The empirical part of this study consists of a comparison of changes in the secondary institutions of regional organizations in Europe and Southeast Asia, which
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illustrates how the model presented in the theoretical chapter can help understand historical institutional developments in international societies. More to the point, it looks at three specific dimensions, or ‘episodes’, of change in regional organizations and asks how these played out in the respective regions. These episodes, to each of which a chapter is dedicated, are decolonization, regionalization and enlargement.
Decolonization is taken here to comprise the dissolution of the old colonial institutions linking peripheral communities to a European core and the emergence of distinct regional organizations in Europe and Southeast Asia. I use regionalization, for want of a better term, in a narrow sense to describe the successive relocation of authority in the regional international societies in more hierarchical ways once the regional organizations are set up. Finally, enlargement means the expansion of the boundaries of the regional international societies.
These should not be seen as distinct stages of regionalism. Regionalization can occur before, after or in parallel to enlargement. Accordingly, the temporal expansion of the episodes within the regions partially overlap. They do, however, mark key processes related to the development of regional organizations that almost all regional international societies hosting such organizations have undergone. Since the processes of decolonization, regionalization and enlargement did not occur in exact temporal conjunction in Europe and Southeast Asia, the timeframes of analysis in the two regions are not entirely congruent (Breslin et al. 2002: 10). For example, the examination of legal integration in Chapter 6 focuses on the period from 1961 to 1992 in the EC case, and from 1976 to 2007 for ASEAN.
In each episode, the analysis focuses on certain key aspects of the developments:
the decolonization chapter deals primarily with how ideas about extra-regional relations were connected to the emergence of regional organizations, the regionalization chapter with legal integration, and the enlargement chapter with specific enlargement ‘rounds’.
The primary goal is to track the nature and the drivers of change in regional organizations in thematically circumscribed areas, rather than to develop an all-encompassing historical account of the institutional development of the respective regional international societies. Therefore, each chapter focuses on those institutions that are most relevant for the particular dimension of change in question.
73 As the model does not propose any nomothetic causal hypotheses but offers a template for understanding institutional dynamics, the purpose of the case studies is not theory-testing. Rather, its aim is to show the heuristic and analytical value of the model in understanding distinct institutional dynamics in regional international societies. The model is valid if it creates a plausible narrative that offers explanations that other theories or models cannot provide. As a consequence, the empirical findings cannot falsify the theory but they can serve to fine-tune the analytical framework and to identify mechanisms that have been overlooked in its theoretical construction.25
Accordingly, the case studies are not designed in an overly rigid comparative frame, which would be more useful if the goal was to isolate possible law-like causal mechanisms and effects. While I am interested in common traits, an equally important aim of the study is to show the historical contingency of individual cases, and empirical generalizations are only in a very limited sense useful to this end. Therefore, I do not systematically juxtapose the two regions on a number of variables and test for possible alternative explanations, but merely identify and emphasize parallels and differences in the institutional development of the two regional international societies where they appear to be salient.
For example, in the chapter on regionalization, I find that actors in both regions pushed for legal integration by pointing to assumed functional necessities, in the sense that economic integration must be undergirded by an according legal order, but European pro-legalization actors could additionally refer to the primary institutions of democracy and Community constitutionalism in order to legitimize their claims.
However, in contrast to a rigid ‘most similar cases design’ study, I do not conclude from this observation that the existence of these primary institutions provides a necessary or sufficient cause for the relatively high degree of legal integration in Europe but merely that it provided an important enabling context for the institutionalization of respective
25 For example, the analytical conception initially contained an ideal-type framework discerning four types of change according to two dimensions: the speed of change (sudden vs. gradual) and the direction of change (primary to secondary vs. secondary to primary). However, empirical findings suggested that even change sparked by apparently revolutionary events usually develops in longer time periods, and that processes of institutional change were more complex than the linear assumption of a dominant direction could account for, as the momentum of change often oscillated between the two levels. In reaction to this, I dropped the ideal-type framework and conceptualized institutional change instead as a process that unfolds in sequences, where institutionalization practices on the primary institutional level may create constitutive contexts conducive to further change on the secondary, and vice versa. I thank Nicolás Terradas for pointing out the possible long-term effects of singular shocks to me.
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secondary institutions. Such a flexible application of the comparative method can help to identify commonalities and differences across cases and uncover the historical contingency of the development of regional international societies.
For purposes such as those outlined above, George and Bennett have proposed the method of structured, focused comparison, a procedure of semi-standardized data collection concentrating on certain empirical aspects of the cases in question. This method, in their words,
is ‘structured’ in that the researcher writes general questions that reflect the research objective and that these questions are asked of each case under study to guide and standardize data collection, thereby making systematic comparison and cumulation of the findings of the cases possible. The method is ‘focused’ in that it deals only with certain aspects of the historical cases examined. (George and Bennett 2005: 67)
In the present study, the interrelated goals of structuring and focusing the inquiry are achieved by means of two features: first, applying the theoretical model of constitution and institutionalization presented in the theoretical chapter serves as a means to structure the inquiry, as well as the narratives that emerge out of this inquiry. Its concepts are used to develop questions that guide the analysis of the empirical material in both regions. For example, the concept of shocks translates into the question of what historical events have been constructed as serious challenges to the institutional set-up in each region – these questions will be developed in more detail below. At the same time, the questions also limit the scope of the inquiry by turning the attention towards the mechanisms surrounding the reproduction of institutional configurations, and away from other potential factors influencing the development of regional organizations.
Second, the analysis will be centred on the three historically central episodes of institutional development mentioned above. These focal points lend a meta-structure to the analysis of the cases and further limit the empirical aspects under which they are examined.