Telo M. European Union and New Regionalism. Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era
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European Union and New Regionalism
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4. A crucial role for global civil governance in all policy areas. In this four-
column approach of global governance political regionalization is attributed
an outstanding role for one of its democratic backbones. In this concept
global citizenship seems to be conceived as a composition of modern and
post-modern elements.
Obviously all three of these strategic designs of democratic global governance
draw on concepts of global citizenship that require, institutionalize and reinforce
new forms of multi-level political identity, i.e. new forms of citizenship at the
national, the regional and the global level that are built amid continuous patterns
of cultural diversity among the citizens addressed. The EU itself is a prominent
case in point.
7 Citizenship, multiculturalism and integration in the EU
For most of the European societies the problems connected with social and political
integration of multicultural communities have gained top relevance in recent years
following a series of serious signs of disintegration even in countries like the
Netherlands that have for a long time been considered as outstanding examples
of admirable success stories in intercultural social integration. This development
appears in the wake of three interrelated experiences that have started to puzzle
European political elites:
1. Right wing populism is reaping the fruits of failing integration and at the
same time actively contributes in its turn to it. It is in almost all European
countries about to become a growing threat to democracy and integration
particularly hitting the democratic parties of the centre left.
2. Apparently all the standard models of handling the challenge of balancing
immigration and integration practiced in various European countries have
failed.
3. In response to failing integration fundamentalist tendencies among cultural
minorities, particularly the Muslim community as the largest group almost
everywhere in Europe are on the increase.
27
Whereas centre left parties up until recently have displayed a conspicuous
inclination to ignore emerging problems of failing integration and stigmatize the
related discourse as typical right wing propaganda, they started after a series of
electoral failures in countries like Austria, the Netherlands or Denmark to realize
that they need to address these issues in a more serious and open minded way. The
two most typical standard models to balance immigration and integration in Europe
have been the French model of assimilation and the Dutch model of unrestrained
multiculturalism. As empirical studies have demonstrated, both models for different
reasons have failed. The French model of civic assimilation leaves little space for
legitimate cultural differences and at the same time does not succeed in assimilating
Cultural Difference, Regionalization and Globalization
69
the migrants sufficiently in social and economic terms. Consequently, it ends up
with massive protest activities, social anomy and severe signs of disintegration. The
Dutch model of unrestrained multiculturalism with the government supporting all
the different cultural communities in their efforts to build closed parallel societies
produces social and economic disintegration and increasing alienation between
the majority society and its cultural minorities. Other societies like Germany have
just begun to acknowledge that they are de facto immigration societies and need
to develop sustainable integration policies. However, the same experience also
reveals that the integration of the vast majority of diverse cultural minorities can
be sufficiently successful under the condition that they are given opportunities to
social and economic participation and leeway to live their own cultural identities
in a democratic framework.
Two questions arise in this situation: first, what are the conditions for successful
social and political integration of culturally diverse societies in the framework of
a democracy under the rule of law; and second; is there enough potentiality in
modern democracies to accommodate all of the diverse cultural religious traditions
by way of a successful strategy of integration.
European experiences with failed integration suggest that all of the pursued
one-dimensional strategies are under-complex. What is needed is a more complex
integrationist approach that comprises three dimensions:
a. the recognition of different ethno-cultural and cultural-religious identities
b. the insistence on the need to accept and develop an overlapping political
culture of democratic cooperation among all communities and
c. the fair participation of all of them in the available social, cultural and
economic opportunities.
As empirical comparison spanning all cultures has shown under certain conditions
that every culture is able to generate currents of fundamentalism alongside the
omnipresent modernizing and the traditionalist ones. As soon as a community
perceives their own members as excluded from the benefits of the society, particularly
when combined with the humiliation of its cultural identity claim its inclination to
take refuge behind fundamentalist identity politics may grow quickly.
28
This seems
to hold as true at the level of national societies as at the regional and global levels
of social relations.
It holds likewise true for all the different religio- cultural and ethno-cultural
communities. In each of them fundamentalism declares war on the two rival
currents of modernism and traditionalism and outside enemies of other cultural
persuasions, unswervingly defending the goal of redeeming the real identity of the
traditional culture from its sullied state and resurrecting it by taking over the reins
of political power and achieving absolute supremacy, so that society is once and for
all rid of the tortuous contradictions of modernization.
