ASEAN-India-Australia: Towards Closer Engagement in a New Asia

4. ASEAN, Australia, and India in Asia's Regional Order

4 ASEAN, AUSTRALIA, AND INDIA IN ASIA’S REGIONAL ORDER Deepak Nair Can ASEAN, Australia, and India emerge as effective and influential drivers of Asia’s pursuit for a stable regional order? This question is at the heart of this enquiry. Writing in 2003, G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno observed that essentially three actors would shape the current and future politics of the Asia-Pacific. Unsurprisingly, these actors were identified as the United States, Japan, and China.1 By most empirical and conceptual definitions of “power”, these three actors are genuine claimants to their position as the three most powerful actors in the international politics of Asia.2 But is this power singularly decisive and absolute? The fact that the most powerful states of Asia are unable to translate their material capacities neatly into shaping the politics of the region on their own terms provides an important opening into understanding the limits of instrumental power in Asia, and of the purpose and function of regional projects and state-led regionalism in charting alternative paths to order. Indeed, the very fact that it could be argued that an emerging yet underdeveloped power such as India, an institutional conglomerate of states such as ASEAN, and a geographically removed “middle power” such as Australia, can be influential shapers of an evolving Asian order, is a reflection of the variable nature of “power” in international politics, as well as of the numerous means by which it can be leveraged. That such an argument can be ventured is equally a reflection of the achievements and possibilities that have been 58 ASEAN, Australia, and India in Asia’s Regional Order 59 opened up by pursuing regionalism to counter the strategic uncertainties of the post-Cold War period. Admittedly, these achievements have been limited, with instrumental state concerns often obstructing the normative goals and aspirations of regionalism. But regional institutions and practices have, at the minimum, socialized regional diplomatic and defence elites,3 have offered a basis for organizing interstate cooperation, and have provided foundations for regional stability that reflect elements of both necessity and innovation in providing viable answers to the Asian region’s search for stability. If a regional “security architecture” is a reference to the empirical arrangements and ideational elements from which a state of order can be obtained, and if it were to be conceptualized in an “overarching and macro analytical sense” (Tow and Taylor, Chapter 1), then it is possible to identify the twin processes of realist and liberal-institutionalist order-building as the key dynamics within this broader attempt at constructing/sustaining order in Asian international relations. There is a realist and instrumental path to order-building manifest in the structure of U.S. guaranteed security alliances and the persistent politics of security dilemmas and Great Powers on the one hand, and, on the other, the operation of a neo-functional method whereby states invest in regional institutions to enhance predictability and transparency among state elites, an endeavour often glazed with the normative pursuit of community building. The operation of multiple pathways to order-building contains within it, and expresses, the multiplicity of material and ideational interests, agendas, and strategies that inform the agents and structures of order-building in Asia. In terms of the ongoing construction of order in the region, scholars have identified the uneasy existence of different permutations and possibilities, and it is a matter of debate as to which type dominates or best describes the international politics of the region.4 These include the continued dominance of a liberal U.S. hegemonic structure, the contestation of this hegemony by China which advances multipolarity to further its ambition of being a “co-manager” of Asian security, and the more normative influence exerted by regional institutions that pursue monetary and security regionalism to create a normative-contractual order.5 In short, these coexisting structures — realist and liberal-institutional, actualized by alliances and regional institutions, respectively — enable the realization of a state of order in the region. Order, as much theoretical literature demonstrates, is a complicated category, and there are different ways of identifying what it constitutes. Hedley Bull’s seminal study of order defined it as “a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society”, with these primary goals identified 60 Deepak Nair as the preservation of the state system, of sovereignty, international peace, the limitation...