1 - Regionalism in East Asia: Development in Stages

Summary

INTRODUCTION

East Asia, which includes China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan in its northern part and Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar in the southern one, is universally accepted now as one of the most important regions in the world, both politically and economically. It is also characterized by an intensive growth of intra-regional economic ties and by the development of various political, security, and economic institutions on sub-regional and regional levels which make East Asia an increasingly more cohesive region. This is particularly impressive since only fifty years ago this part of Asia presented a loose assortment of colonial and semi-colonial states and territories which, along with China and the defeated Japan, were lying in ruins after the end of World War II (WW2).

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

1940s to 1950s

The initial stage of East Asia becoming a region with its own distinct characteristics covers the period from the middle of the 1940s to the end of the 1950s. The principal geopolitical and geo-economic changes that happened at that time in the Pacific basin were: (1) the transformation of the United States into a dominant political, military, and economic power in this part of the world after the end of WW2; (2) the collapse of the colonial system and emergence, as a result, of new sovereign states in Northeast and Southeast Asia; (3) acceleration of an economic decline — a process which started already on the eve of WW2 — of old colonial powers (the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal) in East Asia; and (4) the simultaneous process of reorientation of economic ties of new East Asian sovereign states from their former colonial masters in Europe to the United States and its regional partners, foremost of all to Japan.

As a result of these fundamental changes a new, unprecedented type of political and economic relations started to emerge in East Asia which will help to create a basis for an eventual regional community. Already in the second half of the 1940s East Asian countries made their first attempts to begin an intra-state cooperation on economic issues.