Most recent European experience reveals the strong relation between social
exclusion and denied recognition of cultural communities on the one hand hand
and the inclination of affected sub-groups within them to resort to fundamentalist
forms of socio-cultural identity building or even aggressive identity politics.
29
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8 Identity politics as a power strategy
All brands of Fundamentalism – be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or
Buddhist – tend to establish a closed system of thinking that artificially excludes
differences, doubts, alternatives and openness. Thus they aim at providing security,
assurance of orientation, firm identity and absolute truth for their own members at
the expense of outsiders. Thereby they arrive at some self-manufactured certainty
of their belief system immunized against doubt. Modern day fundamentalism
serves in its militant forms as legitimization for intellectual, religious and political
claims to power and supremacy over those who differ and guarantees strong forms
of unconditional recognition of those who submit to its claims. The closed systems
of faith and schemes of order of a fundamentalist mould represent a return of the
absolute in politics to the extent that they assume a role in the public sphere and
shut out criticism, all alternatives, doubts, and open dialogues on their cognitive
claims between equals. What generally follows is the total – or sometimes in
developed democratic civilizations only selective – disregard for human rights,
pluralism, tolerance, law and the democratic majority principle in the name of an
absolute truth to which the fundamentalists in each case believe themselves to be
uncompromisingly committed. In the culture of the west we have been witnesses
to a variety such fundamentalist movements recently: Protestant Fundamentalism
in the US, Ethno-Fundamentalism in the Balkans or Germany, and, without overt
religious features, Marxism-Leninism in its many forms.
By the end of the twentieth century modern day fundamentalism has turned
out to be an unparalleled formula for success in the politicization of cultural
differences in all civilizations, even if it reveals facets that are just as diverse as the
very modernization against which it revolts in the various centres where it emerges
as the dominant force. With the end of the East-West conflict and the related grand
ideologies, the different cultural patterns have actually become more conspicuous
than ever. Hardly had this rather unspectacular fact succeeded in somewhat
imprinting itself in the public consciousness in the few years following the end
of the ideological age than it itself became the object of political exploitation.
Fabricated partly for political ends, over accentuated in part to ensure recognition,
taken in by disoriented publics with a shudder of relief at their safe distance
from the terrible misfortune, cultural self-awareness and with it the awareness of
cultural differences seem as of now to take over the legacy of the great ideological
confrontation which had dominated the twentieth century.
The politicization of cultural differences constitutes a threat in foreign policy
and a temptation in the domestic. In many cases challenges on both fronts
automatically extend into each other, as exemplified with classic clarity in South
Asia where the same cultural differences between the two nuclear powers, India
and Pakistan, dominate both external relations and domestic politics within the
two societies, proving equally explosive in both cases once politicized with the
intention of creating antagonisms. Nevertheless it is never cultural differences per
se, but almost always their political exploitation which often enough follows in the
wake of economic conflicts, despair and degradation or denied social and political
recognition.
Cultural Difference, Regionalization and Globalization
71
In the course of the last three decades of the twentieth century the politicization
of cultural differences has proved to be a universal instant recipe that is forever
useful in stirring up public opinion inside the respective communities that can
then be converted into political support. Problems which can and must be resolved
through political means such as fair co-operation, mutual security, economic
progress, meaningful division of labour and social inclusion that are in fact
underlying the dissatisfaction of the frustrated communal groups are obscured and
re-interpreted as mere cultural conflicts. Social and economic conditions which
have outraged many are projected as the outcome of the degeneration of cultural
identity, the deliberate intermingling of cultures or the subjugation of one’s own
cultural by that of the powerful others. Viewed from this perspective, the politics
of cultural identity, by ousting others from the domain of their rights, appears to be
the indispensable basis for the welfare of ‘one’s own kin’.
The politicization of culture takes place both from within as well as from without.
The former represents the strategy of fundamentalism which seeks to convince us
that the afflictions of the world can be wholly cured only when claims to certainty,
held out by charismatic fundamentalist leaders in each case, rule the world without
fear of contradiction. The latter represents the strategy of those like Huntington
who, without being fundamentalists themselves, pave the way for fundamentalist
action by declaring that the divergent civilizations of the world are by their very
nature nothing but fundamentalist action programmes which compel even non-
fundamentalists to pay back in the same coin if they do not want to jeopardize their
own powers of assertion in the supposed global clash of civilizations.
