular concepts and practices (comprehensive security, cooperative security, confidence building measures, preventive diplomacy and so on) as modalities for negotiating those challenges – again, around a state-oriented framework. Likewise, efforts had been made at incorporating NGOs and other civil society actors into the fold. In his opening speech to the 1993 Asia Pacific Roundtable conference, the former Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Badawi noted: ‘Like the ASEAN-PMC process, this Asia Pacific roundtable too must practically and judiciously evolve further to make it more and more inclusive and less and less exclusive. The aim here is not to emulate other models but to become more productive and effective’ (1993: 15). In this regard, some point to the ongoing though sketchy ‘liberalisation’ in Asia Pacific regionalism, which is partly a consequence of democratic transitions in countries such as the Philippines, Thailand and most recently Indonesia. Regional cooperation in the Asia Pacific, according to this reasoning, has been an essentially state-centred and elite-driven project, while the engagement of civil society has been minimal despite the proliferation of Track 2 processes. However, the growing post-Cold War attention to transnational and non-traditional issues has given rise to NGO-initiated campaigns on environmental degradation, human rights abuses, poverty and social justice that have been pursued at the regional level – activities that occasionally contradict state policy if not regime interests. Since the mid1990s, for example, various international networks of NGOs have held regular meetings to deal with issues and challenges arising from open regionalism and globalisation; some of these sessions are parallel conferences that coincide with intergovernmental gatherings such as the annual APEC summits. Contra longstanding official positions on security matters, these NGOs seek to challenge the dominant discourse and

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practice of security in their efforts to ‘build constituencies for peace’ (Shigetomi 2002). Clearly, political openness in countries that have undergone domestic political transition has, among other things, led to the empowerment of civil society actors with regional and international agendas. Moreover, the expansion of the security agenda of states and of the region at large to include ‘human security’ considerations provides a rationalisation for the closer involvement of NGOs in regional cooperation, a domain that has traditionally remained the exclusive preserve of governments (Caballero-Anthony 2004a). Needless to say, NGOs in the Asia Pacific have long been reluctant to collaborate with regional intergovernmental organisations, preferring instead to pursue their own separate networking and advocacy activities, although this view is gradually changing as well. Despite such constraints, modest efforts by both governments and civil societies to promote dialogue over social and security issues have been pursued, such as the ASEAN Peoples’ Assembly (APA) meetings in Batam and Bali, both in Indonesia, in 2000 and in 2002 respectively, or in Manila, the Philippines, in 2007. These sessions – and the surprising endorsement by member nations of the East Asia Summit (EAS) to host a ‘civil society summit’ on the sidelines of the EAS inaugural in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005 – attest to a growing recognition by regional officialdom of the importance of engaging with regional civil society and can rightly be regarded as a significant first step in the turn towards participatory regionalism (Acharya 2003). For those who welcome these developments, the transition represents, as one analyst has averred, a ‘sign of the times – one characterised by an increasing willingness by actors in the second and third tracks to engage including the unlike-minded for the achievement of the goals they cannot obtain in isolation from or in hostile opposition to each other’ (Hernandez 2002; Caballero-Anthony 2004b). As the late Hadi Soesastro, a veteran Indonesian second-tracker, once noted, ‘A new ASEAN must be invented … A mature ASEAN is a prerequisite. Members must open up. This is where the ASEAN civil society can contribute greatly. They have to be incorporated into the agenda setting of the new ASEAN, otherwise, people will have a totally wrong idea about what ASEAN is all about’ (2001: 309). In his introductory remark at the inaugural APA in 2000, Simon Tay, a prominent Singaporean public intellectual, has argued for ‘vertical dialogue’ between ASEAN and regional civil society: ‘for ASEAN to be more open to people’s organisations and nongovernmental organisations’, and to accept them as legitimate track three actors. In order for this to occur, Tay believed that “track two” think tanks such as the ASEAN-ISIS can play a role as a bridge’ (2001: 11). Others, however, perhaps alarmed by the perceived threat posed to raison d’état and the integrity of the anarchical society of

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states, have (as did a pundit) castigated the APA as ‘an incoherent babble of voices’ (Rashid 2001) that offers little of relevance to regional security management, presumably filled with the ‘illusionary’ interpretations of irrational beings, so to speak, and therefore not to be taken seriously (Ashley 1988: 249-250). Finally, there are those who welcome the influx of greater numbers of participants into Track 2 dialogues and the institutionalisation of an expanding research agenda but are at the same time concerned that the parameters of discourse are, ironically enough, narrowing (à la Foucault) even as participation in discourse is on the rise.6 As Jim George has cautioned, conventional discourses on international security can produce ‘devastating closure’ even as they encourage ‘progress, potential, and openness’ (1994: 201). In a sense, despite the pervasive ideological and intellectual conservatism of the process, the ranks of Track 2 have nevertheless burgeoned. More importantly, the manner of restriction implied here cannot merely be understood in terms of the intellectual cum political regulation of discourse. By this I do not mean that the regulatory practices that determine the proper limits of discourse are therefore not important as a matter of pedagogical and practical concern. Instead, equal if not greater consideration should be accorded the so-called positive rather than negative aspects of that discourse. From this vantage point, it becomes comprehensible why the regulative and restrictive nature of discourse has neither prohibited the production of a vast amount of material on Asia Pacific security nor forestalled the proliferation of Track 2 processes and ancillary activities.7

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Sovereignty-Subjectivity Nexus: Reinforcement or Reinstatement? If modern disciplinary society, as Clifford has reminded us, is ‘a society of the gaze’ (2001: 48), then the foregoing institutional developments, despite their potential for significantly revising extant regional norms such as non-intervention/non-interference and state sovereignty, are arguably being managed in Track 2 discourse to ensure that their interpretation comports with the inscribed boundaries of the state. This is patently clear in the light of evidence that suggests, notwithstanding regional orthodoxy regarding the sanctity of the non-interference norm in Asia Pacific diplomacy and security, that ASEAN member countries in effect interfere quite frequently in one another’s domestic affairs or that ARF member countries readily but selectively engage in preventive diplomacy even though the ARF has hitherto resisted implementing preventive diplomacy because of members’ concerns over the purported intrusiveness of that security practice (Emmers & Tan 2011; Jones 2010). To paraphrase Martin Wight (1966: 33), while the stuff of concrete human experience throughout the region may be constantly bursting the

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bounds of the ‘licensed’ language of Asia Pacific security with which security studies communities try to handle it, there is however the equally strong sense that the persistent and pervasive pressures of regulation and surveillance would not permit, at least not any time soon, the decoupling of sovereignty and subjectivity in security thinking and doing. The growing liberalisation – as well as, intriguingly, legalisation – currently experienced in the Asia Pacific region, when viewed as a sort of ‘normalising’ necessity, could lead to the reinforcement, in Track 2 discourse, of the nexus between sovereignty and subjectivity as regional states mature from developing ‘quasi-states’ to developed ‘normal states’ – true of the Southeast Asian nations, but also of regional powers like China and Japan – per modernisation logics (Jackson 1990). In the regional context since decolonisation and the subsequent formation of newly independent nations, sovereignty claims therein have been especially pronounced precisely because of their apparent dubiousness. The paradox is not difficult to appreciate, since such contentions stem primarily from claimants for whom ‘sovereignty’ remains a highly tenuous proposition. Take, for example, the case of Malaysia, whose newfound sovereignty as a country was immediately contested by President Sukarno of Indonesia, who inaugurated a policy of confrontation (konfrontasi) through which the Indonesian leader vowed to ‘crush’ (ganjang) the nascent Malaysian federation. Or take the case of Singapore, whose independence came amid the throes of confrontation and at the expense of Malaysian unity. From this vantage point, the institutional significance and utility of the formation of ASEAN in August 1967 thereby lies in the formal recognition of the sovereignty principle which the ASEAN diplomatic framework provides its members and the assurance that ASEAN members would acknowledge one another’s sovereign right of existence. That the older members of the ASEAN fraternity (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and arguably Indonesia) have experienced significant levels of economic and social development as well as political consolidation since their formative years suggests a pattern (albeit uneven) of state evolution/normalisation which, in turn, could arguably enhance or reinforce state sovereignty (Jorgensen-Dahl 1982; Leifer 1989, 2000; Simon 1982). Indeed, any discursive reinforcement of sovereignty would in all likelihood be transitory for a variety of reasons, not least our current awareness of the difficulties which globalisation and other contemporary phenomena pose for a traditionalist sovereignty paradigm. That said, as the territorial dispute between Japan and South Korea over the Takeshima/Dokdo islands and that between Japan and Taiwan (and China) over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands clearly show, sovereignty claims have not abated with liberalisation, which further suggests that the ontological commitment to exclusivity and territoriality remains robust in popular renditions of sovereignty. Nor, for that

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matter, are exclusivity and territoriality antithetical to democracy (Connolly 1991). On the other hand, the increasing un-tenability of the concept could also encourage the reinstatement of the sovereignty-subjectivity nexus in new ways. In this regard, it is not inconceivable that state sovereignty in the regional context might likely be recast in relatively more inclusive and/or ‘virtual’ forms (Rosecrance 1996). But despite its contested ‘nature’ as a concept, sovereignty has demonstrated a remarkable adaptability and durability in daily practice, not least in the Asia Pacific region. Nevertheless, moving towards more inclusive and/or virtual conceptions requires a major political commitment. This would not only involve a rewriting of the state and of sovereignty in terms other than that of exclusivity and territoriality. It would also assume a widespread willingness – so far non-existent or at best paltry, if half-hearted attempts by the ASEAN Regional Forum to institutionalise inclusive concepts such as preventive diplomacy, cooperative security and, even less so, common security, are any indication (Emmers & Tan 2011) – on the part of intellectuals and practitioners to relinquish their inveterate hold on certain philosophical and theoretical prejudices that inform a particular understanding of sovereignty and subjectivity.

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Forming and Governing the Track 2 ‘Self ’: Two Illustrations Both formation and governance of the self are evidenced in the ways Track 2 intellectuals work to accommodate discourse that supports a state-centric ontology and to marginalise discourse that is perceived as subversive to that ontology. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to how self-formation and self-governance of knowledge networks have occurred by way of illustrations from two discourses germane to Track 2 diplomacy – notably, on regional security and human rights. Domesticating the Regional Security Discourse Firstly, self-regulation is exercised through implicitly subscribing to what Friedrich Meinecke (1957) has referred to as the ‘one common denominator’ pivotal to modern diplomacy: raison d’état. For instance, troubled by what he saw as the giddy fantasies of dreamers who enthuse idealistically about the ‘emerging civil society’ in the Asia Pacific or about complex interdependence as the key to region-wide stability and peace, one security intellectual has rejoined in no uncertain terms: To say that these suppositions are wide of the mark does not quite capture the sense of my disagreement with those who have

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had the tendency to glibly and complacently advance them. If anything, the first half of the last decade of the 20th century has given clear indications that power is still very much anchored in the classic notion of the concept, that is, military terms, even if economic strength has grown more significant within our understanding of the power equation. (Da Cunha 1996: x) Other examples abound. Reasoning that peace in post-Cold War Europe, relative to East Asia, is more plausible due to ‘the apparent satisfaction of the great powers with the status quo’, one intellectual notes that in the latter region ‘an ample pool of festering grievances [exists] with more potential for generating conflict than during the Cold War, when bipolarity helped stifle the escalation of parochial disputes’ (Betts 1993/1994: 64). Similarly, another has contended that Europe’s past – one marked by war and conflict – could well be Asia’s future, making the Asia Pacific region in the long run ‘the cockpit of great power conflict’ (Friedberg 1993/1994: 7). Still another analyst has made the even more interesting but hard to sustain move of grounding a hyperrealist desire – temporarily deferred, in his view, for the sake of the commercial imperative – in ‘certain primordial impulses, like … a type of domination founded upon classical raison d’état, inherent in the human condition will somehow remain dormant as long as the peoples and governments of the Asia Pacific preoccupy themselves with the business of making money’ (Da Cunha 1996: x). By deploying and circulating practices of representation that naturalise a monological and teleological rendition of the state, war and diplomacy, these preceding illustrations can be understood as ‘semi-official narratives’ that authorise and provoke certain sequences of causality, while at the same time preventing other narratives from emerging or simply co-opting them (Said 1993: 324). Reflections by Kishore Mahbubani, a former top diplomat who has reinvented himself as a leading public intellectual and academic dean, also illustrate the workings of practices of statecraft in both aspects of self-formation and self-government (Tan 2005c). Highlighting the need for governments in the contemporary Asia Pacific to eschew the high probability of conflict and turbulence in the region – a ‘natural groove of history’, as he puts it8 – Mahbubani identifies what he sees as the fundamental diplomatic question of the moment: ‘If the Asia Pacific is to defy the historical odds and make a smooth transition from one order to another, a new consensus must soon be forged’ (1998: 148, emphasis added)9; that is, a ‘new consensus’ regarding ‘what is to be done’ in a region fraught with the tensions and contradictions that pervade and distort the interstate enterprise. Mahbubani draws attention to oft-cited regional ‘flashpoints’ (notably, the Korean peninsula and the Taiwan

