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This paper seeks to apply the idea of cosmopolitan democracy to the question of national identity in a comparative context in the European Union and East Asia. The application of the idea of cosmopolitan democracy to East Asia is constrained by a number of factors, and hence cannot be understood as a universal concept, but rather as a contingent regional phenomenon that is dependent on certain conditions. The paper concludes that East Asia will find its own approach to the question of national identity and that this has been demonstrated to some extent by China's handling of Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

East Asian countries perceive that their individual and collective positions in the world political economy are not fairly represented in existing international institutions, which have yet to fully adjust to the region's rapid economic ascent over the last several decades. This problem seems especially acute in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), wherein each country's participation in the organization's weighted voting scheme is supposed to reflect the following logic: relative weight in world economy → size of quotas → number of votes. Are Asian countries' IMF quotas incommensurate with their relative economic weight and, if so, by what margin? And if Asian countries are indeed under-represented in the IMF, which other country, group of countries or region is correspondingly over-represented? This paper examines these questions from several perspectives. It first discusses the purpose of quotas and how they are determined. It then turns to the question of whether Asian perceptions concerning under-representation are empirically corroborated. The first data analysis section compares current quotas to relative measures of economic weight in the world economy. The following section compares four quota values: past quotas, current quotas, calculated quotas and quotas calculated using the method of the IMF's external quota review board. In short, the data demonstrate that Asia does have a strong claim for a greater share of IMF quotas. We conclude with a brief consideration of possible alternatives to the IMF's current use of quota to determine voting weights, and argue that the problem of Asian under-representation will probably not be corrected unless the IMF's quota-determination process is overhauled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of pre-modern Chinese hegemony is crucial for both theorizing hegemony and envisioning a new global order. I argue the pre-modern Chinese hegemony was a reciprocal rule of virtue, or aretocracy, driven by the transnational sociocultural elites shi. In contrast to the prevailing models of Chinese hegemony, the Early Modern East Asia was not dominated by the unilateral normative influence of the Chinese state. The Chinese and non-Chinese shi as non-statist sociocultural elites co-produced, through their shared civilizational heritage, a hegemonic order in which they had to show excellence in civil virtues to wield legitimate authority. In particular, the Ming and Chosŏn shi developed a tradition of envoy poetry exchanges as a medium for co-constructing Chinese hegemony as aretocracy. The remarkable role of excellent ethos for world order making in Early Modern East Asia compels us to re-imagine how we conduct our global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, East Asia's efforts to enhance regional financial cooperation raised the possibility of East Asia playing a more assertive role in global financial governance. However, despite the region's increased voice in governance and economic weight, East Asian financial systems and markets have mostly adapted to global norms developed in New York, London, and Washington, DC. We argue that the failure of East Asia to push an alternative vision of financial governance reflects both the lack of regional political unity and, more crucially, the divisions of interests both between and within key East Asian economies. Despite nearly universal regional dissatisfaction with global standards and institutions in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, these two factors have combined to prevent the development of a distinctive regional model that could be promoted at the global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of China and how other countries respond to China's rising is widely studied. But little has been done on how other countries reacted to the rise of China throughout history and how China strategically interacted with them. The conventional wisdom holds East Asian international relations did not operate in the Westphalian way and China's rising in history did not trigger regional balancing actions. In this article, we challenge that view. We argue East Asian international relations were not exceptional to basic rules of the Westphalian system. Each time China rose up, it triggered balancing actions from neighboring regimes, including nomadic empires and settled kingdoms. The neighboring regimes would accommodate China only after they were defeated by China or pro-China regimes propped up in these countries. The Chinese hegemony in East Asian history could not be taken for granted. Over last 2,000 plus years, only during three periods of time (the Qin-Han 秦汉, Sui-Tang 隋唐, and Ming-Qing 明清 dynasties) China could successfully overpower regional resistance and enjoyed a stable tributary relationship with neighboring states. In the rest of time, the Chinese state could not retain hegemony in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, Japan and the Republic of Korea have chosen dissimilar policy options with respect to the US-led missile defense (MD) systems in East Asia. What explains the two countries' dissimilar MD strategies? Inspired by neoclassical realism, this study introduces a framework of domestic hurdles that combines Randall Schweller's cohesion model and Jeffry Taliaferro's resource extraction model. It sheds light on the degree of elite cohesion and social and economic impediments as key causal determinants that impede balancing against external threats. Although the influence of systemic variables that suppose optimal policy options, such as balancing, domestic hurdles impede or delay such options. This study will provide useful contributions to international relations by offering comparative and theoretical analyses on different paths that Tokyo and Seoul have chosen for their MD policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

