Constructing Multilateralism in an Anti-Region: From Six Party Talks to a Regional Security Framework in Northeast Asia?
Paul Evans (Liu Faculty, UBC)
January 1, 2007
Does multilateralism have a future in Northeast Asia, or is it an empty dream that tantalizes but inevitably disappoints? Is it like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s eighteenth-century conception of a European federation: highly desirable in theory but, at least in its time, unachievable in practice?
Past thinking about these questions has produced skepticism and outright cynicism on the one hand, and occasional bursts of high hopes and brimming optimism on the other. In his 2000 survey of two decades of multilateral proposals and activities in Northeast Asia, Gilbert Rozman concludes that they have failed. His view corresponds with the accumulated academic wisdom. On the ultimate realist playing field of blood and guts, competing nationalisms, unresolved disputes, historical ghosts, and intractable security problems, even modest institutional aspirations seem misplaced, naïve, and bordering on fantastic.
In Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Snyder, Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia(Brookings Institution Press, 2007);