As long as socio-economic exclusion and denied recognition are the basic
features of many societies and, moreover, the world society as a whole, there are,
therefore, great risks that the politicization of cultures is becoming a self-sustaining
process and the cultural factors tend to exceed political control. Hence, a purely
culturalist counter-strategy trusting in dialogues and symbolic recognition alone
will hardly prove successful, as the above explanation for the growing strength
of fundamentalism underlines. What needs to be fought are the tangible causes of
fundamentalism with credible policies, lest people be driven into its embrace.
9 The politics of recognition: Basis for fair globalization and multilateralism
Obviously it is social experiences and life-situations that prove decisive in defining
the cultural ways of life of the groups, in terms of their affiliation to a great
religious-cultural tradition. Included in these formative experiences are crises,
ruptures and deprivations, as the case of fundamentalism reveals. However, social
values regarding ways of living together that are shared by all the existent cultures
create space for the coexistence of different cultural identities as ways of believing
and living in all the relevant political arenas: national, regional and global. Today,
however, against the actually given opportunities for mutual understanding, the risk
is imminent that the politicization of cultures is becoming a self-sustaining process.
Those who are pursuing it from within and those who are working on it from outside
are playing into each others’ hands, their explanations and prognoses corroborating
each other deceptively, their energy being mutually reinforcing. Contrarily, all
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cultures of today’s world prove to be social discourse spaces which are intrinsically
highly diverse and dynamic. In all of them, to a varying degree, fundamentalism
occurs, in none of them is fundamentalism the unchallenged expression of the
culture’s identity as a whole. But in all of them too, Islam not excluded, liberal
traditions emerge and build a solid basis for intercultural cooperation.
Like any national society, regional systems of political cooperation and the
emerging global order require some common values and norms of living together.
Such basic commonalities exist in the heart of all the cultures, though expressed
in different languages, symbols and images. More often than not they are hardly
obvious but need to be discovered and brought to the full light of day. It requires
purposeful efforts to recognize, develop and bring those elements in the various
cultures close to each other that facilitate understanding and common action,
particularly since they almost always manifest themselves in diverse forms.
As noted, common citizenship demands that all five categories of universal basic
rights (civil, political, social, economic and cultural) be equally respected. Only
a policy of integration through recognition can manage to satisfy the conditions
for a satisfactory implementation of these rights. Such a strategy is complex but
necessary in order to develop the liberal and democratic potentialities in each
culture and tame the omnipresent fundamentalist temptations they also comprise.
The political strategy that is required for the achievement of these objectives is a
four- pronged politics of recognition:
1. The recognition of diverse cultural identities.
2. The recognition of democracy under the rule of law and universal basic
rights as a binding legal framework by all cultural communities; that is, the
emergence of a common political culture.
3. The fair participation of all in the social and economic resources and
opportunities both of their own society and of the global society.
4. A fair multilateralism in the making of those political decisions that affect all
of them.
As stated at the beginning of this chapter the cultural factor in the world of
globalization is and certainly will remain both powerful and ambivalent. We do
not have the power to wish its often irritating and unpredictable role away from
the political agenda. It is, after all, more probable then not that libertarian market
politics that produce exclusion nationally, regionally and globally in combination
with hegemonic political power strategies and, even more so, hidden or open claims
to cultural superiority will play directly into the hands of actors and communities
that promote fundamentalist identity everywhere in the world. It is one of the
unavoidable consequences of globalization that their networks are worldwide
effective so that all attempts to guard the centres of wealth from the severe threats
to peace and security they pose will be in vain.
To sum up: there will be an increasingly powerful trade off, either the politics
of globalization builds on the emergent trends of overlapping social and political
values of all the world civilization and pursues a credible politics of recognition
including the dimension of fair participation in world resources and decision
Cultural Difference, Regionalization and Globalization
73
making or the countervailing tendency of identity politics will proliferate at all
levels: within most of the nation states, the regions and in the global area. In that
sense the future of fair political globalism and regionalism indeed depends on the
way in which the cultural factor is taken into account.
Notes
1 Huntington, 1996.
2 Barber, 1995.
3 Cox/ Sinclair, 1996.
4 Lee, 2005.
5 For details see Meyer, 2001.
6 Marty/Appleby, 1991; Hofstede, 1994; Inglehart/Abramson, 1995; Sigma-Institut, no
year.
