Generally speaking, the literature discussed above has advanced the study of regionalism. Through its theoretical pluralism, it offers a number of explanations for differences between regional organizations – although various non-mainstream
17 approaches remain weakly represented – and its comparative perspective has made the study of regional cooperation and integration less Euro-centric. This study builds upon central insights and arguments of Comparative Regionalism: specifically, it takes into account that regional organizations are created by state representatives who can draw on differential power resources in order to gear them towards forms that are consistent with their preferences, as rationalist approaches contend. I also acknowledge the observation by the institutionalist and diffusion literature that, despite the fact that institutions are supposed to fulfil certain functions, they often seem to be less than optimal solutions to given problems and develop a ‘life of their own’. This being said, existing approaches suffer from some major deficits, two of which are addressed in this section: the unclear conceptualization of path dependence and the dilatory treatment of regional norms.
2.3.1 Unclear conceptualization of history
First, Comparative Regionalism is largely unconscious of history as an autonomous factor, and is therefore badly equipped to account for organizational pathways. Regional organizations and their shapes are mostly conceived to be a function of present environmental conditions, such as a specific distribution of power, preferences, domestic coalitions and the like. If these conditions change, so will – virtually unmediated – the organizational architecture of a region. Vice versa, if institutions persist, it is because the exogenous variables remain constant.
The tendency to rely on such ‘synchronic’ explanatory approaches has been criticized in the discipline of IR as a whole (Buzan and Little 2000: 19–20; Lawson 2006), but also with regard to Regionalism as a sub-discipline (Hurrell 2007b: 134).
Some of the ‘puzzles’ of the rationalist literature on regional organizations, such as the absence or weakness of regional organizations in areas of high economic or security interdependence like East Asia (Börzel 2016: 50; Kahler 2000), can be attributed at least in part to the overemphasis on synchronic explanation. Power-political, domestic, and functional factors may very well have an impact on the development of regional organizations but the latter do not, as posited, adapt directly to change in the former.
As noted above, some Comparative Regionalists do adopt a historical perspective when accounting for differences between regional organizations. However, in doing so, they mostly content themselves with tracking their development over time (Beeson 2005). By contrast, perspectives that see regional organizations as being
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subject to temporal dynamics, in the sense that institutional choices inform options for continuity and change in the future, are less wide-spread. As a consequence, their efforts to specify the historical conditions for differences between regional organizations remain unsatisfactory.
While some Regionalist scholars adopt the concept of ‘path dependence’ to factor in the role of history, they use it in a very loose and generic way which contrasts with the original theoretical sophistication found in historical institutionalism, where the term was originally coined (Pierson 2004; see also Chapter 3 in this thesis). First, unlike implied in some Comparative Regionalist appropriations, path dependence does not cause institutional stasis but in fact leads to partial stability as well as conditional change. Missing this point, some authors adopting historical institutionalist ideas overemphasize similarities between old and new institutions – e.g. ASEAN and the ARF (Acharya 1997, 2001: 165–193; Nesadurai and Khong 2007) – while neglecting evidence of change.
Second, historical institutionalist writers do not treat path dependence as a causal force eo ipso, as some Comparative Regionalists seem to do, but as a heuristic concept which helps to identify the social mechanisms causing institutional stability and change.
Only an examination of the processes through which regional organizations are reproduced and the events leading to the adoption of certain institutional pathways at critical junctures provide the concept of path dependence with true explanatory power.
By contrast, Comparative Regionalism has not been very attentive to the social mechanisms leading to the reproduction of ideational phenomena (Checkel 2016: 574).
Consequentially, it interprets path dependence as if it were an inherent cause of stability. This does not amount to much more than the claim that institutions, once set up, are hard to change (Nesadurai and Khong 2007).
Such conceptualizations are particularly unsatisfactory in their accounts of institutional change at critical junctures: if path dependence leads to stability almost all of the time, why does change suddenly become possible at certain moments in time, as in the 1980s in Latin America (Domínguez 2007)? If path dependence means that, usually, the possibilities for institutional change are relatively restricted, it is only plausible to pay particular attention to the contestation between different institutional models in such moments where the restraints on institutional adaption are temporarily
19 lifted. However, to date, moments of change and instances of contestation do not receive adequate attention in historically informed approaches to differences in regional organizations. Accordingly, the way in which actors set regional organizations onto specific pathways in these moments and, by consequence, reproduce differences between regional organizations is treated negligently.