East Asia has experienced a drastic decline in incidences of warfare and has had exceptionally low levels of battle deaths after 1979. However, East Asian peace had already begun in 1967 inside ASEAN. Is it possible that East Asian peace began in ASEAN and spread to the rest of East Asia? This is the question that this article aims to tackle by showing the association between a reasonable and plausible explanation, the ASEAN Way, and East Asian peace after 1979. The argument about the role of the ASEAN approach in the pacification of East Asia is based on an examination of the patterns of frequency of conflicts, numbers of battle deaths and conflict termination. In this kind of examination, it seems that the recipes for peace in East Asia after 1979 are similar to those of ASEAN after 1967, and that their relationship to conflicts was also very similar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the mid-1990s, China has adopted various multilateral policies to shape a more favorable regional environment. The policy of integration, which accommodates both the United States and neighboring countries’ core interests, can succeed in achieving China's goals in regional multilateral cooperation. On the contrary, the policies of dominance, co-governance, and guidance have been suffering from frustration or failure because they threaten the core interests of either the United States or China's regional partners. The efficiency of China's multilateral policies is strongly shaped by two factors: the dominant United States wary of China's rapid rise and the substantial power gaps between the two states. In the coming decade, China may rise to the second rank in terms of economic capabilities, but the United States can still maintain its dominant position. So China will adhere to the policy of integration to maintain its favorable regional environment in East Asia. China's rising position and its integration policy will result in the continuation of competition in the regional cooperation mechanisms and the stability of the US regional alliance system in the decade to come. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

East Asian governments have engaged in unprecedented collaboration on trade and financial matters since the economic crises of 1997. For some observers, such activity, building on a new sense of shared identity forged by resentment at Western responses to the crises, is a significant step towards the formation of an East Asian economic bloc. In reality, the new collaboration has produced only modest results. Neither an East Asian preferential trade agreement nor an Asian Monetary Fund is likely to materialize. Underlying power realities and fundamental economic interests are unchanged. The new interest in negotiating preferential trade agreements (many of which are with countries outside of East Asia) is best explained by government perceptions of the effectiveness of such arrangements elsewhere in the global economy, and by a desire to increase bargaining power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Every international system or society has a set of rules or norms that define appropriate behaviors. These norms are, however, never obeyed in an automatic fashion. Perhaps more than any other setting the international environment is characterized by organized hypocrisy. Actors violate rules in practice without at the same time challenging their legitimacy. In nineteenth‐century East Asia this was true for countries embracing the European sovereign state system of formal equality and autonomy, and the Sinocentric Confucian system of hierarchy and dependency. The West imposed the treaty port system which violated the sovereign principle of non‐intervention. China accommodated the West, tacitly jettisoning demands for ritual obeisance. Japan chose those principles that were most suitable for its material interests. Korea, however, dominated by a literati class whose position was associated with Confucian principles, failed to pursue policies that might have maintained Korean independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To construct a coherent account of East Asias evolving security order, this article treats the United States not as an extra-regional actor, but as the central force in constituting regional stability and order. It proposes that there is a layered regional hierarchy in East Asia, led by the United States, with China, Japan, and India constituting layers underneath its dominance. The major patterns of equilibrium and turbulence in the region since 1945 can be explained by the relative stability of the US position at the top of the regional hierarchy, with periods of greatest insecurity being correlated with greatest uncertainty over the American commitment to managing regional order. Furthermore, relationships of hierarchical assurance and hierarchical deference help to explain critical puzzles about the regional order in the post-Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]