Contemporary East Asia has attracted a plethora of international relations analyses from competing theoretical perspectives. Most prominent are realist studies that analyze the dynamics of power in the region, including coercive diplomacy, alliance politics, nuclear proliferation, and conflicts over sovereignty and territoriality. Evelyn Goh's elegant work presents an important English School contribution to the realist dominated scholarship of East Asian politics. Relying on the international society approach developed by Hedley Bull and Andrew Hurrell, Goh focuses on ‘the fundamentally social nature of the international system’ in which shared norms, rules, and expectations constitute, regulate, and make predictable international life or order that contains primary goals of a society of states, behavioral limits, conflict management, and accommodation of change (p. 7).
Different from Amitav Acharya who stresses the region-specific order based on shared ideas among states, Goh views the regional order in East Asia as part of the global liberal order constructed by the United States or a social compact founded on reciprocal agreements between the hegemonic power and lesser regional states. The author notes that ‘(t)he core values and goals of East Asian regional society are deeply defined by liberal US principles’ (p. 9). While concurring with John Ikenberry's conception of constitutional order, the author attempts to innovate upon it by analyzing the formation and change of regional order as ‘order transition’ in light of multiple reciprocal contracts that include small states’ selective binding of great powers.
The author's analytical framework entails power and rationality as well as norms and solidarism. This bifocal approach reflects upon the definitions of order transition as follows: ‘significant alterations in the common goals and values, rules of transition that accompany a significant shift in relative power distribution is marked throughout by mutual adjustment and negotiation between the incumbent hegemon, the challenger, and surrounding states about key aspects of the international order’ (p. 19). Based on the definitions, mechanisms for renegotiation of the normative structure are set forth as ‘institutional bargains, authority and public goods provision, regionalism and community, and collective memory revision’ (p. 21).
The author analyzes the mechanisms empirically in order to show the descriptive and analytical utility of the order transition thesis. The main findings are as follows: ‘The contested process of renegotiating the normative structure of regional society reflects a widespread regional inclination to sustain the most important element of the social structure: US preponderance’ (p. 205). ‘China has (instead) allowed itself to be co-opted partially into the US-led international and regional order’ (p. 207), referred to as the ‘layered hegemonic hierarchy’. The continuous US influence or open regionalism is attributable to the limited prospects that the region might negotiate an alternative compact to supersede the global liberal order. China and South Korea have contested historical memory and Japanese conservative revisionism.
The first and second findings pose a major challenge to the power transition theory that is used by Aaron Friedberg and John Mearsheimer to describe, explain, and even predict the dynamics of East Asian politics. The power transition theory posits that ascendant states seek to alter the status quo or the existent hegemonic order through the use of coercion and military might and that alterations might prove unstable and even violent because of the intense security dilemma in East Asia. In contradistinction to power transition, the author's order thesis eschews the significance of anarchy, power politics, and the deep schisms that prevent political communities from reaching a social compact. It emphasizes order over anarchy, solidarism over division, and complicity over resistance. This view is justified by the fact that a major change has not occurred in the distribution of power, thus supporting the continuation of the existing hegemonic order.
Nevertheless, as the author proceeds with the empirical analysis, more and more signs of deviations from the order are uncovered. They include China's attempts at diluting US influence in the region, intense territorial disputes between China and Japan and between China and Southeast Asian states, disputes over Taiwan's sovereignty, North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons and the major powers’ inability to prevent it, and Japan's nationalism that upsets the post-World War II collective memory. These events suggest that the social compact in the region has become increasingly elusive or even meaningless. Furthermore, China's increasing assertiveness in recent time questions the author's claims on accommodation of change that suggest ‘coexistence between inclusive bargaining perpetuating US-led security order and exclusive bargaining for a new China-centered order’ and China's contentment with its secondary position in the layered hegemonic hierarchy. The increasing uncertainty of the nature of China's moderation is also reflected upon, looking at the changes in the US treatment of China from the Clinton Administration's ‘strategic partner’ to the Bush Administration's ‘strategic competitor’ to the Obama Administration's target of ‘rebalancing.’
The deviant behaviors noted above are derived from the fact that East Asia has been bereft of a meaningful social compact for both historical and institutional reasons. Historically, unlike in Western Europe, the post-World War II liberal order was commenced in East Asia without explicit consent: at the war's end, there was the division of Korea and China, while no comprehensive settlement treaties were concluded among major states. The emergence and continuation of the Cold War left these issues virtually unresolved and susceptible to political manipulations that perpetuated territorial and sovereignty disputes as well as hindered reconciliation and cooperation between states.
Institutionally, the global liberal order has not permeated the domestic political and economic arrangements of several states in the region: there still exist one-party and dictatorial states that routinely violate human rights and the rule of law. Their illiberal characters and deeds contradict the author's claim that ‘they (East Asian states) have not fundamentally resisted or rejected the normative values and structures preferred by Washington’ (p. 207). East Asia represents pluralism at maximum. Without internalizing the liberal order, East Asian states could hang together only through minimal joint interests in negative peace and economic opportunities, rather than inter-subjective consensus about the basic goals and means of conducting international affairs.
In this sense, Goh's work nicely illuminates the legitimacy of the US hegemonic order that relies on America's will and ability to provide regional security and manage global economic institutions. But the author's bifocal conceptual framework composed of norms and power exemplifies its internal inconsistency in analyzing a non-western region where the underlying principles of territoriality, sovereignty, and the rule of law for the liberal order remain unsettled. The inconsistency becomes even more serious when an ascendant state begins to challenge these principles.
