(Download) "Southeast Asian Regionalism and Global Governance: "Multilateral Utility" Or "Hedging Utility"?(Report)" by Contemporary Southeast Asia * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Southeast Asian Regionalism and Global Governance: "Multilateral Utility" Or "Hedging Utility"?(Report)
- Author : Contemporary Southeast Asia
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 327 KB
Description
Regional organizations are widely regarded as building blocks for global governance and constitutive parts of the global multilateral order. This view has been explicitly confirmed by the 2005 World Summit of the United Nations (UN) which through General Assembly Resolution 60/1 attached a key role to regional organizations in the management of global problems. (2) However, the building block paradigm provides a rather undifferentiated view of how regional organizations operate. Although as a result of isomorphic behaviour regional organizations may increasingly resemble each other in terms of structure, (3) they significantly vary in their contribution to multilateralism. While some, like the European Union (EU), pursue a strong normative agenda, (4) others--in particular many of the newly formed non-Western regional bodies--act more pragmatically, regarding multilateral institutions primarily as devices to influence the regional and global power equation. These two approaches to multilateralism correspond to two types of regional organizations, namely those acting as "multilateral utilities" and those acting as "hedging utilities". This, however, raises an important question: how do we know whether regional organizations are acting as one or the other? This article seeks to address this question. It develops a theory-guided set of six indicators, which allow us to determine the type of multilateral engagement of a regional organization and to appraise the intensity of a grouping's contribution to a multilateral global governance system. In a subsequent case study, I apply these indicators to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN is a particularly interesting case, not only because it is Asia's premier regional organization, but also because it has persistently championed the cause of multilateralism, even when multilateralism was under siege.