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straits) and prescribes roles that are (in his view) appropriate to major powers in the Asia Pacific. Mahbubani understandably and wisely refrains from overt commentary on questions of ‘internal’ subversions and threats in the Asia Pacific, lest (presumably) he be accused of ‘interfering’ in the domestic affairs of neighbouring nations. Other than an exception or two, his apparent silence on the proliferation of other social forces in the form of ethnic, religious and political resistance movements in Aceh, Chechnya, Hong Kong, Irian Jaya, Kelantan and Timor – all roiling during the time of his writing – is deafening. This is not to imply that the regional security discourse is conspicuously silent about such things. But it is to point out that such issues, as and when they are raised in security discourse, are almost always refracted through the prism of the state – whether in the sense of strengthening or that of subverting (or attempting to subvert) the purported regional status quo. In both instances, the domesticating effect serves the same purpose: the rationalisation of raison d’état via the accommodation of collusive forces and the defeat of subversive forces. Hence the question of forging a ‘diplomatic consensus’ is necessarily assumed to be of a technical, not political, nature – the very step, as we saw earlier, that security intellectuals must render so as to affirm and preserve the fiction of boundaries as fixed and absolute (Ashley 1988: 249-250). The representing of dangers, threats and opportunities as implicitly technical concerns is a common discursive practice in depoliticising particular issues or entire fields so as to discourage serious critical reflection on things of fundamental importance. Granted, nowhere in his comments does Mahbubani explicitly insist that the process of regional consensus building is ‘technical’, much less that it should be depoliticised. Indeed, his eloquent articulation of the enormous stakes at hand for one and all seems to invite, not dissuade, political discussion on regional affairs. However, less than a year after his call to fellow statesmen and others in policy circles to forge consensus, Mahbubani again addresses the issue, this time in the context of the 1996 missile crisis in the Taiwan straits: We faced a danger then [the missile crisis], but we also saw a new opportunity because it woke up key minds in Washington, D.C., Tokyo and Beijing on the importance of preserving the status quo. A new consensus emerged in the region: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. This is why we have not had any major geopolitical crisis in East Asia since March 1996, despite phenomenal historical change in our region. (Mahbubani 1998: 150-151) He further elaborates on the ‘nature’ of that new consensus:

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This consensus could rest on three distinct and somewhat unusual pillars. First, the current geopolitical order should be frozen in place. Under present circumstances no better order can be achieved. Second, all key players must develop a common understanding of the region’s constraints and realities. Third, they will need a vision that draws out common elements from the region’s tremendous diversity and so lay the groundwork for a sense of community. (ibid. 139) From these excerpts, two things are clear. First, in raising the ostensible need to forge a new diplomatic consensus in the post-Cold War Asia Pacific, what appears to be an open invitation to reflection and dialogue, when understood in terms of practices of statecraft, can conversely be seen as a move to effect closure of the diplomatic enterprise and its core assumptions to politicisation. It is a move to securitise or sanitise the statist presuppositions of diplomacy from the sorts of questions that the Asia Pacific security discourse cannot ask if it is to affirm its foundations and maintain the limits that define it. Mahbubani’s disciplining gesture is effected by way of a discourse implicitly predicated on raison d’état: preserving the status quo of hyper-statism; freezing in place the ‘current geopolitical order’; adducing a ‘vision’ of, ‘lay the groundwork’ for, a ‘sense of community’ among states (ibid. 139) – in short, maintain and strengthen the ontological commitment to the state. Two further things stem from this first point. On the one hand, the vaunted new diplomatic consensus urged for and which, in ways not entirely clear, suddenly ‘emerged’ in the aftermath of a missile crisis does not seem to merit the sense of triumphalism that permeates this discourse. Mahbubani’s message, after all, is essentially: do nothing. On the other hand, it is triumphal in that it implicitly celebrates the logic of reason of state and reaffirms an ontological commitment to the state by disseminating the word over and over again in security discourse to discipline those who would dare ‘let slip the dogs’ of otherness with terrifying consequences, as it were.10 In Mahbubani’s own words, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. It is a ‘rational’ discourse in that no ‘discrepant and illusionary interpretations’ that do not subscribe to state-centric parameters are permissible much less conceivable. The preceding point already anticipates my second point. In Mahbubani’s comment concerning the Taiwan missile crisis, calls for Taiwanese independence are tacitly taken to task for their irrational rejection of the ‘one China’ policy and the international status quo – irrational because it goes against the common sense of modern interstate diplomacy. Hence the invitation to ‘forge a new consensus’ in presentday Asia Pacific security can be understood as a summons to knowledge practitioners to increase their vigilance against the proliferation of

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flows and movements that resist the conceptual (and, even more fundamentally, suppositional) confines that define and sustain that which all practitioners of statecraft worth their salt know as truly representative of diplomacy. Indeed, Mahbubani’s persistent use of the word we – ‘we faced a danger’; ‘we … saw a new opportunity’; ‘we have not had any major geopolitical crisis’ – is in itself an interesting discursive practice (ibid. 150-151). The proviso we is redolent with the presupposition of homogeneity and ‘consensus’ among those who make it their business to speak, write and act with respect to Asia Pacific security and diplomacy; it is, in other words, the constitution and instantiation of the knowledge networks as speaking subject. ‘We’ therefore refers not only to members of the diplomatic community who, presumably, already know themselves to be, but also to the un-stated assumption purportedly shared within regional knowledge and Track 2 communities that the sovereign state and anarchy principle in which ‘we’ have invested must continually be protected from the most dangerous threat of all: activities that refuse to affirm the foundations and secure the limits that render viable a hyper-statist discourse, and which, in doing so, expose the state as an endless, rather unstable effect of practices, without which the metaphysics of state, paradoxically, cannot hold.

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Domesticating Human Rights Discourse Secondly, while the ‘Asian values’ debate that took place during the 1990s has received wide attention in scholarship (Cauquelin, Lim & Mayer-König 2000; De Bary 1998; Dupont 1996; Jones 1994; Tan, H.L. 2011), little has been said about the role of regional knowledge networks in responding to as well as appropriating the debate for the purposes of self-formation and self-regulation. As noted in the previous chapter, the Vienna Conference on human rights in June 1993 was a crucial battleground. Constrained by an apparent cultural relativism, the ‘ideological imperialism’ ostensibly exercised by (mostly Western) advocates of an international human rights agenda and the failure of East Asian participants to establish a viable consensus among themselves on human rights at the Regional Meeting for Asia for the World Conference on Human Rights held in Bangkok just months prior to the Vienna Conference, East Asia found itself on the receiving end of criticisms that deplored Asian obduracy as the barrier against the ‘universality’ of human rights (Bell 2000; Posner 1997; Tan, H.L. 2011). As a consequence, fissures started to appear within the mostly friendly relationship that the European Community (EC) and ASEAN had since the Cold War – by and large an unspectacular and distant relationship, concede Jürgen Rüland and Cornelia Storz – due to the EC’s emphasis on liberal democracy, the respect for human rights, market economy and

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disarmament as the cornerstones of its relationships with non-Western countries (Rüland & Storz 2008). This led to outright criticisms directed by the EC against the sluggish pace of democratisation in and the weak human rights record of Southeast Asian countries, with special attention given to ASEAN’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards Burma/Myanmar and Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor (1975-1999).11 On their part, East Asians – affronted by the aforementioned charges – refused to take them lying down. Ali Alatas, Indonesia’s foreign minister, took umbrage with international media coverage which, to his mind, fostered the erroneous impression that the Vienna Conference was placed under threat by ‘a clash of values between the developed countries of the North and the developing countries of the South’, a depiction Alatas dismissed as both ‘unwarranted’ and ‘counterproductive’ (cited in Tan, H.L. 2011: 2). European criticism also provoked a rash of ripostes by key East Asian political leaders, public intellectuals and opinion makers that contributed to the public articulation of ‘Asian values’ (Kausikan 1993, 1997; Kim 1994; Koh 1999; Lee 1992; Mahbubani 1992, 1995a; Sen 1997; Zakaria 1993), an enterprise that the first Asian financial crisis of 1997 more or less discredited (Thompson 2004). In this regard the efforts of the ASEAN-ISIS during that period are worth looking into. But there are distinct differences between the two sets of responses: whilst the principal articulators of Asian values (Mahathir Mohamad, Lee Kuan Yew and others who comprise the socalled ‘Singapore School’ of Asian values,12 and so forth) adopted perspectives distinguished by a common scepticism with Western liberal democracy (without, at least for some, being anti-democratic),13 the diverse membership of knowledge networks is clearly less amenable to crass ideological reductionism. In a proposal (published in 1992) on just those controversial issues (particularly for the ASEAN states), representatives of the ASEAN-ISIS, noting growing international awareness of the importance of protecting the global commons and promoting human rights, defined the problem, interestingly, in the following terms: Of great concern to developing countries like those in the ASEAN region, however, is the increasing tendency by the industrial countries to make economic and political cooperation contingent, firstly, upon environmental policies that do not take into sufficient account the legitimate economic and political interests of developing countries, and secondly, upon human rights criteria based on Western perceptions and priorities in civil and political rights without due emphasis given to other dimensions of human rights which are of equal or sometimes of greater concern to the developing ASEAN nations. (ASEAN-ISIS 1992: 1)

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In the light of this interpretation, the recommended response, according to the document’s authors, was the ‘urgent need’ on the part of ASEAN to articulate in a comprehensive fashion its policy approaches and responses to these issues, including the reiteration that ‘the pursuit of economic, social and cultural rights are just as important as the pursuit of civil and political rights’. Of the consequences emerging from this effort, three in particular deserve mention: first, establishing a political environment within and among ASEAN countries conducive for dealing with hitherto taboo though no less controversial issues; second, producing a counter-discourse to the Anglo-American (and on occasion, continental European) discursive dominance of the human rights regime; and third, effectively closing a potentially radical regional discourse via the circulation of interpretive dispositions and practical attitudes (constitutive practices of statecraft) that discipline interpretations and meanings of just what a discourse on security entails. As Clara Joewono, an eminence grise of the ASEAN-ISIS, intimated to this author in 1996, the common reaction towards perceived ‘Western’ pressure on the ASEAN states to improve their human rights records and level of democracy was, ‘Why should ASEAN be at the receiving end?’. As such, the ASEAN-ISIS advocated a proactive stance with itself as the self-appointed articulator of the ‘official ASEAN position’, at least from an intellectual vantage point. In other words, its leaders intentionally strove for control of a counter-discourse in response to pressure (mostly from Europe), culminating in ASEAN’s joint Bangkok Declaration of Human Rights in 1993. Nevertheless, the antinomies in this seemingly self-serving move of regime legitimisation were equally striking: there was a conscious effort on the part of the ASEAN-ISIS to make self-admission of the ‘hardcore problem of human rights’ more palatable to ASEAN governments. As such, the region-wide – as opposed to country-bycountry – emphasis of its 1992 proposal, entitled The Environment and Human Rights in International Relations, was chosen specifically – albeit embellished (or perhaps diluted) with a discussion on ecological concerns – as a way to dismantle incrementally an inveterate taboo: The growing international awareness of the importance of the protection of the environment and the promotion of human rights is to be welcomed. It helps focus global and national attention upon the need to protect the environment, foster sustainable development and promote human rights, key challenges facing the planet and mankind … If these issues are not addressed at the international, regional, and state levels, they can become a major source of international conflicts in the future. (ASEANISIS 1992: 3-4)

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Even then, the discourse clearly refracts what presumably could be global or regional collective concerns – environmental protection and human rights promotion – through the prism of the state. Such issues that confront both planet and mankind, we are told, must necessarily be addressed at the international and state levels in order to avoid them becoming ‘a major source of international conflicts’. The regional level is invoked once but in a way that leaves little doubt that what is likely meant are interstate efforts within the region. Ultimately, the apparent fear and trepidation that preceded the enunciation of the Bangkok Declaration at the Geneva conference was unwarranted; the enunciation itself had a kind of anticlimax to it.14 In a reversal of rhetorical play, the ASEAN policy of constructive engagement with the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) military junta in Myanmar during the 1990s, significantly maligned by Western governments, was nevertheless commended by those same governments, which previously had made it clear in no uncertain terms their displeasure with ASEAN’s plan to welcome Myanmar into its fold. This probably explains the sense of déja vu for some following ASEAN’s successful effort at persuading Myanmar to forgo its turn at the grouping’s helm in 2006 (which eventually went to the Philippines), if only to avert the United States’ displeasure – in contrast to the current engagement of Myanmar by the Obama administration in the wake of the President Thein Sein’s efforts at political liberalisation (IHT 2011).15

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Conclusion: The Precarious Art of Self-Representation This chapter has explored how Track 2 networks, particularly the ASEAN-ISIS, engage in ‘representing themselves to themselves’ (Said 1994: xv) – principally by authorising their place and privilege as epistemic agents – in regional security discourse. As the foregoing illustrations have shown, what the discursive systems of exclusion and regulation that operate in Track 2 dialogical processes appear to have accomplished, if only temporarily, is the taming of the perceived unruly nature of regional security discourse and human rights advocacy and to render them, if not powerless and ineffective, then certainly emasculated via their integration within the ambit of state-centric discourses.16 The knowledge network in question here, the ASEAN-ISIS, is adduced as the rational speaking subject who provides relevant counsel and whose reasonableness is proven in its concession, perhaps more negotiated than either unambiguously coerced or voluntary, to a state-oriented ontology of Asia Pacific regional life. We are reminded of Butler’s words: ‘Is the discourse in and through which that concession occurs – and, yes, that concession invariably does occur – not itself formative of

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the very phenomenon that it concedes?’ (1993: 10). Yet not only are the boundaries of the state re-inscribed; so too, if only tacitly, is the ASEAN-ISIS constituted, empowered and legitimised as a rational agent by virtue of that concession and the unspoken suppositions that underwrite it. Even so, self-representation remains a precarious undertaking, not least because it is never accomplished in isolation, always requiring the endorsement of Track 1. While by no means new, the following introspective comment by two long-time CSCAP luminaries, painfully honest as they come, highlights the anxieties and concerns that bedevil most if not all Track 2 knowledge brokers:

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The burden of responsibility in the task of engagement is between Tracks One and Two actors is shared by both sides. Despite over a decade of interaction, mutual suspicions between these actors have continued. Questions of representation arise for both Track One and Track Two. On the one hand, an issue raised by certain Track One players is the lack of political legitimacy of Track Two actors – often couched in questions such as, ‘Who elected you?’ or ‘Whom do you represent?’ – the concern being that individuals in Track Two may be either simply government representatives who parrot official lines or representatives of special interests, out of tune with current attitudes of their country’s population. On the other hand, there are divisions in Track Two over the wisdom and efficacy of engaging Track One, including on the issue of whether and to what extent Track Two efforts do make any real difference between Tracks One and Two policy positions and perspectives. (Hernandez & Kim 2012: 48) As the late Michael Leifer, consummate scholar of Asia Pacific security and active contributor to Asia Pacific Track 2 diplomacy, once noted, conservation is never achieved by standing still. For Leifer, ‘the commonplace [is something] which requires special attention because it is commonplace and, therefore, in danger of being taken for granted’ (1987: 21). The Track 2 knowledge networks considered here have, over the years, been remarkably successful in naturalising their participation in contemporary Asia Pacific regional affairs; they have, in Leifer’s terms, become commonplace in Asia Pacific security. But as the aforesaid observation implies, naturalisation from the extraordinary to the ordinary is a process that must not be taken for granted. What is apparently settled can be undone; what has become commonplace can again become uncommon.

