Suchergebnisse

Discusses US-Asia relations, emphasizing issues of security cooperation & economic integration. The proposal for a "Concert of Asia" is examined in terms of its potential to effect peaceful economic & political change. The proposed "Concert of Asia" is compared & contrasted with the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe, & it is demonstrated that Asia's heterogeneity & geographic diversity would ensure an even less successful alliance than was the case of its earlier European counterpart. Moreover, the present state of US hegemony dominates in the region & is still central to dealing with change in an unstable economic & strategic environment. There are no practical or theoretical benefits to the proposed "Concert of Asia"; rather, what is necessary to oversee Asia-Pacific security is the continuing primacy of US power. K. Coddon

The prevailing scholarly orthodoxy regarding recent diplomatic initiatives in the Asia-Pacific assumes that East Asia is evolving into a distinctive regional community. The orthodoxy attributes this development to the growing influence of the diplomatic practices espoused by the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) and its related institutions. However, a paradox remains, namely: despite the failure of ASEAN's distinctive practice to fulfil its rhetorical promise in Southeast Asia both immediately prior to and in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, it is nevertheless considered sufficient to validate the projection of ASEAN defined norms onto a wider Pacific canvas. This study analyses how an academic preference for constructivism has misinterpreted the growth in official rhetoric extolling East Asian regionalism since 1997 in a way that has helped produce and reinforce this paradox. By contrast, we contend that government declarations of a developing East Asian identity actually serve to obscure the continuation of traditional interstate relations and do not herald any wider, let alone inexorable, movement towards an integrated regional community.

This article provides an indictment of the study of Southeast Asian international relations by confronting head-on the problems that have arisen within this field, in particular the way in which Western academics ended up colluding with deeply illiberal regimes in the area, which excluded dissenting opinions, often by deliberately denouncing these opinions as "polemical." This study uses the discipline of Sovietology to explore the reasons why Southeast Asian studies developed into a closed community of scholarship, often hostile to dissenting viewpoints. The disciplines bear comparison because they both manifestly failed to predict the cataclysms that befell their respective areas of study. The analysis identifies similarities in the way in which the two disciplines seemed to ignore skeptical voices & evolved a shared belief in "system stability." As a result, both Soviet studies & the study of Southeast Asian international relations developed serious methodological flaws. However, this study argues that Southeast Asian studies suffered even more severe disciplinary shortcomings than its Sovietological counterpart because the academic space was further de-intellectualized by the pervasive influence of the authoritarian Southeast Asian developmental state which blurred the distinction between scholarship & bureaucracy & which succeeded in co-opting Western academics. The result was to create a field of study that promulgated the tyranny of the single truth, which erroneously perceived Southeast Asia as a region of domestic tranquility & regional order. What, in fact, emerged was an intellectual culture of self-censorship that kept Southeast Asian studies within tacit, self-regulated boundaries. Adapted from the source document.