Search results

The book intends to locate the process and effectiveness of cooperation in East Asia, to regard the construction of the East Asian community as the ideal, to see the contradictions and difficulties in construction as the reality, and to identify the actual development and achievement as the choice and effort between the two. Instead of the East Asian Community, various functional mechanisms have come into being in the development of East Asian cooperation because of complicated historical and economic relations among the countries. This book examines the roles played by ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Japan, the United States and China in the cooperation, respectively. More importantly, China⁰́₉s strategic orientation in regional cooperation is studied in the last chapter. It observes that China, as a rising power, is re-establishing regional relations and order withits geographically neighbouring countries as the basis.

This book provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of a key concept in East Asian security debates, sovereign autonomy, and how it reproduces hierarchy in the regional order. Park argues that contemporary strategic debates in East Asia are based on shared contextual knowledge - that of international hierarchy - reconstructed in the late-nineteenth century. The mechanism that reproduces this lens of hierarchy is domestic legitimacy politics in which embattled political leaders contest the meaning of sovereign autonomy. Park argues that the idea of status seeking has remained embedded in the concept of sovereign autonomy and endures through distinct and alternative security frames that continue to inform contemporary strategic debates in East Asia. This book makes a significant contribution to debates in international relations theory and security studies about autonomy and status, as well as to the now extensive literature on the nature of East Asian regional order.