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8 Conclusion: A Plea in Three Parts

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There are no rules by which intellectuals can know what to say or do; nor for the true secular intellectual are there any gods to be worshipped and looked to for unwavering guidance. (Said 1994: xiv) Shortly after the Cold War ended, Ken Booth, in appealing for a new language of international relations that would better fit with new realities, gravely announced, ‘Our work is our words, but our words do not work anymore’ (1991: 313). For knowledge networks that contribute to national and regional discourses with the ostensible aim to make the Asia Pacific region a more secure place and space, their words do not only constitute their work. Indeed, it may be said that their words – and the words of the scholarly community who study those communities – constitute and legitimise their existence, if only tenuously so, as subjects blessed with agential privilege to produce and purvey security knowledge. In short, their life is their words. As with most books and their authors, mine has a personal dimension to it which provided much of its thrust. As Antonio Gramsci once mused, ‘the starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’ (1971: 324). It is with a similar ‘self-consciousness’ that I, as an on-and-off ‘member’ of a knowledge network and participant to the Track 2 process in the region of interest here, embarked on this work of tracking the sorts of representational practices that constitute agency and sovereign subjectivity vis-à-vis the contemporary Asia Pacific and in which my fellow security intellectuals and I have been actively engaged. Needless to say, much work remains to be done in this area, although trackers of constitutive rituals and practices may be forgiven for feeling, not unlike Frost’s bucolic traveller on a snowy evening, that they have ‘promises to keep’ and ‘miles to go before [they] sleep’ in navigating through woods ‘dark and deep’ (Frost 1979: 224). But for now, I want to close with an appeal to fellow knowledge brokers regarding the need for greater critical awareness among

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ourselves about how we ‘do’ Asia Pacific security studies, as it were. To that end, three things come to mind, notably, essence, paradox and play. The first two provide a summary of the book’s argument and vital themes as well as highlight areas in which students of Asia Pacific security are inclined to posit limits to ‘the limit-attitude’ (Campbell 1998: 224) – in short, to engage in representing practices – which essentially condemn them to replicating elements of the ‘inherent dominant mode’ (Williams 1958: 376), as it were, from which they seek to be distanced. The final element offers a possible exit strategy, one that involves inviting reality to confront us and our perspectives, at times brusquely so. Only then can we avoid essentialism and reification where our claims are concerned.

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The Persistent Allure of Essence The point has already been made earlier that policymakers and practitioners, in a sense, have no reason to apologise for treating the state in their policy deliberations as a given fact of international politics. As one scholar has well noted about statesmen, soldiers, politicians and technocrats who labour ‘officially’ on behalf of their respective states and national governments: ‘In the orbit of Orbis, anarchy is not a problem to be solved but a fixed background condition that all participants in a discourse simply take for granted, and the state can be regarded as the necessary embodiment and instrument of the communal values as these are expressed in a dangerous world’ (Ashley 1988: 240). But this is not and should not be the case with scholars of international relations and security, not least those who engage in theoretical work. As noted, the field of Asia Pacific security studies of late has been party to a thrilling profusion of attempts at theorising the Asia Pacific as evidenced most vividly, though not only, by constructivist contributions. Few if any serious interlocutors in this theoretical debate take things like ‘anarchy’, ‘states’, ‘region’, ‘community’ or ‘Track 2’ for granted, readily acknowledging the contested and constructed ‘nature’ of such ideas or institutions. Some also concede the need to address the perdurable problem of subjectivity, recognising the enormous difficulties posed by the problematic time-honoured coupling of subjectivity with sovereignty – a move that condemns the human subject to an endless search for an imaginary wholeness, unity or essence that it will never attain (Edkins & Pin-Fat 1999: 4). Such judicious sensibilities are commendable and should therefore be encouraged. But as this study has shown, few students of Asia Pacific security at this stage, constructivist or otherwise, appear willing to forego the desire for essence. Moreover, even among those who grasp the futility of such a desire, there are many who

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nevertheless refuse ‘to let go of the abstract ideal itself’ (Ashley & Walker 1990: 380fn). Indeed, as long as a robust epistemological commitment to rationalism-positivism remains among theorists of Asia Pacific security, coupled with an equally resolute ontological commitment to sovereign subjectivity – one ‘so central that it is usually relegated to the (hegemonic) status of a simple and reified given’ (Walker 1992: 180) – it is difficult to see how different scholars and theorists are from statesmen in their shared interpretive disposition to refract all of the ambiguity, contingency and diversity of regional life chiefly and violently through the prism of the sovereign state. Consider the following illustration (there are many but this would suffice). The publication in 1994 of an edited volume of essays on postCold War international relations of the Asia Pacific, Pacific Cooperation: Building Economic and Security Regimes in the Asia Pacific Region (1994) by Andrew Mack and John Ravenhill, was hailed as the ‘first systematic attempt to apply theories of cooperation to the Asia Pacific region’ (Mack & Ravenhill 1994: 6). Upon closer inspection, however, the rather limited character of their conclusions and the nature of those limits become apparent: the essays primarily comprise a liberal-institutional discourse that accepts without question the notion of ‘cooperation under anarchy’ as the fundamental problem to be solved. Indeed, the volume editors seem to expect their readers to accept the precedence accorded a neo-liberal reading mainly on the ‘say so’ of the authors rather than on the basis of any substantive arguments to that effect (Pettman 1998: 8-9). But what is even more interesting is the projection of a kind of ‘happy fatalism’ that seems to have fuelled this project. On the one hand, its concluding essay concedes that the volume’s state-oriented approaches are ‘unable to deal effectively with the changing role of states and the challenges to them from above and below’, allowing that ‘we still do not have a full theoretical synthesis that can bridge the disciplines of economics and political science’. On the other hand, and almost in the same breath, it nevertheless concludes – to the exclusion of any consideration of alternative perspectives – that those same problematic, state-oriented contributions would be ‘hard to better’ (Harris 1994: 268), thereby effecting closure. Which prompted one reviewer to surmise, understandably so, that the essays ‘appear still too closely associated with those in authority’ (Kolodziej 1997: 97). Hence what had begun as an effort aimed explicitly to open up a particular discourse in Asia Pacific international relations at the end revealed strict delimitations that revived the fundamental problem of subjectivity with which it had teased audiences. Other illustrations abound. The foregoing merely exemplifies a widespread proclivity among many scholars and theorists to cast Asia Pacific security – notwithstanding concessions to diversity and change – as a

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relatively homogeneous and harmonious discourse. In so doing, awkward elements of history and practice, such as inconsistencies and paradoxes, are readily elided and logical closure upon discourse is summarily enforced. They do so in such a way that the conditions on which they rely to explain continuity and change in the contemporary Asia Pacific – usually understood in terms of some deep structure and/or essence that is at once autonomous, objective, extra-historical and extrapolitical – can be upheld.

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The Scholar/Statesman Paradox In his study of the British literary intelligentsia, John Carey (1993) identifies the problem of the intellectual as that of the existence of the insiders, experts, coteries and professionals who mould public opinion, make it conformist and promote a reliance on a few who are in control of knowledge in part because they are in the position to define knowledge as such. Yet if the public role of intellectuals, not least those who contribute to the regional discourse on Asia Pacific security, is one that rightly eschews simplistic sloganeering or adopting the orthodox party line or a fixed dogma (Said 1994: xii), then a critical relaxation of those commitments that oblige them to reduce ‘a complex and turbulent world to a patterned and rigidly ordered framework of understanding’ (George 1994: xi), as it were, is clearly in order. To some extent, the above point takes us back to the implied criticism of the alleged abandonment by Asia Pacific knowledge communities of their ethical and intellectual authority to speak the truth against political authoritarianism in the region – and potentially back into the problem of subjectivity (as we saw in chapter 2). Certainly, my insistent caveats against potential revivals of the sovereignty-subjectivity conundrum, as in this instance, may invite censure by liberal colleagues for the apparent inherent ‘conservatism’ of this present work. (In like fashion, in an oft-cited debate with his French counterparts Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas asserted that by questioning the Enlightenment-inspired philosophical object of ridding reality of all ‘ideology’ and obscurantism and, in turn, disclosing it by ‘theory’, postmodernists are ‘neo-conservative’ in that they offer no theoretical reason for intellectual thought to choose or judge between social directions.1) But it is not entirely clear either that the answer lies in a liberal humanist solution, not least that implied in criticisms against Asia Pacific ‘scholar-bureaucrats’ whose self-interested support for autocracy represents for their critics, in Benda’s handy expression, ‘the treason of the intellectuals’ (1969). As Emmanuel Lévinas has intimated, ‘We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all we need to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject.

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Does this subject arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other man in the act of election that raises him to this height?’ (1990: 63). As such, Lévinas advocates the denouncement of liberal humanism precisely ‘because it is insufficiently human’ as a consequence of its inconsideration of difference and otherness (1981: 127). The point of this brief diversion, however, is neither to disparage liberal humanism nor to defend authoritarianism but rather to underscore the complexity of the problem of the Asia Pacific region’s security intellectuals and their ‘organic’ promotion and preservation of the regional order from whence their identity and legitimacy as speaking subjects are derived. But if the growing numbers of theoretically inclined students of Asia Pacific security, constructivist or otherwise, keep retying knots they claim to have untangled by unreflectively holding fast to particular epistemological and ontological commitments (Walker 1999) – burnished, moreover, with ubiquitous claims of intellectual objectivity and scientific rigour – that make them more statesmen than scholars, then there arguably is grave cause for concern. This is not to say that there is therefore no place at all for the role of intellectual of statecraft in the persona of the security scholar. But it conceivably explains why, despite the many theoretical innovations that have taken place in international relations and security studies worldwide, requiems about the endless ‘piling up of bodies’ continue to be expressed, necessarily so (Zalewski 1996). Yet this should not surprise us, given the not dissimilar ways in which sovereign states and theoretical discourses predicated on sovereign subjectivity and autonomous agency function: Both have specific boundaries which define what is inside and what lies outside a settled domain. Both possess systems of surveillance and instruments of disciplinary power for regulating and policing the lives of citizens, and for identifying who does and does not belong. Both rely on a specific conception of time, and instil memories of origins, discrete epochs and decisive watersheds to regulate collective identities. Similarities are evident in the way that both disciplinary boundaries and national frontiers are determined arbitrarily and maintained by force. (Linklater 1992: 88) This similitude is neither an innocent occurrence nor a felicitous coincidence. Indeed, the confluence of nation and narration is assiduously cultivated through the sorts of knowledgeable practices examined in this book, with theorists patrolling and regulating the paradigmatic borders of the international relations discipline in much the same fashion and intensity with which security intellectuals would patrol and regulate the

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discursive borders of Asia Pacific Track 2 dialogues or, for statesmen and soldiers and homeland security agents, the territorial borders of Asia Pacific nations. For them all to represent their respective subjects as rational identities ‘under the sign of sovereignty’, they must inscribe and affirm boundaries as absolute and objective independent of practice in order to adjudicate between ‘rational’ and ‘sensible’ interpretations that correspond with those boundaries – and thereby declared credible, relevant and worth attending to – and ‘irrational’ and ‘illusionary’ interpretations that transgress or subvert those boundaries – and are thereby deemed incredulous, irrelevant and excludable (Ashley 1988: 249-250). In short, for both scholar and statesman, the power to define an interpretation – and the agent who conveys it – as un-commonsensical (or indeed nonsensical) is not unlike issuing a religious fatwa, except the targets in view are academic ‘apostates’ and ‘miscreants’ who do not share their fiduciary commitments:

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Once established as common sense, theories become incredibly powerful since they delineate not simply what can be known but also what it is sensible to talk about or suggest. Those who swim outside these safe waters risk more than simply the judgement that their theories are wrong; their entire ethical or moral stance may be ridiculed or seen as dangerous just because their theoretical assumptions are deemed unrealistic. Defining common sense is therefore the ultimate act of political power. (Smith 1996: 13)2 As Said has reminded us, there are neither rules by which scholars can know what to say or do nor deities to which theorists can look for unwavering guidance – except those arbitrarily imposed and fashioned, respectively, by self-interested claimants to a sovereign subjectivity (Said 1994: xiv). Hence, if predictions about the Asia Pacific region as a future ‘cockpit’ of international conflict and war were to be fulfilled, the culpability, should any be assigned (an inevitability, as history reminds us), rests not only with the statesman and soldier but with the scholar as well, not least the theorist of Asia Pacific security whose intellectual and ideological prejudices regarding sovereignty and subjectivity may well contribute to the very disastrous ends his/her work aims, ironically, to avert.

