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Regionalism and Critical Junctures: Explaining the “Organization Gap” in Northeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2016

Kent Calder  and
Min Ye
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Extract

Northeast Asia, where the interests of three major nuclear powers and the world's two largest economies mingle around the unstable pivot of the Korean Peninsula, is a region rife with political and economic uncertainties. It is arguably one of the most dangerous areas in the world, plagued by security problems of global importance, including nuclear and missile proliferation. It has, to be sure, been widely touted as a region of economic promise. Yet despite Northeast Asia's demonstrable economic success at the macro level, and a panoply of highly regarded individual economic managers at the micro level, its collective economic management has nevertheless been disappointing.

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Journal of East Asian Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , August 2004 , pp. 191 - 226
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Copyright © East Asia Institute 

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References

Notes

The authors express special appreciation to Vinod Aggarwal, Lee Jae-cho, Peter Katzenstein, Sook-jong Lee, Chung-in Moon, John Odell, and Ippei Yamazawa for their comments and to seminar participants at Princeton University, University of California-Berkeley, the East-West Center, Korea University, Sejong Institute, KIEP, the Korea Development Institute, and the Institute of Developing Economies in Japan for their suggestions.Google Scholar

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56. Transnational networks are proliferating at various levels, in particular the linkage between the governments and nongovernmental coordination. For example, in December 1998 the leaders of ASEAN, China, Japan, and Korea agreed to establish the East Asia Vision Group (EAVG), first proposed by President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea. The EAVG, consisting of eminent intellectuals from the member countries, developed a number of concrete proposals, including one for an accelerated development of a regional free-trade area, and submitted its report to the ASEAN+3 (APT) Summit in Brunei Darusalam in 2001. At the Singapore Summit of November 2000, the APT leaders agreed to establish a more formal East Asia Study Group (EASG), at the initiative also of Kim Dae-jung. This body, consisting of actual government officials, began its deliberations in the spring of 2001 and reported to the APT Pnom Penh summit of November 2002. A Working Group at the level of directors general was also established in July 2001; it met in Seoul and enhanced communication and coordination among the three Northeast Asian countries.Google Scholar

57. The APT members did agree, however, that 10 percent of the swaps could be implemented without an agreement with the IMF. See Henning, Randall, East Asian Financial Cooperation (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2002), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar