RE-ENVISIONING SUBJECTIVITY AND SOVEREIGNTY IN THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF SOUTHEAST ASIA: THE CASE OF “NON-STATE” ACTORS
See Seng Tan
Is anyone still not a constructivist? —Amitav Acharya (2005)
My suggestion is that agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an external political world. But if we agree that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction… In a sense, the epistemological model that offers us a pre-given subject or agent is one that refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative. —Judith Butler (2001: 638)
For the most part, available epistemological models and paradigms, including the most “advanced,” fail to comport with the complexity of the political-security world they purport to explain. This is equally true of much of the scholarship on the International Relations of Southeast Asia (hereafter SEAIR), where, arguably, a fair bit of emulation and mimicry of the largely Anglo-American enterprise of International Relations (IR) has taken place insofar as the “theoretical turn” in SEAIR – the growing embrace of formal IR theory among SEAIR students especially in the post-Cold War years – is concerned (Acharya and Buzan 2007; Acharya and Stubbs 2006; Tan forthcoming). That said, the apparent mismatch between theory and the “ground realities” or brute human experiences of Southeast Asian regional life is not necessarily a judgment on the “failure” of epistemology. After all, as Raymond Aron presciently noted over four decades ago, “Ambiguity in ‘international relations’ is not to be imputed to the inadequacy of our concepts, but is an integral part of reality itself” (Aron 1966: 7). Indeed, one could equally point to the productive power of epistemology in rendering a particular ontological knowledge of Southeast Asia and the regional subjects, objects and modes of agency deemed “natural” and essential to it, while at the same time marginalizing other subjects by either diminishing their agency or denying altogether their very subjectivity (Tan 2007a).
What prospects are there for (as this conference’s concept paper has it) “opening up a discursive space to consider the multiple ontologies and epistemologies that already operate in world politics” in the SEAIR disciplinary domain? In an important sense, constructivist contributions in SEAIR have taken up this concern through their efforts at raising much needed awareness of identity considerations, introducing conceptual and methodological innovations to the study of identity, and so forth (Acharya 2000, 2001; Acharya and Tan 2006a; Ba 2006; Busse 1999; Haacke 2003; Katsumata 2003; 2004; Narine 2002; Peou 2002). That said, however, there is an emerging (and, to my mind, worrying) trend within SEAIR scholarship – encouraged and
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See Seng Tan is an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he concurrently directs the school’s research program in multilateralism and regionalism and its executive education department. In the latter part of March 2009 he will take up an
additional appointment as head of research of RSIS’s Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS). His latest publications include the editorship of a 4-volume series entitled Regionalism in Asia (Routledge, forthcoming 2009).
enhanced by the growing emulation of formal Anglo-American IR theory – toward an appreciation of subjectivity as essentially sovereign, without which subjectivity is itself inconceivable (Persram 1999). Though not confined to constructivist scholarship, this subjectivity-sovereignty alignment is most visible in the rising constructivist “orthodoxy” in SEAIR (Khoo 2004), where “mainstream” constructivists who take inspiration from the influential works, say, of Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein (at least prior to his current advocacy in behalf of “analytical eclecticism”), Emanuel Adler and the like – seem intent on retying the very knots they have worked hard to disentangle, especially where their conceptual treatment of subjectivity and sovereignty are concerned (Tan 2006a). On the one hand, they presuppose a voluntarist actor or agent who socially constructs identities and interests through instrumental actions – an understanding that revives the enduring problem of subjectivity that constructivists, by their own logic, call into question. On the other hand, they view social production in terms of discourses and ideas that operate deterministically to construct reality – an understanding that potentially makes a mockery (unintended, no doubt) of human agency. These moves highlight two distinct assumptions of “sovereign subjectivity” that operate within extant constructivist understandings of Southeast Asian regional life that allow an at best limited space to critically reflect on ontologies other than those permitted by the rationalist epistemology subscribed by realist/neorealist and liberal/neoliberal perspectives. Despite their welcomed challenge, so-claimed, against rationalism and positivism (Peou 2002), SEAIR constructivism tends ultimately to “replicate elements associated with the more mainstream appropriations from which they want to be distanced” (Campbell 1998: 224).