7 Marty/Appleby, 1996.
8 Weber, 1974.
9 Tibi, 2002.
10 Tibi, ibid.
11 Flaig/Meyer/Uelthöffer, 1993.
12 Sigma.Institute, noyear.
13 Kymlicka, 2000: 35.
14 Almond/Verba, 1963.
15 Galston, 1991: 221ff.
16 Almond/Verba, 1993.
17 For the idea and theory of overlapping consensus see Rawls, 1993.
18 Putnam, 2000.
19 Varshney, 2002.
20 Delanty, 1995.
21 The Commission on Global Governance, 1995.
22 Soysal, 1994.
23 Held, 1996.
24 Compare Meyer/Hinchman, 2007.
25 Dryzek, 1995; Hirst, 1995.
26 Held, 1996.
27 Heitmeyer, 1997.
28 Tibi, 2002.
29 Heitmeyer, 1997.
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Chapter 4
Alternative Models of Regional
Cooperation? The Limits of Regional
Institutionalization in East Asia
Richard Higgott
Introduction
There is a large range of literature on regionalism (the creation of formalized regions
with agreed membership) and regionalization (the process by which regional
economies and societies become more integrated).
1
There is also a large body of
literature on regionalism and regionalization in East Asia and the Pacific; notably
on ASEAN and APEC, and of late on ‘East Asia’ as a voice of the region. Indeed,
if the volume of literature written on a region was an indicator of the strength
of regional institutional development then the Asia Pacific would be a highly
institutionalized region. There is also a growing body of literature comparing
regionalism and regionalization in Europe with East Asia in particular.
2
Finally,
there are also large bodies of scholarly literature in economic and political science
on the theory and practice of institutionalism and international organization.
3
This
last body of literature is evolving and it is not settled on many issues.
Notwithstanding the recent major work of Peter Katzenstein (2005) we are no
closer to a genuine comparative study of the theory and practice of regionalism.
There are lessons to be drawn from different regions but this does not amount to
what we might call settled comparative theory of regionalism. Specifically, there is
as yet little or no substantial analysis of the importance of the theory and practice of
institutionalism as a significant predictor of enhanced regionalism in an East Asian
context. There is a range of reasons for this. From the perspective of the scholar
of institutionalism and international organization, East Asia until recently has
simply not been a region where they could ply their craft in a meaningful way. The
laboratories were to be found either in the multilateral organizations, or in the study
of the European project – for many, the one exercise in regionalization worthy of
theoretical study. For the analyst-cum-practitioner involved in the various regional
discourses taking place in the Asia Pacific, and East Asia in particular, since the
closing decades of the twentieth century, the very idea of ‘institutionalizing’ this
dialogue in a meaningful way, or certainly on the basis of some European model
was largely unthinkable. Indeed, senior members of the Asian regional policy
community were often heard to rail against what they saw as the dangerous excesses
of European legal formalism and the prospect of a ‘Brussels in Asia’.
European Union and New Regionalism
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Since the turn of the century there has been a change of mood in East Asia.
Driven by a number of factors in the wake of the financial crises observers have
focused on the enhanced dialogue on regional monetary cooperation, especially
following the Chiang Mai agreement, and the development of the ASEAN + 3
(APT) as a sign of a new interest in enhanced cooperation in the region. This
chapter is not just another review of the state of East Asian regionalism.
4
Rather it
takes the theory and practice of institutions and institutionalization seriously and
asks exactly what are the prospects of such institutionalism in East Asia in the
early twenty-first century. This is done in a comparative context with the theoretical
literature on institutionalism embedded in the empirical context in which it has
found strongest expression to-date – the European project. At this time in the history
of the EU, the comparison with East Asia warrants further interrogation especially
since the normative advocacy of institutionalism in East Asia would appear to be
strengthening at the very time when limits of this process in Europe, in the wake of
the defeat of the constitution, are being questioned more strongly than at any time
in the last twenty-five years.
