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* We would like to thank John Ravenhill, Amitav Acharya, Kanishka Jayasuriya, Philomena Murray, David Hundt for their valuable comments and suggestions; and Kingsley Edney, Matthew Hood and Su Wei for their assistance.
Most of the current scholarship focuses on the functional aspects of regionalism such as economic and security issues, and the literature tends to be too focused on American or European concerns (Katzenstein, 2005; Higgott, 2007; Ravenhill, 2008). Despite the early examination of varied ideas of Asian regionalism (Milner and Johnson 1997, He, 2004, Acharya 2009), there remains a substantive lack of critical scholarship that focuses on the study of Asian ideas, proposals, and visions of regionalism.
This volume will study ideas of regionalism in Asia with a particular focus on the relationship between ideas and power politics. It assesses the ideas of regionalism that have been promoted by great power actors, as well as those that have been promoted by middle powers, looking at how different actors sell their vision of the region to others, build support for their ideas, and manoeuvre against competing proposals. Although ideas about regionalism often appear to be thinly disguised expressions of national interests, an important question for Asia is whether or not ideas about the region can move beyond the limits of narrow national interests into a shared sense of community.
There is no single Asian idea of regionalism. Individual countries such as South Korea and Japan demonstrate vast internal differences in developing, modifying, and shifting ideas of regionalism. A complex variety of national or even sub-regional ideas of regionalism has emerged. This includes the early Japanese, Indian, and Chinese notions of pan-Asianism; Mahathir's notion of an East Asian Economic Group (He, 2004); Indonesian, Malaysian, and Filipino conceptions of pan-Malayism, as well as other regional groupings such as the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) and MAPHILINDO (Clark, 2011), the Asia Pacific Community (APC) idea (Boutin, 2011; He, 2011a, b), Kim Dae-jung's idea of an East Asian Community (Hundt and Kim, 2011), and Hatoyama's proposal of East Asian Community (Inoguchi, 2011). Also the idea of Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), a sort of hegemonic regionalism, is a sharp contrast to the idea of weaker states (ASEAN).
A strength of this...