An Invitation to Play Perhaps a rethinking of Asia Pacific security should begin, innocuously enough, with restoring an appreciation for what intellectuals do best – namely, critique and reflection. If positivism, as noted above, is

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essentially the disavowal of reflection (Habermas 1971: vii), then it behoves students of Asia Pacific security to pay serious attention to how the non-negotiable ‘cores’ of their epistemological and ontological commitments effectively inhibit or even disavow reflection. Perhaps it also involves what Foucault has called ‘a relentless erudition’, combing alternative sources, disinterring buried documents, reviving forgotten histories and abandoned memories – knowledge either suppressed or consigned by the dominant ‘construal’ and its legion of domineering custodians. Moreover, it will likely involve what Roland Barthes has termed rereading, which he portrays as a form of play:

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Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (or ‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book … [Rereading] is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere) … Rereading is no longer consumption, but play. (Barthes 1974: 15-16) Barthes’s concern has to do with contemporary society’s frivolous treatment of texts. All too often, readers only recognise what they already think or know, ‘obliged’ as they are to impose their current understanding on whatever they read – independent of what the text actually says. Likewise, the propensity of the region’s knowledge communities, scholars and policy intellectuals alike to socially construct their world along principally state-centric lines implies a failure on their part to reread the world-text of the Asia Pacific, as it were, thereby obliging them to ‘read the same story everywhere’. With rereading, Barthes challenges us towards a dissatisfaction not only with the usual perfunctory readings of regional life one encounters in Track 2 dialogue sessions but also with scholarly renditions of Asia Pacific security that ultimately and rather politely subscribe to the dominant geopolitical ‘imaginary’, thereby reproducing and even buttressing it against alternative imaginaries. With rereading, Barthes challenges us to take supplementary looks at the world in which we live, and to do so as if it were for the first time and without the consumptive conceits of the cultural imperialist. If entry into the kingdom of heaven, according to the Good Book, is possible only if initiates become like little children,3 as it were, there is all the more need for simplicity and meekness in our engagement with the peculiar world of Asia Pacific security. Indeed, it compels us to walk a road less travelled precisely because it invites, it necessitates, an attitude of humility that is hopefully free of metaphysical hubris, although one can never be entirely sure of that.

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Notes

1

Introduction: From ‘Pacific Asia’ to ‘Asia Pacific’

The regional idea likely appeared before the late 1980s – say, within Japanese policy circles – but failed to take root given the dominance of the Cold War geopolitical ‘imaginary’ (Dirlik 1992; Reid 2008). 2 My debt here is to Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’ as a corporate institution (Said 1979: 3). Also see Sullivan (1996). 3 The notion of theory has also been understood as everyday practice in the work of meaning-making rather than merely as tool or critique (Zalewski 1996). 4 It should be noted that the phrase ‘post-Cold War Asia Pacific’, while used liberally in this book, is in a sense irrelevant given that the very idea of the ‘Asia Pacific’ is after all a recent invention that emerged near the end of the 1980s and gained currency partly with the proliferation of the Track 2 knowledge networks discussed here, which helped to promote that regional idea. As such, to speak of the ‘post-Cold War Asia Pacific’ unfairly and incorrectly implies the past existence of a ‘Cold War Asia Pacific’ (also another phrase employed below), which is conceptually inaccurate, although it might be argued the Asia Pacific idea has a longer lineage than that which I have proposed here. 5 On the one hand, European participants representing CSCAP Europe, for example, are active in the region’s Track 2 activities, some of which are hosted in European nations. On the other, Asia Pacific Track 2 has, since its inception, engaged in the practice of inviting Track 1 counterparts – policymakers and practitioners – to their sessions. 6 Most, if not all, of the academics and policy intellectuals cited in this book have at least engaged in ad hoc participation in Track 2 activities even if they are not ‘card-carrying members’ of the ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP, PECC or other Track 2 networks. 7 On criticisms against ‘free play’ and ‘methodological craziness’ which potentially lead to ‘an endless and treacherous and terrifying … errance joyeuse’, see Booth (1979: 216). 8 Labelling the desire to establish determinate causation and fixing subjectivity as sovereign the ‘Cartesian anxiety’, philosopher Richard Bernstein writes, ‘It is the quest for some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us. The spectre that hovers in the background of this journey is not just radical epistemological scepticism but the dread of madness and chaos where nothing is fixed, where we can neither touch bottom nor support ourselves in the world’ (1983: 85). 9 As elaborated in chapter 2, self-professed constructivist scholars who – despite the oftheard ‘rationalism versus constructivism’ slogan – do not fundamentally challenge the rationalist-positivist assumptions held by their realist and liberal-institutional counterparts can be viewed as ‘mainstream’ in their approach. 10 For example, the Network of East Asian Think Tanks (NEAT) was established in support of the ASEAN Plus Three (the ten ASEAN member countries plus China, Japan

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and South Korea) regional arrangement. The Network of ASEAN Defence and Security Institutions (NADI) was established in support of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM). To be sure, there were and still are some security intellectuals from within the Pacific Asia region who represent the Asia Pacific in predominantly abject (or pessimistic or unfavourable) terms, just as there were/are security intellectuals from outside Pacific Asia – realists included – who see the Asia Pacific in a more favourable light.

The Desire for Essence Realist scholars were particularly active, if not opportunistic, in defining the immediate post-Cold War Asia Pacific as a region at great risk of great power rivalry and imminent conflict if not war (Betts 1993/1994; Buzan & Segal 1994; Friedberg 1993/ 1994). Regarding the second and third aims of Southeast Asia constructivism, I am indebted to insights from Roxanne Doty (2000) on constructivist IR theory in general. Furthermore, it could be said of the third and final aim that it is consonant with the modernist but fundamentally chimerical vision of theory as a unifying force, one that provides, in Foucault’s words, ‘a solid and homogeneous theoretical terrain for all these dispersed genealogies [and] to descend upon them from on high with some kind of halo of theory that would unite them’ (cited in Said 1982: 3). By advancing propositions that contradict each other – agency/authorship on the one hand, ideational determinism on the other – their constructivism is undermined rather than enhanced partly as a result of a reliance on an epistemology that conflicts with the chosen ontology (Smith 2000). However, it should be said that Katzenstein has moved away from constructivism towards what he has termed ‘analytical eclecticism’ (Katzenstein & Sil 2010). In her critique of Wendt’s constructivism, Cynthia Weber argues: ‘But identities, interests, and institutions are authored by someone, Wendt suggests. Authorship is always at the bottom of production. It is only by keeping the author in mind that we can hold the author accountable and, maybe even more importantly, recognise that we are the authors of our own lives. Anarchy is what states make of it … Our lives are what we make of them’ (2001: 74). Palan writes: ‘Social philosophers do not say that “ideas” which, Wendt emphasises, people “hold in their heads”, have some independence or epistemological and ontological primacy, they say that the object of knowledge can be defined only through the medium of a particular logical and conceptual structure. In other words, “ideas” do not constitute the “raw” and the “cooked”, but the “raw” and “cooked” are linguistic and hence “cultural” or inter-subjective categories. The notion that ideas, in Wendt’s view, are either private or shared notions people hold “in their head”, constitute “brute material force” is an extreme idealist and indeed voluntarist position which patently contradicts the philosophical realm that Wendt claims to subscribe to. Wendt commits here a categorical confusion, harnessing a legitimate “constructivist” epistemological argument to support an illegitimate argument privileging ideas vis-à-vis power and interest’ (2000: 590). IR theory according to Ashley ‘is a language that enables us to shift and manoeuvre, outflank and charge, turn tail and run, retreat into historical ambiguity, commandeer resources where we can find them, shed one uniform and don another, and return to fight another day’ (1996: 240). As Steve Smith has argued regarding Wendt’s view of language, ‘it follows that [Wendt’s] agents are not constituted by language, rather it is a tool that they use.

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Wendt has no discussion of how actors are constituted into self and other in the first place. Thus Wendt’s world is one in which certain social features are indeed given, and in which identities are stable. There is no discussion of how subjectivities and identities are formed, there is no discussion of the “identity of identity”’ (2000: 160).

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Knowledge Networks as Agents of Representation Author’s interviews with various Track 2 security intellectuals, including Singaporean representatives to the ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP, during the 1996-1997 period. Comprehensive security is enshrined in the following documents by the ASEAN-ISIS (1993a; 1993b) as well as CSCAP (1995). If anything, Scott’s categories of resistance, including evasion, foot-dragging, gossip and the like, matter as much to a ‘modern’ society such as Singapore as it does vis-àvis the peasant societies studied by Scott (1985). In Singapore, there are anecdotes aplenty about the proverbial taxi drivers and coffee-shop patrons whose ‘everyday forms of resistance’ resemble Scott’s categories and whose conversations invariably cover impressions, fair or otherwise, of perceived infringements and double standards of those in power. As Maria Lugones has noted, ‘We can … make a funny picture of those who dominate us precisely because we can see the double edges, we can see them doubly constructed, we can see the plurality in us and in them’ (1987: 14). On this point I am indebted to Der Derian’s reading (1996), by way of Barthes (1977), of Hedley Bull’s writings on diplomatic culture as open-ended texts which invite new interpretations. Foucault continues in that same passage: ‘In another way, we are also subjected to truth in the sense in which it is truth that makes the laws, that produces the true discourse which, at least partially, decides, transmits and itself extends upon the effects of power. In the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power.’ (1980: 93-94). As Todorov has put it: ‘First of all, there is the value judgment (an axiological level): the other is good or bad, I love or do not love him, or as was more likely to be said at the time, he is my equal or my inferior (for there is usually no question that I am good and that I esteem myself). Secondly, there is the action or rapprochement or distancing in relation to the other (a praxeological level): I embrace the other’s values, I identify myself with him; or else I identify the other with myself, I impose my own image upon him; between submission to the other and the other’s submission, there is also a third term, which is neutrality or indifference. Thirdly, I know or am ignorant of the other’s identity (this would be the epistemological level); of course there is no absolute here, but an endless gradation between the lower or higher states of knowledge’ (1984: 185).

Representing the ‘Asia Pacific’ The present chapter deals specifically with representations of the ‘Asia Pacific’ popular in the regional security discourse in the immediate post-Cold War decade. The various subjectivities associated with the Asia Pacific ‘produced’ in those discourses are covered by the subsequent chapters. The ‘original five’ are: the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Indonesia; the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) in Malaysia; the

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Institute of Strategic and Development Studies (ISDS) in the Philippines; the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA); and the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) in Thailand. The ‘newcomers’ include: the Brunei Darussalam Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (BDIPSS); the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace (CICP); the Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFA) in Laos; and the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam (DAV; formerly known as the Institute of International Relations or IIR). They are as follows: 1) Australia – AUS CSCAP, based at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre; 2) Brunei – CSCAP Brunei, based at the Brunei Darussalam Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies; 3) Cambodia – CSCAP Cambodia, based at the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace; 4) Canada – CSCAP Canada, based at the Institute of International Relations, a component of the Liu Centre for the Study of Global Issues at the University of British Columbia; 5) China – CSCAP China, based at the China Institute of International Studies; 6) Europe – CSCAP Europe, based at the Paris-based Asia Centre; 7) India – CSCAP India, based at the Indian Council of World Affairs; 8) Indonesia – CSCAP Indonesia, based at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies; 9) Japan – CSCAP Japan, based at the Japan Institute of International Affairs; 10) North Korea – CSCAP-DPR Korea, based at the Institute of Disarmament and Peace, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 11) South Korea – CSCAP Korea, based at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies; 12) Malaysia – CSCAP Malaysia, based at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies; 13) Mongolia – CSCAP Mongolia, based at the Institute for Strategic Studies; 14) New Zealand – CSCAP New Zealand, based at Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies; 15) Papua New Guinea – CSCAP Papua New Guinea, based at The National Research Institute; 16) the Philippines – CSCAP Philippines, based at the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, University of the Philippines; 17) Russia – CSCAP Russia, based at the Second Asian Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 18) Singapore – CSCAP Singapore, based at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University; 19) Thailand – CSCAP Thailand, based at the Institute for Security and International Studies, Chulalongkorn University; 20) the United States of America – US CSCAP, based at the Pacific Forum CSIS; and 21) Vietnam – CSCAP Vietnam, based at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They are: The Security of the Asia Pacific Region, Memorandum 1 (1992); Asia Pacific Confidence and Security Building Measures, Memorandum 2 (1995); The Concepts of Comprehensive Security and Cooperative Security, Memorandum 3 (1995); Guidelines for Regional Maritime Cooperation, Memorandum 4 (1997); Cooperation for Law and Order at Sea, Memorandum 5 (2001); The Practice of the Law of the Sea in the Asia Pacific, Memorandum 6 (2002); The Relationship Between Terrorism and Transnational Crime, Memorandum 7 (2003); and The Weakest Link? Seaborne Trade and the Maritime Regime in the Asia Pacific, Memorandum 8 (2004). They are: Trafficking of Firearms in the Asia Pacific Region, Memorandum 9 (2004); Enhancing Efforts to Address the Factors Driving International Terrorism, Memorandum 10 (2005); Human Trafficking, Memorandum 11 (2007); Maritime Knowledge and Awareness: Basic Foundations of Maritime Security, Memorandum 12 (2007); Guidelines for Maritime Cooperation in Enclosed and Semi-Enclosed Seas and Similar Sea Areas of the Asia Pacific, Memorandum 13 (2008); Guidelines for Managing Trade of Strategic Goods, Memorandum 14 (2009); The Security Implications of Climate Change, Memorandum 15 (2010); Safety and Security of Offshore Oil and Gas Installations, Memorandum 16 (2011); Promoting the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy, Memorandum 17 (2011); and Implementing the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), Memorandum 18 (2011).

