Great powers and hierarchical order in Southeast Asia analyzing regional security strategies

International Security

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 113-157

  Goh, Evelyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38349088884     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2008.32.3.113     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Aaron L. Friedberg, "Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter 1993/94), pp. 5-33;
2. Richard K. Betts, "Wealth, Power, and Instability: East Asia and the United States after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter 1993/94), pp. 34-77;
3. Gerald Segal, "The Coming Confrontation between China and Japan?" World Policy Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 27-32;
4. and Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, "The Coming Conflict with America," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 2 (March/April 1997), pp. 18-32.
5. See Yuen Foong Khong, "Coping with Strategic Uncertainty: The Role of Institutions and Soft Balancing in Southeast Asia's Post-Cold War Strategy," in J.J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds., Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 172-208. The concept of "soft balancing" here predates the application of the term to post-Iraq reactions to U.S. foreign policy, as discussed later in this article.
6. James A. Kelly, "An Overview of U.S.-East Asia Policy," testimony before the House International Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., 108th Cong., 2d. sess., June 2, 2004, http://www.state.gov/p/eap/rls/rm/2004/ 33064.htm.
7. Robert G. Sutter, China's Rise in Asia: Promises and Perils (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 177-208;
8. Avery Goldstein, Rising to the Challenge: China's Grand Strategy and International Security (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford. University Press, 2005), pp. 172-174;
9. and Dana R. Dillon and John J. Tkacik Jr., "China and ASEAN: Endangered U.S. Primacy in Southeast Asia," Backgrounder, No. 1886 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, October 19, 2005), p. 1.
10. See, for instance, Michael Leifer, "The ASEAN Regional Forum: Extending ASEAN's Model of Regional Security," Adelphi Paper, No. 302 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1996);
11. and Yuen Foong Khong, "Making Bricks without Straw in the Asia-Pacific?" Pacific Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1997), pp. 289-300.
12. Leifer argued that the existence of a stable balance of power was a prerequisite for successful regional security institutions; Khong countered that regional institutions were a critical mechanism for "defusing the conflictual by-products of power-balancing practices" while regional states were trying to forge a stable balance of power. Khong, "Making Bricks without Straw in the Asia-Pacific?" p. 296.
13. See especially Denny Roy, "Southeast Asia and China: Balancing or Bandwagoning?" Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 27, No. 2 (August 2005), pp. 305-322;
14. Amitav Acharya, "Containment, Engagement, or Counter-dominance? Malaysia's Response to the Rise of China," in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, eds., Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 129-151;
15. and David C. Kang, "Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks," International Security, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Spring 2003), pp. 57-85.
16. The extremes of this debate are represented by Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (New York: Routledge, 2000), on the one hand.
17. and David Martin Jones and Michael L.R. Smith, "Making Process, Not Progress: ASEAN and the Evolving East Asian Regional Order," International Security, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Summer 2007), pp. 148-184, on the other.
18. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 127.
19. Those most closely aligned with China - Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar - are so inclined more from the lack of options vis-à-vis other major power backers than out of a specific calculation of countering U.S. power. See Jürgen Haacke, "Myanmar's Foreign Policy toward China and India," Adelphi Paper, No. 381 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2006);
20. and Sisowath Doung Chanto, "Cambodia," in Evelyn Goh, ed., Betwixt and Between: Southeast Asian Strategic Relations with the U.S. and China, IDSS Monograph, No. 7 (Singapore: Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, 2005), pp. 83-92.
21. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
22. For a detailed discussion of these threat perceptions, see Evelyn Goh, "Southeast Asian Perspectives on the China Challenge," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (August 2007), pp. 809-832.
23. Vietnam was a suzerain state of China for more than 1,000 years and was repeatedly attacked by China in the thirteenth, fifteenth, and eighteenth centuries, and again in 1979; and the two countries have active disputes over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China and the Philippines also had armed clashes over the Spratlys in the 1990s. Indonesia has had long-standing concerns about China's interference in its domestic politics in the form of the latter's support of Chinese communist insurgents and incitement of its small but economically powerful Chinese minority population.
24. For a review of this aspect of the literature, see Robert S. Ross, "Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China: Accommodation and Balancing in East Asia," Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (July-September 2006), pp. 355-395, at pp. 362-364.
25. Randall L. Schweller, "Unanswered Threats: A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing," International Security, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Fall 2004), pp. 159-201;
26. and Stephen R. David, "Explaining Third World Alignment," World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 2 (January 1991), pp. 233-256.
27. Ross, "Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China." Singapore, the Philippines, and Japan are among the strongest balancers he identifies.
28. See, for instance, Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
29. David C. Kang, "Hierarchy and Stability in Asian International Relations," in G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno, eds., International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 163-190;
30. and Kang, "Getting Asia Wrong."
31. See Amitav Acharya and Evelyn Goh, eds., Reassessing Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific: Competition, Congruence, and Transformation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 1-17;
32. Jones and Smith, "Making Process, Not Progress";
33. and Alice D. Ba, "Who's Socializing Whom? Complex Engagement and Sino-ASEAN Relations," Pacific Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 2006), pp. 157-179.