Does the history of the European project tell us anything about the utility and
limits of regional institutionalism in East Asia? If so, does it do so in a way that
takes us beyond the early 1990s’ dichotomous analytical impasse that gave us the
‘No Brussels in Asia’ school of thought on the one hand and the ‘No serious regional
cooperation in Asia until it adopts the European model’ on the other (for discussions
see Segal, Maull and Wanadi, 1995 and Breslin, 2005). Does a comparative reading
of the European and East Asian institutional projects instead now allow us to offer
a more dynamic explanation or regionalization in East Asia that sees a process of
adaptation, or what Acharya (2004) calls ‘norm localization’, rather than one of
either mere rejection or mimicry? Yes. The often Eurocentrically smug, analyses
of the 1990s – that saw European regionalism overcoming the negative constraints
of state sovereignty on the one hand while Asia hovered on the edge of perilous
security and regional disorder on the other (Friedberg, 2003/4; Buzan and Segal,
2004 – were crudely overdrawn.
The chapter is in four parts. Firstly it discusses the current state of the theory
and practice of regionalism in comparative perspective. Secondly, it locates the
theory and practice of institutionalism in a regional setting. Finally in parts three
and four, it asks how relevant contemporary European institutional cooperation
might be for understanding the way forward in East Asia. In so doing, it recognizes
not only the significance of the European project to date, but also the limits of that
project as a vehicle for transcending sovereignty and advancing supranationalism
on the one hand and the potential for regional transformation in East Asia on
the other. Europe, certainly for the time being, would appear to have gone about
as far as it can down the institutional path. East Asia is only at the first step on
that path. The interesting policy question is not whether East Asia will become
more institutionalized rather than what form that institutionalization might take.
The interesting scholarly question is what are the key drivers that might assist or
impede that process of regional institutionalization? Just as Europe is questioning
the status of the institutions and practices that characterized the European project
in the closing decades of the twentieth century, so too is Asia, especially since the
Alternative Models of Regional Cooperation?
77
financial crises of 1996–97. The ‘Asia Pacific way’ characterized by weak informal
norms of consensus-based decision making and non-interference are giving way to
calls to establish substantive institutional practices of decision making, especially
in the domains of trade and monetary relations at both regional and bilateral levels
even though the practical direction and application of initiatives such as ASEAN
Plus 3 and a putative East Asian Community remain to be determined. In this
context, the issue of regional ‘leadership’ and institution building is identified as
the key issue for early twenty-first century East Asian regionalism. At its core,
the degree and the nature of regional leadership in the emerging Asian integration
process that can be provided by China and/or Japan will prove crucial to the
success of the current endeavours to secure enhanced regional economic (and
political) institutional cooperation in the region. The presence of, or absence of, the
emergence of some kind of collective leadership, or at least consensual cooperation,
is the major instrument for, or obstacle to, any advancement of regionalism in Asia.
Without a ‘historic compromise’ between China and Japan economic integration
will remain a distant prospect.
1 Theorizing regionalism: Europe and Asia compared
Regionalism is invariably conceptualized with comparative reference to Europe
even though it is clear that policy learning and the politics of emulation (or in
many cases the politics of avoidance) are major features of current deliberations
about regionalism in other parts of the world, and especially East Asia. This is
especially the case as regionalism is increasingly seen as a response to the growing
internationalization of the division of labour and production, or what we now call
globalization. The time lag between European developments and the construction
of regional orders elsewhere has meant that region-building elites have had the
opportunity to learn from the European experience. As often as not this has led to
a desire for avoidance of, rather than the emulation of, the ‘Brussels model’. The
less institutionalized approach that emerged in Asia in the early 1990s represented
a deliberate choice to avoid the legal formalism of the EU (see Higgott, 1998a).
So, whether viewed negatively or positively, the European experience looms
large. This search for ‘European correspondence’ is an obstacle to the development
of analytical and theoretical studies of regional integration elsewhere (Breslin,
2005). The oft-repeated characterization of Asian regionalism as ‘loose’ or ‘informal’
reflects a teleological prejudice informed by the assumption that ‘progress’ in
regional organization is defined in terms of EU-style institutionalization. An
assumption remains that the EU is the paradigmatic case of regionalism against
which all other regional projects are judged. For some, the Union’s longevity,
institutional complexity and policy reach means that it is more than just an
international organization. Indeed, Hix (1994 and 1999) argues that the EU is a
political system rather than an integration project. This is an extreme position (see
Rosamond, 2000), but it raises the issue of whether the EU is in fact an instance
of integration, and thus of regionalism, at all and thus of any comparative use for
trying to explain the direction of regionalism in Asia in the twenty-first century.