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To date, the full members of PECC are: 1) Australia – Australian Pacific Economic Cooperation Committee (AUSPECC), based at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University; 2) Brunei – Brunei Darussalam National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (BDCPEC), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; 3) Canada – Canadian National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (CANCPEC), based at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; 4) Chile – Chilean National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (CHILPEC), based at the Chile Pacific Foundation; 5) China – China National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (CNCPEC), based at the China Institute of International Studies; 6) Colombia – Colombia National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (COLPECC), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 7) Ecuador – Ecuadorian Committee for the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (ECUPEC), administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Integration; 8) Hong Kong China – Hong Kong Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (HKCPEC), based at the Trade and Industry Department; 9) Indonesia – Indonesian National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (INCPEC), based at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies; 10) Japan – Japan National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (JANCPEC), based at the Japan Institute of International Affairs; 11) South Korea – Korea National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (KOPEC), based at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy; 12) Malaysia – Malaysia National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (MANCPEC), based at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies; 13) Mexico – Mexico National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (MXCPEC), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 14) Mongolia – Mongolian National Committee on Pacific Economic Cooperation (MONPECC), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 15) New Zealand – New Zealand Committee of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (NZPECC), based at the Auckland Chamber of Commerce; 16) Peru – Peruvian National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (PERUPEC), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 17) the Philippines – Philippine Pacific Economic Cooperation Committee (PPECC), based at the Philippine Foundation for Global Concerns, Inc.; 18) Singapore – Singapore National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (SINCPEC), based at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore; 19) the South Pacific – the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), based at the PIF Secretariat; 20) Taiwan or ‘Chinese Taipei’ – Chinese Taipei Pacific Economic Cooperation Committee (CTPECC), based at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research; 21) Thailand – Thailand National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (TNCPEC), based at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 22) the United States – United States Asia Pacific Council (USAPC), based at the East-West Center; and 23) Vietnam – Vietnam National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (VNCPEC), based at the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 8 Since 1989, APEC has championed open regionalism (Garnaut 1996; Pomfret 2010). APEC’s Bogor Declaration of 1994 calls for the realisation of ‘free and open trade and investment in the Asia Pacific’, and that goal here is not simply ‘the actual reduction of barriers among APEC economies but also between APEC economies and nonAPEC economies’. 9 For example, Bergsten (1997) has identified at least five possible definitions of open regionalism relevant to the Asia Pacific region. 10 For example, Acharya (1997), borrowing from Asia Pacific economic intellectuals’ deliberations on open regionalism, has referred to the guiding principle behind regional security institutions such as ARF as well as Track 2 security groupings such as CSCAP as ‘open security regionalism’.

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In this regard, Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister, has reminisced about his brief but strong working relationship with the late Edgardo Boeninger of Chile when the latter was president of PECC, as the two of them shared a ‘common passion for building new regional economic cooperation architecture’ (Evans 2011). As Martin Wight has noted, ‘the stuff of international theory … is constantly bursting the bounds of the language in which we try to handle it’ (1966: 33). A recent treatment of such a theme is Ba (2009), who examines ASEAN political discourses about the regional security environment. I refer here to the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, whose celebrated adherents include Princeton historian Bernard Lewis and the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, as the definitive feature of the post-Cold War but, contra Fukuyama, by no means post-ideological world (Fukuyama 1989; Huntington 1993; Lewis 1990). Westmoreland was, of course, the US military commander who infamously ‘lost’ Vietnam for the United States three decades ago (Jackson 2005). The anthology edited by Ruggie from which his statement is excerpted includes a chapter by Miles Kahler (1994) on the neo-liberal institutional debate on the strengths and weaknesses of ‘big-number’ multilateralism – multilateral institutions with big memberships – versus ‘small-number’ multilateralism, or what in recent IR literature has come to be known as ‘minilateralism’ (Naím 2009; Wright 2009). Whichever way, this intra-neo-liberal debate shares the common belief that multilateralism, big or small, is essentially stabilising. It is interesting that Ruggie, despite his liberal-constructivist inclinations, remains sufficiently attuned to the persistence and prevalence of power-balancing of some form even in the ‘enlightened’ European context (Lang 2006; Ruggie 1995). A twist on the infamous slogan (‘It’s the economy, stupid!’) from Bill Clinton’s US presidential campaign. I am indebted to Itty Abraham for this insight. A question dealt with by Spivak (1988) in her influential essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. Commenting on what he sees as the systematic abandonment in the positivist enterprise of critical reflection precisely due to its domination by instrumental reason, Habermas writes: ‘In following the process of the dissolution of epistemology which has left the philosophy of science in its place, one makes one’s way over abandoned stages of reflection. Retreading this path from a perspective that looks back towards the point of departure may help to recover the forgotten experience of reflection. That we disavow reflection is positivism’ (1971: vii). This raises the question of the wisdom of Robert Keohane’s well-known proposition that there are essentially two kinds of IR scholarship – rationalist and reflectivist (Keohane 1988). Keohane’s move, problematic as it is, inadvertently lends itself to the charge made by Habermas of positivism – which is precisely what Keohane understands rationalism to be – because it does not reflect on its own acts and practices and presuppositions, the very sorts of things to which many reflectivists want to draw attention (Walker 1989a). From the reflections of the late Noordin Sopiee, who chaired Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) and was an eminence grise of the ASEANISIS (author’s interview, 1996). Author’s interviews with various ASEAN-ISIS, CSCAP and PECC intellectuals over the years (1996-present). Proponents of multilateralism contend that multilateral principles and conventions emphasise non-discrimination, freer and fairer competition, better representation and more equitable distribution, all of which arguably ensure greater predictability (Benner 2011). Classic arguments that favour multipolar systems as more stable and

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predictable than bipolar systems include Deutsch and Singer (1964) and Kegley and Raymond (1992). Multilateral security dialogue mechanisms have been viewed with a great deal of apprehension and suspicion by several Asia Pacific nations, especially China and the United States. As Ralph Cossa (1994) of the Pacific Forum CSIS, the ‘licensed’ US institutional member of the CSCAP, has noted, the ‘decided shift in regional attitudes toward, and US support for, multilateral security initiatives in Asia’ are marked by two significant developments: (1) the call within ASEAN (at the instigation of ASEANISIS) for the introduction of security-related issues into its Post-Ministerial Conference (PMC) deliberations, and (2) the April 1993 Senate confirmation hearings of Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Winston Lord, when he identified as one of the Clinton administration’s ten priority policy goals for Asia a commitment to enhanced multilateral security dialogue – a commitment based nonetheless on the belief that bilateral security arrangements in the Asia Pacific could only be supplemented (not replaced) by multilateral security efforts led by friendly and essentially status quo-oriented states. Such an attitudinal shift, Cossa’s analysis implies, would not have been possible had it not been for the end of the Cold War which evidently created a sense of uncertainty that thereby warranted the turn to multilateralisation. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the majority of Asia Pacific security intellectuals are political scientists, diplomatic historians or the occasional economist who received their training in the British and North American traditions (including that in Australia). As such, their educational biases may have predisposed them toward generalities and continuities as preferred ways of organising and making global life meaningful and intelligible. On Southeast Asian IR, see Tan (2009a). An implicit jab, to be sure, at European industrial democracies for their criticisms of the alleged lack of democracy and human rights in Southeast Asian societies and, more interesting from our perspective, a presupposition in no need of critical explanation that ASEAN states, constructed as different from their Western counterparts, treat (or should treat) popular elections as little more than a controversial method for selecting political leaders a la Joseph Shumpeter’s democratic method (Schumpeter & Swedberg 1994). That being said, the substance and speed of the institutionalisation of multilateral cooperation are fiercely debated matters; for example, in its State of the Region 2006-2007 report, the PECC noted that ‘there is considerable disenchantment with [Asia Pacific] regional institutions … PECC’s first survey of its membership on regional cooperation issues shows that among a group that strongly supports regional cooperation, there is concern that economies have not sufficiently invested in regional institutions and that the work of these institutions is not adequately meeting the needs of the region … Regional cooperation and well-functioning regional institutions are essential to meet the challenges of the early 21st century. We believe that Asia Pacific economies need to renew their commitment to institutions … and to take a fresh look at the architecture of regional institutions across the Pacific’ (PECC 2006). This is also a point that Hernandez reiterated to this author in an interview. In the same conversation she further insisted that Southeast Asian leaders might want to consider ‘getting rid of borders and constructing an ASEAN-wide community’. I have in mind here intrepid individuals such as M. Rajaretnam of the Singaporebased Information Resource Centre (IRC) or Jeff Penrose of The Distillery in Australia who regularly travel to the Indochina nations to educate security practitioners and thinkers there in security-related concerns. For example, Jusuf Wanandi of CSIS Indonesia in Jakarta identifies ‘impatience’ as the ‘most significant impediment’ to the successful drawing of a pensive suspicious

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China into the multilateral fold. In particular, Wanandi has fumed about the alleged impatience of the Americans in what he regards as a recipe for instantaneous disaster for indigenous efforts at conflict resolution – an implicit stab at possible American criticism (though not necessarily representative of the official US view) at the pace of Indonesian-moderated Track 2 discussions regarding the South China Sea imbroglio involving most if not all claimants – which explains partly Wanandi’s frustration with what he regards as US impatience (author interview). Remarks made by Carolina Hernandez during a session at the Sixth ASEAN Young Leaders Forum, Manila, 22-25 October 1996. At the practical level, ASEAN leaders recognised that plans to expand the membership of the Association to ten states would create problems. As Wanandi observed, ‘the inclusion of the CLM [Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar] countries into ASEAN will definitely create some strains on the process of decision-making and on the unique “style” of ASEAN’s tolerance, consensus, and political culture. ASEAN leaders acknowledged this and therefore have encouraged the granting of assistance to help the CLM countries immediately and not to wait until they have become members of ASEAN’ (1996b: 3). Elsewhere Wanandi has insisted that, ‘It is important for ASEAN to lay down a road map for the three members [i.e. CLM countries] and to assist and help them adjust to ASEAN’s principles, tradition and the ASEAN way’ (1997: 12). Offering another perspective on this matter, UBC political scientist and ex-CSCAP cochair Brian Job wrote, ‘ASEAN experienced the growing pains associated with bringing into its fold new members (Vietnam and Laos), who both lacked experience in the ASEAN way and were inclined to be more insular and reticent, particularly on any matter that might concern their internal affairs’ (1998: 7). That the ASEAN way can be understood both as a consensus to refrain from mutual comment and interference in each other’s affairs as well as (in Job’s sense) the growing transparency and openness among ASEAN member societies underscores the nonessential-ness of that practice. This is corroborated more or less by a 1993 declaration made by Ali Alatas, former Indonesian foreign minister, where he urged that a nuclear weapons-free pact for post-Cold War Southeast Asia was necessary, that this ‘fits into this new preoccupation of the international community’. In this respect, Alatas also claimed, ASEAN has a plan of action to truly establish the long-held notion of a Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), which is, in his view, evidently based on (1) a regional code of conduct, i.e. the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) of 1976, (2) intra-ASEAN cooperation and cooperation with other states, (3) a blueprint to engage friendly powers in dialogue on political-security matters, and (4) a framework to promote observance of the UN Charter (The Straits Times, 29 July 1993). As Kwa Chong Guan, the elected ASEAN-co-chair of CSCAP for 2011-2013, noted in a private communication with this author, this observation has elicited two common responses. First, for ASEAN sceptics such as Gerald Segal, the intense frenetic activity constitutes nothing more than an instance of ‘more words than deeds’. Second, for cautiously optimistic watchers such as Michael Leifer, it demonstrates the long road ASEAN has travelled to make regionalism a success, but it also reflects the contemporary need for serious institutional reform if the Association wants to achieve equal or greater success in meeting post-Cold War challenges. But there likely is a third possibility not covered by Kwa: the enthusiastic response from ASEAN proponents and advocates who celebrate the institutional successes of the organisation and continue to see its relevance without the concomitant need for major reform. Interestingly, by contrast, former chief of the Indonesian armed forces Feisal Tanjung argued in 1996 that ‘if the spirit of ASEAN solidarity [were] allowed to prevail’ in the Indonesian-Malaysian dispute over Sipadan and Ligitan, the ASEAN way ‘will produce

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better results than international legal arbitration’. Tanjung used the successful peace settlement between the Philippine government and the Moros (which Jakarta helped broker) as an example that regional problems should be settled by ‘indigenous means’ (The Straits Times, 1 September 1996). 37 For a similar argument on the ARF’s institutional inflexibility, see Emmers and Tan (2011). 38 The Thai-Cambodian dispute over the border area surrounding the Preah Vihear temple has led to Phnom Penh seeking clarification from the ICJ concerning its 1962 ruling awarding the temple to Cambodia. This paved the way for a successful effort by Cambodia to have the temple included in the UNESCO World Heritage listing, which occurred in July 2008. On its part, Thailand claims ownership of 4.6 kilometres of land adjacent to the temple. Fighting between Cambodian and Thai forces broke out in February 2011, after which the foreign ministers of both countries appeared before the United Nations Security Council. In April, Phnom Penh submitted a petition for interpretation of the ICJ’s 1962 judgment along with a request for the indication of provisional measures. Mediation efforts by Indonesia at the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in May – pursued at Jakarta’s discretion in its role as chair of ASEAN – initially proved inconclusive. In July, the Court ruled that both countries were to withdraw their troops from a newly defined provisional demilitarised zone around the temple area and to allow ASEAN-appointed observers to enter the zone (see Paragraph 64 of the ICJ order) (ICJ 2011). Further, the two claimant states were to continue working with ASEAN with the latter playing a ‘facilitating’ role in the resolution of the conflict. Both foreign ministers have indicated their respective governments would honour the ICJ’s decision (Antara News 2011). Following the victory by Yingluck Shinawatra, sibling of the ousted Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, at the polls, CambodianThai relations received a welcome lift when the new prime minister visited Phnom Penh in September 2011. Yingluck’s premiership has also raised hopes that other outstanding bilateral concerns between Cambodia and Thailand – such as the demarcation of disputed stretches of their shared border, a process that stalled under Abhisit Vejjajiva’s premiership, and how to share oil and gas in a 27,000-square-kilometer zone in the Gulf of Thailand – could see some progress (Carmichael 2011). The Preah Vihear case also highlighted the influence that domestic forces and alleged nationalist impulses could have on foreign policy. Arguably, the role played by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), the so-called ‘yellow shirts’ – opponents of the populist-inspired ‘red shirts’ who supported Thaksin – in political agitation contributed to the deterioration in Cambodian-Thai relations. 39 I have already quoted Gerald Segal’s pointed jab at the problematic essentialism in the sorts of cultural explanations favoured by some Asian and ASEAN apologists (1995: 107).

