From Trade to Investment: ASEAN and AFTA in the Era of the 'New Regionalism'

摘要

Bowles' 1997 Pacific Affairs article is an important contribution to the literature on ASEAN and the "New Regionalism." The explanation of AFTA as an investment-driven policy was original and innovative at the time of the article's publication and secured it a prominent place in the meanwhile voluminous ASEAN literature. Without explicitly touching on this debate, the piece supports those who regard globalization and regionalism as closely intertwined~(42) against others who viewed them as contradictory or competitive trends.~(43) Similarly important, Bowles' article contributed to paving the way for a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the New Regionalism and, as one of the first, analyzed the phenomenon of multiple or overlapping regionalism. Although with hindsight the latter proved more enduring than Bowles anticipated, this would have been difficult to predict at the time of his writing, which was prior to the Asian financial crisis and only at the beginning of concerted challenges to the liberal multilateral post-Cold War world order by newly (re-)emerging global and regional powers. The latter-primarily represented by the BRICS states China, India, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and South Africa-regarded the Western dominated global institutional architecture as a thinly veiled attempt to establish a Western "soft hegemony." The contest over membership, decision-making procedures, and the norms and mandates of international fora transformed global institutions into arenas for power contests, a trend that spurred forum shopping in the form of, inter alia, multiple regionalism; and when regionalism was paralyzed-for instance as a consequence of economic crisis-the multilateral order fragmented even more by the plethora of bilateral (trade) agreements that have emerged since the early 2000s.