The New Asian Renaissance and Its Discontents: National Narratives, Pan-Asian Visions and the Changing Post-Cold War Ord
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The New Asian Renaissance and Its Discontents: National Narratives, Pan-Asian Visions and the Changing Post-Cold War Order Mark T. Berger International Studies Program, School of Modern Language Studies, The University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
This article provides a critical retrospective on the influential Pan-Asian visions that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to explain and celebrate the economic dynamism of a growing number of East Asian states. Both the dominant East Asian-based narratives and many of the cultural explanations provided by commentators outside the region rested and/or continue to rest on a dubious distinction between East and West and on generally fixed notions of culture/race. The promotion of a New Asian Renaissance is best explained in terms of its relationship to the vicissitudes of particular state-mediated national development projects against the backdrop of the wider transformation of Asia. The growing irrelevance of APEC, the continued and growing economic importance of China, the IMF’s handling of the Asian financial crisis, and the emergence of ASEAN+3 have all provided sustenance for revised, albeit more cautious, forms of PanAsianism that reflect the unfinished character of the history of New Asian Renaissance. International Politics (2003) 40, 195–221. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800013 Keywords: Pan-Asianism; Confucianism; Asian values; New Asian Renaissance; ASEAN+3
Introduction The onset of the Asian financial crisis marked a major reversal for the idea that the 21st century would be a ‘Pacific Century’ in which organizations such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), would play an important, even central, role (Berger, 1999).1 The late 1990s also signaled the weakening of related, but more exclusively Pan-Asian visions of the region’s future. On the other hand, the increasing economic and politico-military significance of the People’s Republic of China by the second half of the 1990s ensured that great expectations continued to prevail about China’s economic and politico-military potential in the 21st century (Goldstein, 2000). Further, the growing displacement of APEC by the Association of Southeast Asian
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Nations: China, Japan and South Korea (ASEAN+3) in the wake of the Asian crisis, has also provided some support for culturally and racially exclusive forms of regionalism (Berger and Beeson, 2003). Nevertheless, the late 1990s marked a major turning point for ideas about a Pacific Century and a ‘New Asian Renaissance’. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the notion of a New Asian Renaissance emerged as a somewhat amorphous term that captured the dramatic economic, political and cultural changes transforming the region (Godement, 1997). For some commentators, the New Asian Renaissance (and the Pacific Century) encompassed the many ‘non-Asian’ nation-states and peoples in the AsiaPacific, while for others it encapsulated a more exclusive Pan-Asianism (Berge
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