5 1

Representing Sovereign States But as the next chapter demonstrates, new albeit limited domains of discursive freedom have opened sufficiently such that alternative subjectivities other than the state have been constituted, none of which pose a serious enough challenge to the state; indeed, many of them have been and are being incorporated into statist discourse such that they have more or less lost their radical transformative power, if any. Moreover, the discourses of these alternative subjectivities are, in the context of IR theory in the main, equally modern in that they depend on the same logocentric principle so fundamental to statist discourse.

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2

For a listing of the items from which the tabled statements were excerpted, see the Appendix. The number in parenthesis at the end of each statement indicates the item from which the former is excerpted. 3 To this, a Chinese security intellectual has responded with the rejoinder that it is ‘wrong to raise fears of malign nationalism [in China] when the US itself is a highly nationalistic state’ (see Table 1C). 4 For example, China has remained relatively quiet in the South China Sea region since the advent of the Asian economic crisis – a possible indication that the Chinese political leadership does not wish to take advantage of the current dilemma some of the other South China Sea (SCS) claimants are facing and forcefully secure their hold on the Spratly and Paracel island chains. On a more recent note, China, at least since 2009, appears to have adopted a more assertive posture vis-à-vis its SCS claims. On China as a reasonable and status quo power, see Johnston (2003). 5 Conversely, Kang (2008) has argued that Ming-period China’s relations with its ‘Sinicised’ neighbours, especially Korea, Japan and Vietnam, were relatively peaceful. 6 The notion of China being ‘governed primarily by men, not law’ has doubtless been reinforced in the minds of the American public through Hollywood movies such as Red Corner (1997), which depicts a convicted American trapped within a Chinese legal system wherein due process does not exist. 7 As ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan has put it, ‘The ball is in Taiwan and China's court. The two sides should sort out a certain way of getting along with each other so we [ASEAN states] can engage and cooperate with both of them without reneging on our “one China” policy’ (CNA 2009). 8 However, Burke was neither a consistent apologist for old-style diplomacy nor an unequivocal defender of monarchical constitutionalism-cum-imperialism. Frequently defending American colonists during the critical years leading up to the War of Independence, his 1775 speech ‘On Reconciliation with America’ earned him the reputation as, in Thomas Paine’s words, ‘America’s greatest friend in England’ (1955: 269n). 9 To be sure, Jusuf Wanandi (1996a) has argued that ASEAN ‘is basically sympathetic to China because it does recognise China’s efforts in taking care of 1.2 billion people’. Yet such an apparently sympathetic gesture in no way precludes the kind of implicit threat discourse – which eschews the explicit use of the ‘threat’ term – practised by ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP security intellectuals, not least by Wanandi himself. 10 The notion of China’s integration with – or entry into – the global economy is obviously problematic in the light of Wallerstein’s work on what he has called the ‘world-capitalist economy’ or the ‘modern world-system’, in which he cogently argues that the Second and Third Worlds, contrary to received wisdom in liberal economics, are effectively integrated into the world capitalist economy, which is hierarchical and organised in terms of a global division of labour comprising core, semi-periphery and periphery. Communist China, as a Third World nation, would have been located in the periphery (Wallerstein 1974). 11 The Obama administration has employed the phrase ‘struggle against violent extremism’ (or SAVE) in place of GWOT, partly as an effort to highlight the counter-insurgency campaign as a lengthy struggle, and partly as an attempt to differentiate its policy, not least rhetorically, from the Bush administration’s (Schmidt & Shanker 2005). The ‘long war’ doctrine officially ended with Obama’s issuance of a new defence strategy at the start of 2012. 12 Ambassador Shi Chun-lai, former chairperson of China CSCAP, once noted to this author that China might not necessarily ‘accept’ US strategic dominance in the Asia Pacific region but could conceivably ‘tolerate’ it for the time being.

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13 Two different articulations of this argument are Van Ness (2002) and Johnston (2003). 14 In the case of the USSR in the Cold War, the US Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), by unreservedly repudiating détente and appropriating ‘Team B’ intelligence estimates during the 1970s, constructed the Soviet Union as a dangerous other principally through the demarcation of ‘radical differences’ between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States and other democracies on the other (Dalby 1988). In CPD language, America and the USSR are fundamentally distinct in ‘history and geography, in … economic conditions and structure, and … political system and ideology’ (Tyroler 1984). 15 For a spirited attempt at distinguishing realism and neo-conservatism, see Mearsheimer (2005). 16 As Jusuf Wanandi (1996a) has intimated, ‘The ASEAN-10 is [sic] looking for a new regional order to be established and has [sic] been very active in looking for ways and means to get China involved in the region, starting with the development of ASEANChina relations’.

6

Representing the ‘In/Human’ Faces of Asia Pacific Security

1

For studies on the ‘sovereign responsibility’ of Asia Pacific states, see Bellamy and Drummond (2011) and S.S. Tan (2011b); on the ‘localisation’ of global norms and conventions of security order and cooperation, see Acharya (2004a). Its initial popularisation in regional discourse has been attributed partly to Chinese security intellectuals deliberating the institutional agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (Capie & Evans 2007: 173-178). Events such as the Indian Ocean tsunamis in 2004, the SARS and H1N1 influenza epidemics in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and terrorist incidents in Bali in 2002, Mumbai in 2008 or Jakarta in 2009 are among the host of concerns regularly cited in NTS-focused literature and discourses vis-à-vis the Asia Pacific. For instance, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction’s office for Asia and Pacific, in calling for ‘robust systems’ to be put in place for dealing with disaster risks in the Asia Pacific region, has encouraged the adoption of a ‘multi-hazard approach’, based on a ‘no regrets’ policy, that is sufficiently holistic (UNISDR Asia and Pacific 2011: 21). What emerged from this was of course the ‘Asian values’ debate, which is covered in chapter 7 of this book. The link between human rights and human security, obvious yet insufficiently explored, is discussed in Frerks and Homan (2008). Such an ethic, if it indeed exists, is arguably driven by strategic as much as, if not more than, normative considerations (Kahler 2000). In neo-liberal and constructivist IR literature, the tension between strategic and normative is discussed in terms of the logics of consequence (strategic) and appropriateness (normative) (Goldman 2005). Significantly, the official emphasis on indigenous regionalism as the preferred regional solution to great power interventionism in Southeast Asia did not preclude the existence of alliance formations and strategic partnerships among ASEAN member countries with the United States (Blackwill & Dibb 2000; Storey, Emmers & Singh 2011; Tow & Acharya 2007). Economically, there was the need to secure and preserve access to foreign markets and to procure foreign investment for domestic economic development. Strategically, there was the need to ensure a collective ‘buy-in’ by the great powers with interests in the Asia Pacific to a particular regional order, and a particular institutional

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architecture in support of that order, in which ASEAN plays a central role. The latter consideration was seen by the ASEAN states as crucial to ensuring the regional peace and stability of the Asia Pacific region, without which the former consideration would not be possible, and vice versa. See Acharya (1997), Bergsten (1997) and Garnaut (1996). The discursive shift here is from the longstanding idea of state sovereignty as an inalienable right – states have rights, period – to that of state sovereignty as a responsibility and obligation – states have responsibilities to their own and possibly other populations (Cooley & Spruyt 2009). Introduced by the Copenhagen School of IR, securitisation ostensibly focuses on ‘societal security’ as conceived within communities but not necessarily confined to state sovereignties (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde 1998). Specifically, it is concerned with ‘how-possible’ questions: how, for example, does the notion of security come about, or how is it politicised within a particular ‘objective’ context. The concept therefore helps us understand why particular issues are securitised as threats to the collective identity of whichever ‘referent object’ is in question, including the state. But this also means that security is necessarily a self-referential enterprise in that it is through securitising practices that a specific issue becomes a security issue. In short, a threat is a threat only because it has been presented as such, not necessarily because there is an actual material or existential basis to it (Tow 2000: 10). The concept has not been without problems (Eriksson 1999; McSweeney 1996). The areas on which ADMM+8 countries have identified include humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, military medicine, maritime security, counterterrorism and peacekeeping operations (Tan 2010). The ten study groups are: 1) the ‘responsibility to protect’; 2) transnational organised crime; 3) counterterrorism; 4) maritime security cooperation; 5) capacity-building for maritime security cooperation; 6) regional peacekeeping and peace-building; 7) safety and security in the Malacca and Singapore Straits; 8) safety and security of offshore oil and gas installations; 9) energy security; and 10) human trafficking. In this regard, the Indian-American journalist and author, Fareed Zakaria, known for his ‘offensive-realist’ view of international affairs, has made this claim, surprising given his ideological orientation: ‘The hundreds of organisations that help coordinate countries’ policies on everything from trade to disease prevention to environmental protection are all new creatures in international life, and they have created a world of greater peace and prosperity than humans have ever known’ (Zakaria 2012: 20). Likewise, in the quest to address global rebalancing, the PECC’s State of the Region 2010-2011 report has identified a number of potential growth engines for the Asia Pacific – regulatory reform of services, the financing and provision of infrastructure, development of a low-carbon economy, capital market reforms to allocate capital resources more efficiently – among others, over which, the report’s authors argue, the APEC should mobilise collective action (PECC 2010). The PECC International Project on marine resources management has also urged collective action in response to climate change and its devastating impact on the seas and oceans of the Asia Pacific (PECC 2011). Indeed, though such ramifications for sovereignty are, in philosophical terms at least, no less severe than in the case of traditional military-security challenges for states, it does seem as if national security planners and managers regard the former as less threatening to state sovereignty. As the 2003 report, Human Security Now, prepared by the Commission on Human Security has put it, ‘The aim of human security is to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfilment. Human security means protecting fundamental freedoms – freedoms that are the essence of life’

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(2003: 4). The UNDP, whose Human Development Report 1994 did much to propagate the concept, identifies two particular ‘freedoms’ every individual should rightfully regard as her or his due, namely, freedom from fear (insecurity) and from want (privation) – ‘the absence of anxiety upon which the fulfilled life depends’, as Cicero has put it (cited in Evans 2004: 263). They are: 1) economic security (assured basic income); 2) food security (access to food); 3) health security (freedom from disease and infection); 4) environmental security (access to sanitary water, clean air, non-degraded land); 5) personal security (freedom from violence and threats); 6) community security (secure cultural identity); and 7) political security (basic human rights and freedoms) (UNDP 1994). For a study on the shift in attitudes between militaries and NGOs regarding collaboration in peace operations in the Southeast Asian region, see Tan (2005b). See Kenneth Waltz’s excellent discussion on the three levels of analysis (1959). See especially the arguments on the points of convergence between realists and liberals in Connolly (1991), Latham (1996) and Wæver (1996). For an earlier definition and conceptualisation of the R2P, see ICISS (2001). As a former defence minister of Singapore once noted, ‘The “responsibility to protect” is different. [R2P] was discussed extensively at the UN World Summit in 2005. That responsibility is very specifically defined to cover instances of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. I think, here, we are talking generally about the responsibility of governments to provide. And in the end, it is the people in the country and in the international community who will be the ultimate judge of whether or not governments of those countries have lived up to their responsibilities’ (MINDEF 2008). Even then, analysts such as Caballero-Anthony and Chng (2009), in calling their revised notion ‘R2P-Plus’, carefully avoid attacking the R2P idea head on, thereby largely preserving its conceptual integrity. According to John Gershman, whom many have credited as the first to refer to Southeast Asia as the ‘second front’: ‘With the Taliban in Afghanistan having been routed, Southeast Asia – home to radical Islamist groups such as the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), Abu Sayyaf, and the Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia (KMM) – was starting to seem like the new home base for the terrorist movement that had brought down the World Trade Centre’ (2002: 60). See, Jones and Smith (2002b) and Wright-Neville (2003), while Ganguly (2009) argues the same in the case of interstate counterterrorism cooperation in South Asia. For a contrarian view on the structure of Al-Qaeda, see Burke (2003). In this instance, abjection is painted through representational practices that Alastair Crooke (2006) has described as the ‘new Orientalism’: ‘The West is now defined by its opposition to terrorism and as a defender of civilisation. The war on terrorism has transformed orientalism, from a European-based vision of modernity that could be used to “domesticate” non-Europeans, into a program that establishes a frontier between “Civilisation” and “the new Barbarism”. The new “Orientalism” offers us new political tools. Since the “new barbarians” live outside of civilisation, civilised rules no longer apply to them: if “they” win elections they can still not be part of “us” – office holders and parliamentarians can be abducted and interned without a murmur; members of “barbarian” movements can be arrested and taken away for imprisonment and torture in other countries, and barbarian leaders, whether or not legitimately elected, can be assassinated at the pleasure of western leaders. They “abduct” us, we “arrest” them’. In the eyes of their critics, Rohan Gunaratna and Zachary Abuza have, fairly or otherwise, become the archetypes of such counterterrorism ideologues. The label comes from Australian academics Carlyle Thayer and Greg Fealy, who used it in a presentation at the Australian National University in August 2006 to describe

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the team of counterterrorism analysts, led by Rohan Gunaratna, at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. The book in question is Conflict and Terrorism in Southern Thailand (2005) by Arabinda, Chua and Gunaratna. See the book’s earlier discussion on domestication and de-politicisation in chapter 4. Rather than ‘a more extreme version of politicisation’, securitisation renders existential threats (and the ‘emergency measures’ for dealing with such) ‘outside the normal bounds of political procedure’ and beyond public debate and, indeed, view – in short, de-politicisation (Edkins 1999: 11). Indeed, whether all self-professed positivist-rationalist scholarship plays by its own rules is a point of contention (Alker 1990).

