In-Person Panel PS6.2

 Power Dynamics in East Asia: Perspectives on Regional Alliances and Rivalries

Dynamics of Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy: The Effects of Vietnam’s Collective Decision-Making Process on its South China Sea Policy 

Phuong Ly Nguyen 

This paper explores why Vietnam pursued a relatively moderate position on the South China Sea issue vis-à-vis China and the United States from 1991 to 2022 despite the evolving geopolitical landscape in the Asia-Pacific. Employing neoclassical realism (NCR), the paper attributes the relative consistency in Vietnam’s South China Sea policy to its collective decision-making process. While sharing neorealism’s emphasis on the international structure, NCR argues that systemic condition only defines a range of appropriate policy options. NCR utilises unit-level factors, such as domestic politics, to understand how structural condition of power is translated into a particular course of state action. From a domestic dimension, Vietnam’s South China Sea policy was the result of disagreements and compromises between the two dominant groups within the Party and Government, termed as conservatives and nationalist-minded elites, during the collective decision-making process. The continuity and change in Vietnam’s South China Sea policy, therefore, depended upon the shifting balance of power between these two major forces. Vietnamese domestic politics was relatively stable as no political element totally overwhelmed the other and shifts in the domestic power configuration occurred gradually. This led to slow evolution and greater consistency in Vietnam’s moderate position on the South China disputes.

Standing up to the Dragon: The Growing Eastern European-Taiwanese Alliance 

Jonathan Ludwig 

Small Power states in Eastern Europe have led the charge against two regimes that have been threatening its neighbors. They were at the forefront of arguing for the importance of standing up against Russia long before its February 2022 full-scale war on Ukraine, and, since January 2022, they have been at the forefront of improving relations with Taiwan in the face of growing Chinese aggression. 

Parliamentary leaders, including Chairs of the Taiwan Caucuses and Foreign Affairs Committees, and other government officials have flown to Taipei to meet with their Taiwanese counterparts. Prague established a sister-city agreement with Taipei, after which Shanghai withdrew from their agreement. Lithuania has gone even further, withdrawing from the 17 + 1 initiative and opening a “Taiwanese” representative office, under that name, in Vilnius, and refused to bow to intense Chinese pressure to reverse these decisions. 

In this presentation, I trace the growing role that Small Power states in Eastern Europe have played in Taiwan relations, the effect this has had on their relationship with China, how this has changed the calculus of larger powers in dealing with Taiwan and China, and the possible long-term effects this changing relationship could have in the Indo-Pacific region.

The Politics of Domestic Legitimacy Enhancement and Southeast Asian States’ Strategies of Engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations 

Thu Hien Phan 

This paper starts with two main observations. First, ASEAN is a regional security complex where security concerns of ASEAN countries cannot be separable. ASEAN countries have been arguably exposed to relatively similar security pressures triggered by great powers. Second, the notion of power transition between the US and China has inspired a growing body of scholarship holding the view that ASEAN states have supported many ASEAN-led institutions membership expansion to promote their national interests in the midst of the US-China competition. The puzzle, however, is that, despite relatively similar security pressure, ASEAN member states have displayed not only patterns of expanding ASEAN-led institutions’ membership but a wide variety of strategies of engaging with ASEAN. The paper argues that the variations on strategies of engagement with ASEAN depend on: (i) ASEAN state leaders’ attempts to link ASEAN to national interests, or particular issues or agendas to boost public support; and (ii) domestic public opinion on the importance of ASEAN to national interests or such particular issues and agendas. Pursuing particular strategies of engagement with ASEAN helps ASEAN state leaders to generate domestic public support and thus enhance their domestic political legitimacy.

Colonialism and the Historical Creation of Malaya 

Wilbert Wong 

Archipelagic Southeast Asia provides a good example of how historical boundaries and identities of nation states were inherited from the borders that were constructed by imperial powers. Colonial historians played a crucial part in this nation-building process by helping create the histories of these regions, crafting identities for communities, polities or nations that did not previously exist. Their historical constructs served as a base for the national histories of the countries that would emerge out of these colonial territories. I will examine how the idea of “Malaya” was conceptualised as a historical entity and nation in the twentieth century by colonial historians and the legacies of their construction in Malaya’s (and, later, Malaysia’s) postcolonial national narrative. The concept of “Malaya” as a nation had no prior existence before the twentieth century. Through their histories, British colonial historians wrote Malaya into existence as a nation and provided the ideological framework that would be useful for Malaysia’s nation building project. Within the context of world history, this legacy of colonial discourse in Malaysia’s nation-state historiography is an example of the influence of colonial narratives in the national discourse of former colonial states. My research demonstrates that one of the key reasons of the continued influence of colonial historical discourse is because they are useful for nation building, providing the intellectual endorsement for the nation that postcolonial nation builders wanted to create.