International relations theory and ASEAN: from international system and estrangement to local innovation

IR Theory via the four main approaches of Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism and Foreign Policy Analysis have made strange bedfellows with the study of ASEAN. Yet theory is indispensable if scholarship on ASEAN is to be of value in comparative analysis with the rest of IR and other regional organisations. As with most incipient approaches to non-western regional institutions in the 1960s, ASEAN was studied as an appendage to great power ordering of international security. This curbed the analysis of the organisation’s agency. The Cold War acted as a blanket conditioner of most analyses for more than two decades after, resulting in the marginalisation of ASEAN intellectually and diplomatically. Scholarship on ASEAN revived in more empathetic and constructivist fashion with the decline of the Cold War from the late 1980s. In many ways, there was a pronounced local turn where scholars within and outside the region began attempting to understand ASEAN’s limited performance and symbolic achievements from ground up. Yet, there are many western scholars today who still hew to the comfortable neorealist lenses of framing ASEAN as limited by great power alignments and its failures to pursue EU-style integration in the mode predicted by Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas. The more promising and bold local turns argue that the ‘ASEAN Way’ of consensual diplomacy and threat obfuscation preserve an infinitely superior cold peace that is refreshingly more durable than the fratricidal nature of regional peace-building0 efforts in the Middle East and Africa. The local turns share some characteristics with constructivist liberalism but these also have deep pre-modern cultural roots that privilege informality and moral hierarchy.