Representing the ‘Authority’ of Knowledge Networks By identifying, in the most tenuous of fashions, the interpretive communities in question – themselves as ‘effects of effects’ – as the nonoriginary origins of the state by means of statecraft, it is hoped that, in propounding its thesis, this book will resist subversion by the very explanation-based logic it seeks to deconstruct, not to demolish, with an interpretive turn. In doing so, it bears reminding that this author is in no way advocating free interpretive play ‘all the way down’. Nevertheless, I want to be clear that what is not being proposed here is the structuration argument popularised by Alexander Wendt, which locates agency and practice only insofar as they fit into an already established opposition of either the structure of a social totality or the ‘utter contingency and arbitrariness of history’ (Ashley 1989: 277). In doing so, structurationism accommodates agency and practice as a ‘supplement’ to a fundamentally structuralist account of IR as a way to control for contingent events that threaten to escape or undo the supposed hegemony of structures that purely structuralist and/or deterministic accounts of international relations posit. In 1998, Sheldon Simon conducted a series of interviews with Malaysian security intellectuals and practitioners, most, if not all, of whom identified the then ongoing economic crisis as the singular concern that had the full attention of Kuala Lumpur. There was, as Simon noted, a collective and quite palpable sense of helplessness not felt in the region since the moment of ASEAN’s inception back in 1967 (Simon 1998). This is an oft-cited reason or justification offered by second-trackers for avoiding engagement with civil society during the 1990s or at least prior to the creation of, say, the ASEAN Peoples’ Assembly (APA). For example, the late Gerald Segal was but one of the more eminent Track 2 members who expressed concern over potentially compromising Track 2 processes were it to be more inclusive. In particular, Malaya Ronas has argued that social movements and NGOs, particularly those concerned about human rights abuses in Indonesian-controlled East Timor, should be excluded from the Track 2 process precisely because of their radical demands (author interview). As Alagappa (2003: ix) has noted, the bulk of Track 2 work is highly empirical and policy-oriented, with few if any theoretical and conceptual bases. Notably, Jim Rolfe and David Dickens of New Zealand (author interviews). On the generative or productive potential of multilateral security dialogues in rendering possible the taken-for-granted social realities of global life specifically in the context of the Asia Pacific, see what David Dessler (1989) has called the ‘constitutive’ as opposed to the merely ‘regulative’ rules governing international politics as understood

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within IR theory. See also the classic statement on the constitutive/regulative distinction by John Rawls (1955). This brings to mind Wight’s oft-cited view of IR as all about the ‘recurrence and repetition’ of war and diplomacy (1960). Mahbubani’s work, Can Asians Think?, is a volume of essays which includes some of the following articles Mahbubani has published through various venues (Mahbubani 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1997). Marc Anthony’s ominous prediction of impending war, issued over Caesar’s corpse: ‘Cry “Havoc”, and let slip the dogs of war’ (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I, Line 270). ASEAN-EC ties continued to stall until the EC’s decision to backtrack to a more pragmatic stance at the Eleventh ASEAN-EC ministerial meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, in September 1994 (Rüland & Storz 2008: 7-8). The label is used in Jones (1994). Other than Lee Kuan Yew’s well known apology on behalf of Asian/Confucian ‘values’ (Lee 1992; Zakaria 1993), other prominent Singaporeans who engaged in the debate include Kausikan (1993, 1997), Koh (1999) and Mahbubani (1992, 1995a). Pro-liberal democracy contentions include Kim Dae Jung (1994), the former president of South Korea, and Ng (1997). Clara Joewono of Indonesia’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (author interview). The military junta’s previous displays of political liberalisation, subsequently abandoned, gives pause to assessments regarding the present developments (Steinberg 1993). Such discursive systems of exclusion and integration find their parallels in the variety of modes through which society tames and disciplines potentially resistant members by excluding and disciplining them and, subsequently, reincorporating them back into society as useful and productive citizens. In short, they are neutered and rendered safe. One such parallel, for Foucault, is that of the task of the university to discipline what to his mind is the most potentially risky group within society – college-age men – through two modalities. First, a function of exclusion – ‘isolated’ from society, fed ‘academic’ knowledge, organised around hierarchical relationships and examinations, thereby rendering them ‘neutralised by and for society, rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politically castrated’. Second, when they eventually become ‘absorbable’, they are reintroduced back to society via a function of inclusion and recuperation (Foucault 1996: 69-70).

Conclusion: A Plea in Three Parts As Rorty has written concerning this debate, ‘It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard were so afraid of being caught up in one more meta-narrative about the fortunes of “the subject” that they cannot bring themselves to say “we” long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong’ (1985: 174). Also see Habermas (1985). As Harold Nicolson, in his seminal statement on diplomacy, has written: ‘it is not religion which has been the main formative influence in diplomatic theory: it is common sense’ (1963: 24). On the other hand, understanding common sense as a complex, dynamic product of history, Antonio Gramsci argues that it is ‘not something rigid or immobile but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life’ (1971: 326). Rather,

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common sense is ‘the folklore of philosophy, and is always halfway between folklore properly and the philosophy, science and economics of the specialists’. The Gospel of Matthew (Holy Bible), Chapter 18, vv. 1-4.

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Index

abject/abjection 17, 22, 24, 45, 52-55, 76-85, 97-109, 112, 129, 131, 135139, 148-152 Acharya, Amitav 29, 31-33, 35-41, 138 Abu Sayyaf 149-150 Abuza, Zachary 149 Adler, Emanuel 30, 32, 35-39 ADMM see ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting ADMM+8 see ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus Eight agency as political prerogative 21, 46, 55-57, 59 agents of representation 45-62 agents of security 22, 46, 52 AICHR see ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights Ajami, Fouad 64 Almonte, Jose T. 103 Al-Qaeda 137, 149-150 American exceptionalism 128 analytical eclecticism 188 anarchical society 166 anarchy as background condition 64, 180 anarchy as a principle 173 anarchy as a problem 181 anarchy, domestic 125 anarchy, international/Hobbesian 15, 31-35, 39, 43-44, 65, 82, 115 Anderson, Benedict 32 APEC see Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation aporia 66

ARF see ASEAN Regional Forum ASEAN-ISIS see ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies ASEAN Charter 105 ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus Eight (ADMM+8) 139, 148, 160, 198 ASEAN exceptionalism 105 ASEAN Free Trade Agreement/Area (AFTA) 73 ASEAN identity 35-36 ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) 147-148 ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEANISIS) 17, 22, 47-48, 59, 70-74, 88, 113, 159-166, 174-177 ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) 49, 103, 159 ASEAN peace process 37 ASEAN Peoples’ Assembly (APA) 166, 200 ASEAN Plus Three (APT) 69, 100, 160, 187 ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference (ASEAN-PMC) 70, 74, 193 ASEAN, primus inter pares 102 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) 47, 70, 83, 89, 139, 160, 169 ASEAN, spirit of 36, 100, 194 ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) 70, 194 ASEAN Way 36, 49, 100-108, 194

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Ashley, Richard K. 39, 69, 86, 114, 188 Asia Pacific community 106, 156 Asia Pacific constructivism 158, 180 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 69, 73-74, 86, 89, 100, 104, 140, 156, 160, 165, 191, 198 Asia Pacific idea 13, 69, 187 Asia Pacific regionalism 28, 100, 165 Asia Pacific Political Dialogue 70 Asia Pacific Roundtable 88, 115, 165 Asian financial crisis 49, 135, 174 Asian values 136, 142, 173-174 Association of Southeast Asian Nations see ASEAN Auden, W.H. 16 axiological 63, 124, 189 Ba, Alice D. 97 Badawi, Abdullah A. 95-96, 165 balance of power 32-33, 77-79, 82, 95-96, 116, 121 Ball, Terence 87 Ban, Ki-moon 147 Bangkok Declaration, ASEAN’s founding 103 Bangkok Declaration of Human Rights 175-176 Barthes, Roland 185 Baudrillard, Jean 30 Bautista, Maria Cynthia Rose B. 94 Bernstein, Richard J. 187 Betts, Richard K. 82 Bhabha, Homi K. 15-16 bilateralism 73, 77 bin Laden, Osama 149 Booth, Ken 179 boundaries, making/unmaking of 32, 35-39, 51, 60, 75, 111-115, 142, 153, 160-164, 167, 171, 177, 183-184 Bourdieu, Pierre 134 Bull, Hedley 66-67, 189 Burke, Edmund 124-125, 196

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Burma/Myanmar 70, 99, 108, 174, 176, 194 Bush, George W. 131, 148, 196 Busse, Nikolas 36 Butler, Judith 19, 21, 46, 59, 129, 176 Buzan, Barry 145-146 Campbell, David 30, 129-130, 157158 Can Asians Think? 201; see also Kishore Mahbubani Cartesian, anxiety 187 Cartesian, fixed point 85 Chatterjee, Partha 62 civil society 14, 23, 143-144, 151, 156, 158, 165-166, 169, 200 Clifford, Michael 167 Clinton administration/presidency 128-129 co-determined see mutual constitution collective identity 32, 35-39, 183, 198 collective subject 155-156, 159-161 Commission on Human Security 142, 198 Committee on the Present Danger 125, 197 common security 169 comprehensive security 48-49, 71, 138, 141-142, 165, 189-190 Conference/Organization of Security and Economic Cooperation in Europe (CSCE/OSCE) 41, 78, 82, 105 confidence building 33, 49, 71, 7778, 83, 119, 133, 165 confidence and security building measure/mechanism (CSBM) 71, 100, 106 Consortium of Non-Traditional Security Studies in Asia (NTS-Asia) 17, 22, 143-144

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INDEX

constructive engagement 118, 174, 176 cooperative security 47-48, 89, 96, 107, 138-139, 165, 169, 190 Cossa, Ralph A. 193 Council for Security Cooperation in Asia Pacific (CSCAP) 17, 22, 4748, 59, 70-74, 87, 89, 100, 106, 113, 115, 118, 123-124, 127, 135, 139141, 146-151, 159-162, 187, 190 counter-narrative 16, 22, 48, 76, 97, 109, 137-138, 152 counterterrorism 22, 133, 140-141, 148-152, 198-200 critical constructivism 29 CSCAP see also Council for Security Cooperation in Asia Pacific CSCAP Regional Security Outlook (CRSO) 141 Cyclone Nargis 143

East Asian Community 156 East Asia Summit (EAS) 100, 122, 166 Eaton, Sarah 31 Enlightenment 62, 125, 182 epistemic agency/agent 15, 18-22, 45-58, 155, 159, 176 epistemic community 86, 117, 120 epistemology/epistemological 30, 33, 41-42, 46, 58, 63, 83, 164, 181, 183, 185, 187-189, 192 Eriksson, Johan 59 essence 21, 89-90, 100, 114, 180-182 essentialism 19-27, 43-44, 46-57, 153, 180, 195 Europe 76-85 European Community 77-78, 98, 173 European Union 80, 136 Evans, Gareth 104, 156, 192

Dalby, Simon 65 Dayton Accord 80 de-centring 63 deconstruction 29, 43, 61-62, 83, 157, 200 Der Derian, James 125, 189 Derrida, Jacques 59 détente 197 determinism, causal 29, 45, 58-59, 200 determinism, ideational/linguistic/ normative 30, 188; see also indeterminism discourse 57-67 discursive practice 20, 22, 59, 171, 173 domesticating security 152-153 domesticating subjectivity 152-153 Doty, Roxanne Lynn 101, 142, 188 doxic 93 Dunkel, Arthur 73

Falk, Richard 15 Fanon, Frantz 84 Fish, Stanley 56-57 Food Security Expert Group 140 Foucault, Michel 16, 19, 34, 53, 61, 117, 129, 134, 160, 165, 167, 182, 185, 188-189, 201 French Revolution 124-125 Friedberg, Aaron L. 79-81, 84 Frost, Robert 179 Fukushima 136 Fuss, Diana 84

EAS see East Asia Summit

Habermas, Ju¨rgen 86, 182, 192

genealogy of regionalism 53 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 73 George, Jim 167 global war on terrorism (GWOT) 130, 149, 196 Gramsci, Antonio 179, 201 GWOT see global war on terrorism

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Hawke, Bob 74 Helsinki process 77-78 hermeneutics of suspicion 37, 54 Hernandez, Carolina G. 47, 102, 193-194 Ho, Szu-yin 96 Hobbes, Thomas/Hobbesian 37, 78, 82, 87, 143 Human Development Report 1994 136-137, 199 human rights 24, 41, 101, 107, 128129, 136, 147-148, 163, 165, 169, 173-176, 193, 197, 200 human/humanising security 17, 2324, 135-152, 166, 197-198 Huntington, Samuel P. 64, 192 ICJ see International Court of Justice ‘ideas all the way down’ 30, 40-43, 57, 61-62 imaginary, geopolitical 24 imagined community 32, 53-54, 157 imitation community 50, 161 indeterminism 59-62, 134 Indonesian Confrontation/konfrontasi 123, 168 inferior/lesser subject 129, 164 inhuman/inhumane 125, 137, 143, 148 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) 48, 52-53 institutionalism 39, 49, 51, 105 instrumentality 49-52 intellectuals/practitioners of statecraft 14, 49, 58, 74, 85, 93, 113, 133, 153, 164, 173 International Court of Justice (ICJ) 105, 106, 195 International Labour Organisation 105 interpretive community 55-67, 61, 96, 158 inter-subjectivity 43, 114, 188

