Governance and Regionalism in Asia.

• Author: Rolfe, Jim
• Position: Book review

Governance and Regionalism in Asia. Edited by Nicholas Thomas. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2009. Hardcover: 342pp.

The linked concepts of regionalism and regionalization are now becoming well recognized as a flourishing fact of global international relations. This is as true in Asia as it has been in Europe for many years now, although the depth and breadth of practice and analysis in Asia has some way to go to match Europe's experience. Nonetheless, this volume continues the examination of the processes in play and provides us additional understanding of the range of experiences and possibilities for the region.

The book itself is a collection of papers designed to support the concept of "East Asia" (rather than "Asia" as the book's title would have it) and to explore important questions about the concept of the region, what its membership is and should be, how it should be governed, and what values should be held by the region's membership, both collectively and individually. In part the future possibilities component of the book succeeds because of gaps in the analysis rather than because of its quality. As a guide to the normative questions raised, the book is less successful as the writers tend to concentrate on description, explanation and to a lesser extent prediction rather than on prescription.

The book is deliberately intended to mimic "the structure of the East Asian Summit" (p. xv). It has an overview dealing with the concept and history of regionalization, chapters describing a range of national perspectives on regional processes (China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and--though not a member of East Asia Summit--the US; but none, however, from a Southeast Asian perspective), chapters on a range of key issues such as the role of law and its relationship to regional governance, regional governance and disaster response and financial integration, and two final chapters comparing the European experience with Asia's and which discuss new modes of regional governance in Asia.

Overall, the book is described by Kanishka Jayasuriya (p. 330) as a "first cut at a new and innovative agenda on regional governance", but that description perhaps says more about the relatively late arrival of scholarly analysis of the region than of the events themselves. Regional governance has been developing at a functional level for many decades. At different levels of Asia Pacific, Asia, East Asia and other such regional conceptions, governance, in...