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.

East Asia is normally identified as a group of countries lying along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, but in recent years scholars have begun thinking about a new East Asia that is a community rather than a set of sovereign states. This regional community is a theoretical notion variously defined on the basis of economic or political relations, philosophical orientations, language or other criteria, with each standard producing a different set of boundaries. This book looks at the new East Asia from a Northeast Asian perspective, considering it both as a theoretical construct and a practical reality.The authors are Asian Studies specialists, mainly from Japan but with contributions from Korea and the United States, and they consider the trade and economic interaction, diplomacy, and security arrangements of East Asia. Prepared as part of a five-year research program conducted by Waseda University's 21st Century Center of Excellence for the Creation of Contemporary Asian Studies, the essays are published here in English for the first time

This book contains the most comprehensive and critical account available of the evolution of The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) norms and the viability of the ASEAN way of conflict management.

The prospect of a new, rapidly rising China poses both opportunities and challenges for regional community building in Asia Pacific. In this book, intellectual leaders from the region present their perspectives on China's development. Four chapters by Chinese authors analyze the domestic dynamics related to the country's political and economic development as well as its external economic and political/security relationships. Contributors from Japan, Korea, member-countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Australia/New Zealand cover the growing political influence of China in the region, its influence on security in the region, and the implications of China's continuing economic growth. Five final chapters examine China's regional strategy toward Asia Pacific, Japan-China cooperation on regional community building, taking a greater role in regional security arrangements and the regional economic order, and the cultural implications for the region of the rise of China. Contributors include Yang Guangbin (Renmin University, Japan), Men Honghua (Central Party School, China), Wang Rongjun (Chinese Academy of Social Science), Ni Feng (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Takahara Akio (Rikkyo University, Japan), Ohashi Hideo (Senshu University, Japan), Lee Geun, (Seoul National University, Korea), Jwa Sung-Hee (Korea Economic Research Institute), Morada Noel (Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, Philippines), Mari Pangestu (former executive director, Center for Strategic and International Studies), Greg Austin, (European Institute for Asian Studies, Brussels, and Australian National University), Jusuf Wanandi (Center for Strategic and International Studies, Indonesia), Chia Siow Yue (Singapore Institute of International Affairs and EADN), and Wang Gungwu, (East Asian Institute, Singapore).

The book intents to locate the process and effectiveness of cooperation in East Asia, to regard the construction of the East Asian community as the ideal, to see the contradictions and difficulties in construction as the reality, and to identify the actual development and achievement as the choice and effort between the two. The year of 1997 saw the Asian financial crisis, which turned out to be a disaster but also opened up an opportunity for East Asia to establish cooperation mechanisms. Starting with the crisis, this book examines the origin and development of the East Asian cooperation movement. More importantly, it investigates the obstacles and resistance, and provides insights into the cooperation within East Asia in the context of unstable political environments. Specifically, it expounds the East Asian Free Trade Area, monetary cooperation, as well as the cooperation within Northeast Asian and Asia-Pacific regions.