THE MAKING OF THE ASIA PACIFIC

intertextuality 58, 76, 82, 88, 104, 109, 123, 128, 133 Jayasuriya, Kanishka 52-55 Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) 149, 199 JI see Jemaah Islamiyah Job, Brian L. 194 Joewono, Clara 175 Jones, David Martin 49-53 Kant, Immanuel 158 Katsumata, Hiro 33, 41-42, 47 Katzenstein, Peter J. 30-35, 39-40, 43-44, 188 Keohane, Robert O. 31, 39, 192 ketahanan nasional see national resilience Khoman, Thanat 102 knowing agent 53 knowledge broker 14-24, 45-47, 52, 59, 74, 155, 177, 179 knowledgeable practice 59-61, 92, 111, 114, 133-135, 158, 183 Koh, Tommy 156 Krasner, Stephen D. 31 Krue Se Mosque massacre 150 Kwa, Chong Guan 194 Kyle, Jon 128-130 Laclau, Ernesto 57 language of regionalism 52-53 Lee, Kuan Yew 102, 123, 174, 201 Leifer, Michael 31, 37, 51, 177, 194 Le´vinas, Emmanuel 182-183 liberalism/neoliberalism 29, 36, 164, 182 limit-attitude 30, 55, 180 Ligitan 105, 194 long peace 104 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 182, 201 Machiavelli, Nicolo 37 Mack, Andrew 181

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233

INDEX

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Mahbubani, Kishore 80, 170-174, 201 Malaysian Emergency 123 Malik, Adam 102 mandalas 156 materialism/materiality 19, 34, 75, 93, 140 Matsunaga, Nobuo 156 Meinecke, Friedrich 169 metalepsis 20 meta-narrative 37, 139, 201 meta-theory 36 mockery of human agency 30, 40, 42, 55, 152 Mohamad, Mahathir 80, 98, 107108, 174 Morgenthau, Hans 37 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) 149 Mouffe, Chantal 58 multilateral security 18, 47, 70-72, 87-100, 160, 193, 200 multilateralism/multilateralisation 32, 73-74, 78-79, 89, 99, 101-107, 121, 137, 140, 192-193 musjawarah and mufakat 105-106 mutual constitution 39, 41-42 Nakasone, Yasuhiro 95 Narine, Shaun 38-39 national resilience 141 naturalization see essentialism Network of East Asian Think-tanks (NEAT) 187 Neumann, Iver B. 52, 54 new regionalism 137 Nietzschean trap 20 non-governmental actors/bodies 23, 70, 89, 156, 160 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 163, 165-166, 199-200 non-interference 41, 48, 100-101, 137, 147-148

non-state actors/agents/subjectivities 14, 17, 19, 23, 47, 52, 58, 69, 144, 155, 158-164 non-traditional/non-traditionalising security 22-23, 135-142 normalise/normalisation 168 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 73 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 78, 82, 101, 105 ‘nothing but the text’ 19, 30, 57, 59, 61-62 NTS see non-traditional/nontraditionalising security NTS-Asia see Consortium of NonTraditional Security Studies in Asia Obama, Barack 122, 176, 196 originary/nonoriginary 39, 58, 200, ‘one Southeast Asia’ 35-35, 38, 156 ontology/ontological 67, 73, 77, 90, 112, 114, 117, 120-121, 133, 138-139, 142, 146, 161-162, 168-172, 176, 181, 183, 185, 188, ontological priority 43-44, 158-159, 164 Onuf, Nicholas G. 29 open regionalism 73-74, 87, 137, 165, 191 orchestration, conductor-less 87, 134 Orient/Oriental 65, 77, 84 Orientalising/Orientalism/Orientalist 65, 84, 129, 187, 199 other/otherness 62, 65, 67, 126, 129-130, 132-133, 159, 172, 183 Outcome document (UN World Summit 2005) 146 Pacific Asia 13, 69, 105, 121, 135, 188 Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) 73, 89 Pacific Century 15 Pacific Cooperation 181

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234 Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) 17, 22, 48, 59, 70, 73-74, 86, 99-100, 141, 156, 159-160, 187, 191 Pacific Trade and Development Conference (PAFTAD) 73 Palan, Ronen 38, 40, 188 Pangestu, Mari 73 Paracel islands 196 Paribatra, Sukhumbhand 81, 91-92 participatory regionalism 74, 138, 166 passive subject see abject/abjection PECC see Pacific Economic Cooperation Council Pedra Branca 105 People’s Action Party 54 Peou, Sorpong 31, 36, 143 Pitsuwan, Surin 142, 144, 146, 196 placement of subjects see positioning of subjects policy community 52, 58, 86, 90, 115, 117, 120, 156 politics of representation 16-19, 2223 positioning of subjects 64-67, 7983, 94-108, 126-127 positivism 33, 42, 86-87, 152, 164, 181, 187, 192, 200; see also rationalism post-Cold War uncertainty/ opportunity 85-108 postmodernism 30, 34, 42, 49, 182 practical cooperation 139 practices of statecraft 20, 48, 59, 61, 75, 111-115, 125, 133, 158, 170-172, 175; see also representational practices praxeology/praxeological 63, 83, 124, 189 Preah Vihear 106, 195 predication 63-64, 78-79, 91-94, 122-126

THE MAKING OF THE ASIA PACIFIC

presupposition 63-64, 77-78, 89-91, 115-122 preventive diplomacy 48, 71, 83, 139, 165, 167, 169 problem of subjectivity 27-30, 39, 44, 57, 180-182 problem-driven 33 problem-solving 86, 132 protection of civilians (POC) 135, 146 Pulau Batu Puteh see Pedra Branca radical constructivism 92, 112, 115, 158 raison d’état 153, 166, 169-172 Rajaratnam, Sinnathamby 102 Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) 48, 190, 200 rationalism 20, 27-34, 37, 39-49, 5861, 86, 152, 158, 181, 187, 192-200, 204; see also positivism rationalist/mainstream constructivism 187 Razak, Tun Abdul 102 realism/realpolitik/hyperrealism/neorealism 15, 17, 21, 27-39, 44, 51, 58, 94-96, 119-121, 127, 132, 146, 152, 164, 170, 198 region-making 29, 35-36 regional identity 32, 36, 38-39, 44, 49, 52, 54 reification see essentialism re-incitement 129, 165-167 reinforcement 167-168 reinstatement 167-169 representational practice 51, 57-62, 67, 107, 112, 125, 134, 155, 159, 179, 199 rereading 185 responsibility to protect (R2P) 2324, 146-148, 152, 199 re-visioning sovereignty 139, 146148 revolution 165-167

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235

INDEX

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Rice, Condoleeza 131 rogue states/nations 64, 128-133 Rolfe, Jim 48, 200 Romulo, Roberto 100 Rorty, Richard 201 Rosenau, James N. 113 RSIS see Rajaratnam School of International Studies Ruggie, John Gerard 77-84, 102, 192 Said, Edward W. 57, 65, 84, 129, 152, 184 San Francisco Declaration and Accompanying Statement 73 Sartre, Jean-Paul 84 scholar-bureaucrat 49-52, 182 Scott, James C. 53, 189 second front (of terrorism) 148-152, 199 security community 32, 35-36, 82, 102, 105, 161 security studies community 33, 45, 48-56, 155, 158, 162, 168 Segal, Gerald 49, 194, 200 self-formation 159-160, 165, 169-173 self-governance 162-169 self-government 159, 170 self-other 84 self-production/promotion see selfformation self-referencing/referential 150, 159, 198 self-regulation 169-173 self-representation 176-177 semi-official narrative 16, 48, 170 Severino, Rudolph 105 Shafie, Ghazalie 97 Shapiro, Michael J. 65, 120 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 16 Sheridan, Greg 150 SIIA see Singapore Institute of International Affairs Simon, Sheldon W. 200

Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA) 48, 190 ‘Singapore School’ of Asian values 174 ‘Singapore School’ of counterterrorism 150 Sipadan 105, 194 Smith, Michael L.R. 49-53 Smith, Steve 188 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 59, 61, 158, 192 Solana, Javier 136 Sopiee, Noordin 92, 192 Stubbs, Richard 31 South China Sea 87-88, 116-119, 122, 194, 196 Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (SEANWFZ) 105 Southeast Asian community 103, 156 Southeast Asian constructivism 188 sovereign actors/agents/subjectivities 53-54, 179, 181, 183-184 sovereignty as responsibility 146148 Spratly islands 196 State of the Region (PECC reports) 99-100, 141-142, 193, 198 strategic uncertainty 76, 86-92, 101, 107, 122, 126 struggle against violent extremism (SAVE) 196 subject emerging in history 46, 54, 69, 155 superior subject 79, 82, 97-100, 126 Suharto 102 Taiwan Straits 88 talk shops 101, 104, 161 Tay, Simon S.C. 100, 166 Team B 197 Teleology/teleological 28, 37, 103104, 170 terrorism 93, 130, 136, 148-152

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236 The Culture of National Security 34; see also Katzenstein, Peter J. The Environment and Human Rights in International Relations 175; see also ASEAN-ISIS Thein Sein 176 Thucydides 37 Todorov, Tzevetan 62-63, 83, 124, 189 Tow, William 146 Track 1/first-track 16, 18, 72, 160, 177, 187 Track 2/second-track 16-20, 27-28, 48, 70-76, 143, 164 transcendental subject 19, 158 transnationalism/transnational 2223, 71, 75-76, 90, 111, 141-142, 151152, 155, 165 United Nations Charter 147, 194 United Nations Security Council 195

voluntarist subject 29, 35, 42 voluntarist interactionist 35 Wahhabism/Deobandism 149 Walker, R.B.J. 33 Wallace, William 50 Wallerstein, Immanuel 196 Wanandi, Jusuf 96, 193-194, 196197 Weber, Cynthia 158, 188 Wendt, Alexander 30-43, 188-189, 200 Westmoreland, William 76-77, 192 whole-of-nation/whole-of-region 144 Wight, Martin 167, 192, 201 Wolfowitz, Paul 131-132 Wong, Kan Seng 104 World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna Conference) 136 World Summit 146, 199 Yamamoto, Tadashi 158 Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) 194

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Vienna Conference see World Conference on Human Rights

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Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,

Publications Series

Josine Stremmelaar and Paul van der Velde (eds.): What about Asia? Revisiting Asian Studies 2006 (ISBN 978 90 5356 959 7)

Monographs Duncan McDuie-Ra: Northeast Migrants in Delhi. Race, Refuge and Retail Monographs 9, 2012 (ISBN 978 90 8964 422 0) Eka Srimulyani: Women from Traditional Islamic Educational Institutions in Indonesia. Negotiating Public Spaces Monographs 8, 2012 (ISBN 978 90 8964 421 3) Kah Seng Loh, Edgar Liao, Cheng Tju Lim and Guo-Quan Seng: The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya. Tangled Strands of Modernity Monographs 7, 2012 (ISBN 978 90 8964 409 1)

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Olena Mykal: The EU-Japan Security Dialogue. Invisible but Comprehensive Monographs 6, 2011 (ISBN 978 90 8964 163 2) Chaiyakorn Kiatpongsan: The EU-Thailand Relations. Tracing the Patterns of New Bilateralism Monographs 5, 2011 (ISBN 978 90 8964 164 9) Rituparna Roy: South Asian Partition Fiction in English. From Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh Monographs 4, 2010 (ISBN 978 90 8964 245 5) Jeroen de Kloet: China with a Cut. Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music Monographs 3, 2010 (ISBN 978 90 8964 162 5) Masae Kato: Women’s Rights? The Politics of Eugenic Abortion in Modern Japan Monographs 2, 2009 (ISBN 978 90 5356 793 7)

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Alex McKay: Their Footprints Remain. Biomedical Beginnings Across the Indo-Tibetan Frontier Monographs 1, 2007 (ISBN 978 90 5356 518 6)

Edited Volumes Barak Kalir and Malini Sur (eds.): Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities. Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia Edited Volumes 7, 2012 (ISBN 978 90 8964 408 4) Gregory Bracken (ed.): Aspects of Urbanization in China. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou Edited Volumes 6, 2012 (ISBN 978 90 8964 398 8) Dipika Mukherjee and Maya Khemlani David (eds.): National Language Planning and Language Shifts in Malaysian Minority Communities Edited Volumes 5, 2011 (ISBN 978 90 8964 271 4) Birgit Abels (ed.): Austronesian Soundscapes. Performing Arts in Oceania and Southeast Asia Edited Volumes 4, 2011 (ISBN 978 90 8964 085 7) Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner (ed.): Frameworks of Choice. Predictive and Genetic Testing in Asia Edited Volumes 3, 2010 (ISBN 978 90 8964 165 6)

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Wen-Shan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu (eds.): Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration. Demographic Patterns and Social Issues Edited Volumes 2, 2010 (ISBN 978 90 8964 054 3) Gijsbert Oonk (ed.): Global Indian Diasporas. Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory Edited Volumes 1, 2007 (ISBN 978 90 5356 035 8)

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p u b li cat i o n s se r ie s Monographs 10

The Making of the Asia Pacific: Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation is about the power of narratives in shaping the ‘world’ of the post-cold war Asia Pacific. Laden with economic, social and political meaning, policy and academic discourses authorise and provoke certain understandings about the region, while preventing counter-narratives from emerging. By no means free-floating, they are tied to the particular interests and ideologies of their narrators and users. This book critically examines the purposes, practices, power relations and protagonists behind policy networks such as the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council. In decoding the conventional lore advanced by established international relations narratives on the Asia Pacific, The Making of the Asia Pacific points the way to a more democratic knowing, doing and being vis-à-vis the region.

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See Seng Tan is associate professor, deputy director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, and head of the Centre for Multi­ lateralism Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

isbn 978 90 8964 477 0 amsterdam university press www.aup.nl

Tan, See Seng. The Making of the Asia Pacific : Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation, Amsterdam University Press,