Asia Pacific in World Politics (review)

As the global "centre of gravity" shifts from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia Pacific, the need to comprehend Asia-Pacific dynamics becomes fundamental to a fuller understanding of world politics. Thus, on the basis of its subject matter alone, the book under review fills an important niche on the personal and institutional bookshelf. Cogently written, it provides an excellent introduction to East and Southeast Asia and will therefore surely feature on many undergraduate course lists from the coming academic year itself. Indeed, the book has the "feel" of an introductory course on Asia Pacific International Relations: it comes as no surprise that the author in his Preface refers to the course he teaches at the University of Melbourne. The book also recalls in part the author's earlier work, The International Politics of the New Asia Pacific (Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner, 1997). I would like in this review to highlight three pleasing features of the book and then put forward one major reservation.

The first positive feature of the book is its chapter plan. The introductory chapter defines the scope of the book, places the subject matter in a historical context and highlights the most important political, economic, social, and cultural features of the states and societies of the region. The six chapters that follow in Part 1 focus on the major powers in the region, the United States, China, and Japan: the first three lay out the respective national contexts in which the Asia-Pacific policies of the United States, China, and Japan have evolved, while the latter three focus on the cardinal bilateral relationships (Japanese-US, Sino-US, and Sino-Japanese). Part 2 of the book contains a chapter each on the two troubling conflicts in Northeast Asia — Taiwan and Korea. Part 3 of the book consists of two chapters on Southeast Asia. The first analyses the changing dynamics of maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, the second focuses exclusively on Indonesia. Part 4 has two chapters on "other key regional actors". The first of these is a rather curious chapter that describes and "compares" Russian and Australian involvement in Asia-Pacific dynamics. The second chapter in Part 4 is on international organizations in the Asia Pacific and has a multilevel approach: ASEAN at the sub-regional level, APEC and ARF at the Asia-Pacific level, ASEAN+3 as the "East Asian alternative" to the Asia Pacific and the United Nations and its agencies at the global level. Part 5 consists of a single chapter that concludes the book through a summing up of its theoretical approaches and a brief prediction of the future directions that Asia-Pacific developments could take.

From the brief outline above, it should be evident that the book's treatment of various countries and themes is imbalanced. For instance, in a 370-page book, all of non-Indonesia Southeast Asia is covered in a single, albeit comprehensive, 30-page chapter; Indonesia gets its own chapter of 34 pages while ASEAN is wrapped up in slightly over four pages in the chapter on international organizations. The varying emphases in the book clearly betray its Australian origins. Nevertheless, this reviewer found the imbalance both necessary and refreshing. Instead of a politically correct but sterile chapter scheme in which all countries and issues are given equal space, the author's own assessment of what matters in the Asia Pacific — and, equally, what/who do not matter as much — comes out very clearly in the book.

A second feature of the book that appeals is the clearly eclectic theoretical frame within which it has been written. Although the book is not explicitly theoretical, the author is clearly more than aware of the various theoretical approaches to the study of International Relations. While its opening emphasis on the major powers is obviously realist, even the chapters dealing with the United States, China, Japan and their respective bilateral relationships do bring a number of non-systemic and non-material factors into the analysis. Several of the chapters...