Advancing the Regional Commons in the New East Asia highlights a number of interests which members of ASEAN and Plus Three countries collectively recognize. This set of common interests includes not only economic development but also social development. Written by nationals in their respective countries, the different chapters in this volume highlights the different foundations for such common interests and these reflect the different constructive ways in which ASEAN and Plus Three countries come to see a multi-strand cooperative partnership. The task of advancing the regional commons will involve efforts to recognise and nurture ASEAN’s and Plus Three’s common interests in terms of broad social development, managing regional security issues, the development of a regional infrastructure, and ensuring collective progress for all member countries. ASEAN becomes a community in 2015 and the idea of embracing, protecting, sustaining and advancing the regional commons become a vital process. Concurrently, APT has also realized that its contribution to the achieving goal of community and promoting regional commons is absolutely critical for both ASEAN and the Plus Three countries. Academics will find in this volume a clear analytical treatment of issues which regional groupings are currently facing and this can provide the basis for a comparative analysis. This volume will also be of interest to students and the general public looking for a systematic introduction to the successful implementation of cooperative ventures and also an assessment of the new collaborative energies which shape this dynamic region.

Advancing the Regional Commons in the New East Asia highlights a number of interests which members of ASEAN and Plus Three countries collectively recognize. This set of common interests includes not only economic development but also social development. Written by nationals in their respective countries, the different chapters in this volume highlights the different foundations for such common interests and these reflect the different constructive ways in which ASEAN and Plus Three countries come to see a multi-strand cooperative partnership. The task of advancing the regional commons will involve efforts to recognise and nurture ASEAN’s and Plus Three’s common interests in terms of broad social development, managing regional security issues, the development of a regional infrastructure, and ensuring collective progress for all member countries. ASEAN becomes a community in 2015 and the idea of embracing, protecting, sustaining and advancing the regional commons become a vital process. Concurrently, APT has also realized that its contribution to the achieving goal of community and promoting regional commons is absolutely critical for both ASEAN and the Plus Three countries. Academics will find in this volume a clear analytical treatment of issues which regional groupings are currently facing and this can provide the basis for a comparative analysis. This volume will also be of interest to students and the general public looking for a systematic introduction to the successful implementation of cooperative ventures and also an assessment of the new collaborative energies which shape this dynamic region.

This volume is a collection of papers written by nationals or former nationals of the respective country in ASEAN and Northeast Asia. Unlike other works written by scholars outside ASEAN or East Asia, it offers an insider’s point of view of the 10 ASEAN states, China, Japan and South Korea on regional community building. While a nationalist perspective may permeate throughout the study, it is also clear that pursuing regional cooperation is considered to be important by the respective author, denoting the non-exclusivity between nationalism and regionalism and the mutual reinforcement of the two. Each author of this volume has made a deliberate effort to introduce and survey the developmental challenges and experiences of his or her country from a historical perspective. All authors, without exception, have emphasized the importance and advantages in staying with ASEAN or linking up with ASEAN by China, Japan and South Korea in political-security, economic and socio-cultural terms. Their papers also reveal that the self-help and self-strengthening mechanism emphasized by the ASEAN Plus Three process will take time to bear fruits. In the meantime, it seems that bilateral interactions and cooperation between ASEAN and Northeast Asian states remain to be more dominant as shown in this study. One can argue that bilateral interactions are the building block of multilateralism interactions. To be sure, there is a deliberate effort in this study to highlight "unity in diversity" in East Asia in general and ASEAN in particular.