Against this backdrop, what this paper aims to do is to critically assess the two types of “sovereign subjectivity” introduced above especially where they matter to “non-state” subjectivities in SEAIR.1 Subjectivity is sovereign in the sense that its alleged affiliation with the logic of social construction ultimately does not stand in the way of an eventual settlement – a “materialization” or “naturalization,” if you will – of its status as always and already given. Put differently, despite allusions regarding subjects are social constructions, certain valued subjects (including non-state actors) are privileged in SEAIR, usually informally and implicitly, as ontologically secure and outside of any interactive dynamic intrinsic to constitutive processes. In short, their sovereignty is ensured by their “pre-interactional” character (Palan 2000) – a rather odd foundational supposition particularly for constructivists! Although my preceding comments trained the spotlight on constructivist contributions, it is probably safe to say the two subjectivities identified above are equally those that operate within the expressly rationalist perspectives in SEAIR, not least realism and liberalism. Indeed, to the extent interventions in SEAIR, whether mainstream or critical, persistently adhere to either a methodological structuralism and/or individualism in their attempts to “resolve” the agent/structure question, they likely accommodate either of the subjectivities, thereby reviving the perdurable dilemma of subjectivity that has long bedevilled what Foucault has called the human sciences.
It is perhaps the foregoing reason – a tacitly shared appreciation across theoretical traditions, in varying degrees, for a commonsensical understanding of construction in questions about subjectivity – that prompted Amitav Acharya (2005) to muse if anyone is still not a constructivist.
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But as we shall see, to the extent SEAIR scholarship of different theoretical hues concur on anything, a big part of it has been in the common presumption of subjectivity and agency as sovereign and pre-given. In their shared refusal to treat agency as essentially a political prerogative – as Judith Butler (2001) rightly reminds us – SEAIR as such remains a predominantly state-centred enterprise to which realists, liberals and constructivists alike lend ideological support. With these concerns in mind, this essay will begin with a brief historical review of SEAIR, proceed to an interrogation of the two modes of sovereign subjectivity operating within mainstream facets of the disciplinary domain, and conclude with a reflection on preliminary conditions conducive to a “democratic opening” of the field towards a more human-centred discourse and praxis in Southeast Asia. Crucially, the aim here is not to interrogate the bulk of theoretical work in SEAIR, but to assess aspects of it that embody the strategic alignments between subjectivity and sovereignty that interest me. All this is by no means an idle exercise in academic navel-gazing, especially in the light of ongoing institutional developments in Southeast Asian regionalism which hint at the anticipated formation of an “ASEAN Community” by 2020, a development that would presumably render regional life more “people-centred” (ASEAN 2005; Noor 2005; Ong 2005). Whether this declared objective is attainable may well have to do with a conscious decoupling in IR discourse: of subjectivity and agency from the illusions of autonomy and sovereignty with which the former are invariably saddled. Southeast Asian International Relations:
Whither the “Theoretical Turn”?
Historically, SEAIR had little to do with IR theory given the poor fit between “Asian data” and Western theory and expectations (Emmerson 1987). This incommensurability is partly explained by the nascent statehood of Southeast Asian countries and their principal preoccupation with internal security considerations, which formal theories arguably did not accommodate (Ayoob 1988). Early SEAIR contributions demonstrate greater affinity for nationalism, nation building and developmentalism than specific IR theories in framing their discussions of Cold War Southeast Asian affairs (Gordon 1966; Leifer 1972). More recently, some scholars have focused on how Southeast Asia’s postcolonial societies have had to learn to behave as normal states through localizing sovereignty and non-interference norms (Acharya 2004). In this respect, post-Cold War studies on Third World IR have begun preliminary theorizing that better fits the developing regions of the world, including Southeast Asia (Jackson 1990; Neumann 1998). Thus understood, academic practices in most postcolonial societies of the developing world have traditionally reflected ambivalence toward formal theory and the pervasive influence of a robust epistemic realism. Such predispositions have equally affected the views of many first-generation SEAIR analysts, not least the staff of leading university departments and research communities throughout the Southeast Asian region. Given the way in which Western and particularly Anglo-American IR theories root themselves in Western philosophical traditions and debates, the relevance of Western theoretical constructs to understanding Southeast Asian calculations and behaviours has not been immediately apparent (Ikenberry and Mastanduno 1993: 2).
