Comparing Institution-Building in East Asia: Power Politics, Governance and Critical Junctures.

• Author: Cook, Malcolm
• Position: Book review

Comparing Institution-Building in East Asia: Power Politics, Governance and Critical Junctures. By Hidetaka Yoshimatsu. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Hardcover: 231pp.

Comparing Institution-Building in East Asia makes a solid, empirically-based contribution to the field of East Asian regionalism, and is suitable for academics, researchers and postgraduate students. However, the author's four-factor historical institutionalist model and its relation to International Relations theory, together with the meticulous nature of its process-tracing (a social science method of identifying causal relations and mechanisms through the detailed analysis of an empirical case-study over time) of each case study, make it less accessible to non-academic and undergraduate readers.

The books' two major strengths are founded on this inductive, empirically sensitive model and the choice of case studies. First, the five cases of East Asian institution-building, i.e. trade, exchange rate management, rice reserves, oil reserves' coordination and acid rain monitoring are highly comparable: all started in the last fifteen years or so, include and exclude the same states (with a few exceptions), have undergone a similar two-stage development of original soft institutionalism, followed by attempts at institutional strengthening and are in the realm of "low politics" in interstate relations. This admirable consistency across the five case studies enhances the analytical value of the commonalities and variances across them. Yoshimatsu provides a compelling argument for how the commonality of early Japanese leadership interacts with Southeast Asian states' commitment to ASEAN "centrality" and Chinese and South Korean competition with Japan to determine the outcome of the second stage of institutionalization in all five cases. One related commonality that is not fully developed in this succinct book is the benefits of East Asia-wide regionalism and ASEAN centrality in moderating the negative effects of Northeast Asian power politics on interstate cooperation.

Second, as is true with many Japanese social science scholars, the author's attention to empirical detail and conscientious process-tracing clarifies well the sectoral specificities of interstate interaction between China, Japan and South Korea, and Southeast Asian states' interests in wider East Asian cooperation. On trade, through participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Japan is...