2.3.2 Unclear status of norms
The second point of critique concerns the treatment of norms. As pointed out, many studies take into account the convergence or divergence of member states’
domestic norms as an explanation for differences between regional organizations. By contrast, only a few studies connect the shape of regional organizations to regionally specific understandings about international conduct. These approaches rightly point to the social embeddedness of regional organizations in a ‘deeper’ layer of social structure, and indicate that regionally specific normative frameworks can help explain differences.
In this, they go beyond those approaches which ignore norms or treat them as mere epiphenomena “overlaid on extant realities” (Solingen 2008: 271). Yet, they have so far offered unconvincing accounts of how exactly these two layers of social structure are connected. For example, Nesadurai and Khong (2007; see also Acharya and Johnston 2007a: 18) emphasize the persistent commitment to non-interference in connection with the longevity of the ASEAN Way, but it remains unclear in their account whether norms are part of ASEAN’s institutional features or variable explaining these features.
Most accounts seem to assume that regional organizations are somehow
‘embedded’ in a normative context. Embeddedness essentially implies that regional organizations share a certain structural logic with the fundamental norms prevalent in international society. For example, if the main actors of a region accept human rights norms, which grant the individual a certain legal status, then so will the concrete legal mechanisms of the regional organizations. This is problematic from a methodological point of view: unless the researcher can specify the causal processes through which norms and organizations are connected, the argument remains quite generic and borders on the tautological: if organizational features are an epiphenomenon or an expression of the underlying normative structure, then the latter cannot be used to explain the former.
Again, I agree with Checkel (2016: 574) that there is an urgent need to study the causal mechanisms that connect the different layers of regional social reality.
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Apart from this methodological issue, the embeddedness argument only works well if the normative context is treated as given. It is inept to account for cases where the social deep structure of a region is ambiguous in the sense that norms are contested.
A look at Börzel and Van Hüllen’s treatment of norms illustrates this point. The researchers’ arguments about governance transfer presuppose a basic global consensus on human rights, democracy and anti-corruption, which then leads to the adoption of certain institutional models in regional organizations (Börzel and van Hüllen 2015c).
However, they do not make much of an effort to provide evidence that such a consensus actually exists. What is more, although the authors concede that the eventual organizational instruments will be localized to fit regional contexts, they do not inquire what role regionally specific norms or interpretations which deviate from the purported global consensus play in such processes of localization. Thus, they neglect a potentially important factor in the explanation of persisting differences between the organizational forms of governance transfer across regions. What are the consequences for the creation and maintenance of regional governance transfer mechanisms if, for example, actors from non-Western regions reject liberal notions of democracy? Of course, norms may also be contested within regions, for example when some actors aspire to promote human rights as an international norm while others remain critical towards it. However, normative contestation has not been a major concern of comparative regionalist studies so far (see also Domínguez 2007).
Ambiguity may also come in the form of tensions between certain norms prevalent in a region. Thus, even if there was a global consensus over the meaning of the three norms of human rights, democracy and anti-corruption, the regional governance transfer mechanisms may turn out to be more or less intrusive because they may conflict with other regionally specific norms, such as specific ideas about non-interference and sovereignty. In Southeast Asia, for example, the recent years have seen an increasing recognition of human rights principles, which implies the acknowledgement of individual rights vis-à-vis the states of the region. At the same time, however, government representatives insist on undivided state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, which has lead to the adoption of a relatively weak human rights mechanism (Aguirre and Pietropaoli 2012).
The more contestation and normative tensions are present, the more the embeddedness argument – that regional organizations reflect the structural logic of the
21 underlying normative framework – runs into difficulties because it cannot explain which aspects of the competing normative expectations are translated into organizational features and which are not. To do so, it is necessary to take a close look at the processes through which such ambiguities are negotiated between the involved regional actors.
An additional problem emanating from the unspecific treatment of norms is that it is largely uni-directional: it acknowledges that norms influence the shape of regional organizations but does not take into account that regional organizations may in turn also have an effect on the normative framework of the region. For example, the EC was created in the context of a changed understanding of sovereignty. At the same time, however, the EC provided an organizational framework through which further change in the deep structure could be promoted – leading, for example, to the transformation of the norms of conventional international law. Such two-way dynamics have a profound influence on institutional pathways and can therefore exacerbate differences between regional organizations. Without an account of the mechanisms connecting the two layers of social reality, our understanding of processes of stability and change in regional organizations remains incomplete.