Open Regionalism and East Asian Community-building: Japan's Perspectives on the East Asia Summit
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概要
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The aim of this paper is to assess the prospects and limits of East Asian community-building by examining perspectives on Japanese foreign policy in the East Asia Summit. With reviewing international relations theories that observe a development of Asian regionalism, this paper focuses on the principles, norms, and orders of the East Asian community. While institutionalizations and the organization of East Asian regionalism have been rapidly implemented within the framework of the ASEAN Plus Three since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8, a proposal of regular regional-level Summit (known as the East Asia Summit) has been one of focal issues of discussion from the earliest times of cooperation. Whereas it has been mostly argued that the membership of the East Asia Summit and East Asian community would be East Asian countries, namely the ASEAN Plus Three countries, Japan has, from the beginning, insisted on inclusion of non-East Asian members, such as Australia, New Zealand, and India. Furthermore, Japan's discourses on the East Asian community focus on concepts of democracy, human rights, and global norms, and thus emphasize bridging a gap between global principles and regional orders. In other words, an important rationale for examining Japanese perspectives on the Summit is to assess whether East Asian community-building has harmonized with existing global principles and norms.As this paper assumes, "open regionalism" has played a central role in Japan's perspectives on regional community-building. The open regionalism discourses that were conceptualized in the late 1970s and early 1980s aimed to establish a tangent point between the Japan-U.S. alliance and Asian regional solidarity. In the 1990s, the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) institutionalized that concept by bridging intra-regional economic cooperation with extra-regional economic liberalization. That is, open regionalism has been the functional political concept that is articulated between global principles and regional orders.This paper regards Japan's perspectives on the Summit as a continuation of the open regionalism discourses, and assesses the significance of open regionalism in relation to the principles and norms of East Asian regional order. By borrowing theoretical frameworks of previous literatures on international relations and Asian Regionalism, and by critically examining Katzenstein's pronous regionalism and Pempel's geopsychology, this paper constructively evaluates the global importance of open regionalism in East Asian community-building. For research purposes, this paper assesses a series of Japanese foreign policy discourses in the Summit during the Koizumi, Abe and Fukuda periods, and uncovers the global significance of open regionalism from the standpoint of articulated global and regional political orders.