Institutional activities have remarkably transformed East Asia, a region once known for the absence of regionalism and regime-building efforts. Yet the dynamics of this Asian institutionalization have remained an understudied area of research. This book offers one of the first scholarly attempts to clarify what constitutes institutionalization in East Asia and to systematically trace the origins, discern the features, and analyze the prospects of ongoing institutionalization processes in the world’s most dynamic region. Institutionalizing East Asia comprises eight essays, grouped thematically into three sections. Part I considers East and Southeast Asia as focal points of inter-state exchanges and traces the institutionalization of inter-state cooperation first among the Southeast Asian states and then among those of the wider East Asia. Part II examines the institutionalization of regional collaboration in four domains: economy, security, natural disaster relief, and ethnic conflict management. Part III discusses the institutionalization dynamics at the sub-regional and inter-regional levels. The essays in this book offer a useful source of reference for scholars and researchers specializing in East Asia, regional architecture, and institution-building in international relations. They will also be of interest to postgraduate and research students interested in ASEAN, the drivers and limits of international cooperation, as well as the role of regional multilateralism in the Asia-Pacific region.

Since the late 1980s, many East Asian countries have become more multicultural, a process marked by increased democracy and pluralism despite the continuing influence of nationalism, which has forced these countries in the region to re-envision their nations. Many such countries have had to reconsider their constitutional make-up, their terms of citizenship and the ideal of social harmony. This has resulted in new immigration and border-control policies and the revisiting of laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, and socioeconomic welfare. This book explores new perspectives, concepts, and theories that are socially relevant, culturally suitable, and normatively attractive in the East Asia context. It not only outlines the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism in East Asian countries but also places them within the wider theoretical context. The contributors look at how nationalism under the force of multiculturalism, or vice versa, affects East Asian societies including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong differently. The key themes are: Democracy and equality; Confucianism’s relationship with nationalism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism; China’s use of its political institutions to initiate and sustain nationalism; the impact of globalization on nationalism in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan; the role of democracy in reinvigorating indigenous cultures in Taiwan.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the consequent outbreak of the Cambodian conflict brought Southeast Asia into instability and deteriorated relations between Vietnam and the subsequently established Vietnam-backed government in Cambodia on the one hand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries on the other. As a result of the conflict, the Soviet Union established a foothold in Southeast Asia while China, through its support of the anti-Vietnam Cambodian resistance, improved relations with Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand. Japan's Fukuda Doctrine - it’s declared priorities of promoting cooperative and friendly relations between Communist Indochinese nations and non-Communist ASEAN countries – became increas¬ingly at odds with Japan’s role as a member of the Free World in the broader Cold War confrontation. Tokyo had to steer a path between Washington’s hard-line policy of isolating Vietnam and its own desire to prevent regional destabilization. Against this background, this book addresses the following questions: what was Japan’s response to the challenges to its objectives and interests in Southeast Asia and to the Fukuda Doctrine? What role did Japan play for the settlement of the conflict in Cambodia? How did Japan’s diplomacy on the Cambodian problem affect the Japanese role in the region? It argues that Japan’s contribution was more active than has widely been recognized.

Since the turn of the millennium it has become clear that the Asia-Pacific Region is, economically, the fastest growing continent in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time despite the setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Asia-Pacific's share of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doubled from 15 per cent to 30 per cent between 1970 and 2017 and is projected to account for half of global GDP by 2050. With South East and South Asia also growing rapidly, with over half the world's population and three of the world's five largest economies, Asia is soon poised to home half of the world's middle class - a class that is both the driver and the product of higher education. The quality of a country's system of higher education may be seen both as a gauge of its current level of national development as well as of its future economic prospects. It is therefore natural that the putative "Asian Century" should generate interest in the region's higher education systems which, on the one hand, share common characteristics-a fixation with credentials and engineering, high technology (especially among male students), and business degrees-while at the same time are also highly differentiated, not only across countries but also within. As such, a better understanding of higher education achievements, failings, potential, and structural limitations in the Asia-Pacific Region is imperative. This handbook presents a number of significant country case-studies and documents cross-cutting trends relating to, among other things: the trilemma faced by governments juggling competing claims of access, accessible cost, and quality; the balance between teaching and research; the links between labour markets (demand) and higher education (supply); preferred fields of study and their consequences; the rise of the research university in Asia; the lure of institutions of international reputation within the region; new education technologies and their effects; and, trends in government policy within the wider region and sub-regions.