The Post Cold War Order in Asia and the Challenge to ASEAN

The Impact of the End of the Cold War in East Asia

3 Post Cold War Order in Asia & the Challenge to ASEAN By: ROS Size: 6" x 9" J/No: 05-14709 Fonts: Stempel Schneidler infectious diseases, maritime piracy and so on. I shall argue that the Southeast Asian countries have what might be called a strategic opportunity to work better together to establish their regional economic community and to institutionalize their cooperation in the management of non-traditional security threats. Otherwise the Southeast Asians may be marginalized by the economic rise of both China and India and their security threatened by the disruption of relations between the external major powers. The Impact of the End of the Cold War in East Asia The origins of the new pattern of great power relations in East Asia go back to the ending of the Cold War. In comparison paid with the attention paid to the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War in Europe, the impact of the disintegration of the Soviet Union on East Asia has tended to be overlooked. Perhaps the impact seemed less significant, for unlike their European counterparts, none of the East Asian communist governments fell and again, unlike Europe, the American series of bilateral alliances seemed little changed. However, although the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union was less immediate and perhaps 01 Post Cold War 5/26/06, 4:45 PM 3 4 Michael Yahuda By: ROS Size: 6" x 9" J/No: 05-14709 Fonts: Stempel Schneidler less thorough-going in Asia it has nevertheless had a profound effect. In ideological terms it spelt the abrupt end of socialism or communism as a rallying cry for either the remaining communist regimes or for opposition parties or groups in East Asia. Similarly the Soviet command economy lost whatever remaining allure it might have had, thereby leaving the ground for capitalism as the only effective economic model. These two developments alone have contributed greatly to the deterioration of relations between China and Japan. As China’s leaders sought to reach out to their people after the Tiananmen disaster they couched their appeals in the early 1990s entirely in the language of patriotism or nationalism. Even the remnants of socialist rhetoric evident in the 1980s had disappeared. The CPC depicted itself as the national saviour of China. It had defeated Japan, the last and the most brutal of the aggressors that had torn China apart during the century of shame and humiliation. The victory in the civil war that had underpinned much of Mao’s claim to legitimacy was no longer mentioned as by this time the CPC leaders were seeking to win over the KMT in Taiwan. The CPC presented itself as the only force that could 01 Post Cold War 5/26/06, 4:45 PM 4 5 Post Cold War Order in Asia & the Challenge to ASEAN By: ROS Size: 6" x 9" J/No: 05-14709 Fonts: Stempel Schneidler complete the unification of China and that could provide the necessary stability to develop the economy so as to make the country rich and powerful once again. The defeat of Japan became central to the CPC’s claim to legitimacy and to its campaign of education in patriotism, especially in 1993– 95.1 In the new national identity that was being forged Japan became the significant “other.” As for Japan, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and all that it stood for resulted in the collapse of the Socialist Party as a major force in Japanese politics. Although condemned for most of its life to permanent opposition, the Socialist Party had played a crucial role in upholding the pacifistic tendency in Japan and in providing opposition to the alliance with the United States and to the capitalist system. It regularly commanded a sufficiently large percentage of voters so as to limit the power of the majority party, the LDP. Shorn of its underpinnings the JSP did not collapse overnight and it finally 1 Zhao Suisheng, A Nation State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2004) and Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tianmen (University of Cambridge Press, 2001). 01 Post Cold War 5/26/06, 4:45 PM 5 6 Michael Yahuda By: ROS Size: 6" x 9" J/No: 05-14709 Fonts: Stempel Schneidler disappeared as a significant element in Japanese politics after its brief share of power in a coalition government in 1995.2 The death knell...