Abstract:

Countries of the East Asia region have been relatively late in joining the regionalisation process. The early cooperation projects initiated after World War II, such as SEAFET, ASA and MALPHINDO proved ephemeral due to mutual antagonisms based primarily on territorial claims. The only notable exception to this trend was the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Consequently, by the second half of the 1990s, East Asia came to be referred to as a ‘region without regionalism’, a ‘white spot’ or an ‘empty box’ in the geography of global regionalism. The use of these labels was fairly universal, even though Asian scientists and researchers had employed the concept of ‘soft regionalism’ as early as the 1970s, typically concerning the Japanese economic policy. It must be noted that the idea in question was mostly a response to the European concept of hard integration built on treaties and political agreements (Jora 2007).