century. Noting the major initiatives only, we can identify organizations such as the
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern
African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC) in Africa; the Organ-
isation of Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) in Central and Eastern Europe;
Mercosur in Latin America; and a range of initiatives in East Asia commencing with
the development of ASEAN in the 1970 s, the growth of APEC from the early 1990 s,
and initiatives to establish an East Asian Community (initially via the ‘‘ASEAN Plus
3 ’’ format) in the early twenty-Wrst century.
But the approach to international organization in the developing world is
diVerent to what (too) many scholars think of as the ‘‘European template’’ (Breslin
and Higgott 2000 ). What has been important in parts of the world such as Latin
America and East Asia is the recognition of the importance of ‘‘the region’’ as a
meso level at which to make policy under conditions of globalization. This chapter
can only provide a sample illustration of this emerging non-EU template. It does so
using the most advanced case—the growth of regional organizational initiatives in
East Asia, especially since theWnancial crises of the second half of the 1990 s.
ASEAN may have started out as a security organization in the context of the cold
war but it, like most regional organizations in the South, has taken on a diVerent
character since then. 2 The search for state competitiveness in an era of economic
globalization is now as salient as was the search for state security in the context of
the cold war. The essence of the new institutional regionalism is an endeavor to
create organizational structures that advance regional competitiveness in the global
economy and provide a venue for policy discourse on key regional issues whilst at
the same time preserving state sovereignty. It is this process that has come to be
known as ‘‘regulatory regionalism’’ since the East AsianWnancial crises of the late
twentieth century (Jayasuriya 2004 ).
What the Asian crises told regional policy elites was that there was no consensus
on how to manage international capitalism in the closing stages of the twentieth
century. But the economic crises also provided a positive learning experience at
the multilateral organizational level. The crises demonstrated that for economic
globalization to continue to develop in an orderly manner requires necessary
institutional capability to provide for prudential economic regulation.
While most regional policy analysts continue to recognize that such institutional
regulation is best pursued at the global level, regional level organizational initia-
tives have become increasingly important. Thus, strong structural impediments to
integration notwithstanding, East Asia has become more interdependent and even
more formally institutionalized (see Higgott 2005 ).
But this is not the kind of regional cooperation that has its antecedents in
Europe. Rather it is a regulatory regionalism that links national and global under-
standings of regulation via intermediary regional level organizations. EVectively,
2 A history of regional organization in East Asia is not possible here. See Acharya 2000.624 richard higgott