To be sure, Cold War-era writings of Kahin (1956) make reference to concepts such as “regionalism,” whilst those of Leifer (1989) or Simon (1982) discuss ASEAN in terms of the “balance of power” and “regional order.” On a more ambitious note, Jorgensen-Dahl’s (1982) 3
study of ASEAN explicitly employs the categories of “regional organization” and regional order. For some, these efforts amount, correctly or otherwise, to a sort of “pre-theoretical” enterprise (Chong 2007). But more often than not, these scholars had little if any interest in systematic theory testing and empirical theorizing, treating such as modes of Western political and cultural imperialism (Rosenau 1993). In this vein the late Kernial Singh Sandhu, an eminent observer of regional affairs, noted that he and his fellow students of Southeast Asian security studies have historically understood their work as primarily involving the recognition of prevailing reality as it actually is, and assiduously avoided turning their field of study into “philosophical, methodological, disciplinary, or missionary constructs” (Sandhu 1992: 229).
However, the traditional predisposition against theory has, since the ending of the Cold War, been gradually supplemented (thought not supplanted) by a greater appreciation for and deeper engagement with theory due to several reasons. The first has to do with the removal of the Cold War political imaginary that had so captivated intellectual thought and affected academic funding in SEAIR study. A second reason is the rising interest in Southeast Asian regionalism, particularly ASEAN and other Asia-wide regionalisms, and (for the purposes of this essay) the role of non-state actors, especially “Track 2” epistemic agents, in promoting ASEAN regionalism. Third, the growing Americanization of IR study worldwide has affected patterns of scholarship and postgraduate education on Southeast Asian IR and international political economy. The professional expectation heaped on academics to regularly publish their research in ranking peer-reviewed English-language publications and university presses, has led many to take formal theory and methodology seriously, particularly if they hope to publish in academic journals such as International Security, International Organization, Review of International
Studies, and the like. Hence, despite the oft-heard insistence that Southeast Asian international
relations or ASEAN regionalism is distinct from that of the West, the increasing reliance on Anglo-American epistemology and method in the study of SEAIR essentially amounts to an inordinate dependence on shared terms of reference, conceptual categories and theoretical language. Southeast Asian affairs may indeed be distinct, but the growing congruence if not convergence wrought by the theoretical turn could mean analysts are by default “obliged to read the same story everywhere” (Barthes 1974: 15-16).
What all this implies is there is little about extant and emerging theorizing in SEAIR that is remotely indigenous or “whose provenance lies outside Europe or North America” (Mandaville 2003: 211; Crawford and Jervis 2000; Smith 2000). If anything, the formal study of SEAIR demonstrates a persistent indebtedness to Anglo-American categories, norms and terms of reference. For instance, two prominent scholars have lamented the dearth of an indigenous Asian – and, by extension, Southeast Asian – IR theory (Acharya and Buzan 2007). To be sure, SEAIR has not been fully domesticated by a hegemonic discourse. Nor has its formal study been essentially simplistic and one-dimensional. Quite the contrary, the field is animated by particular tensions that parallel intellectual developments in the wider IR discipline. At the same time, those tensions arguably betray an inherent proclivity within the field for Western-influenced redactions of local knowledge that would accommodate the latter’s growing appropriation of IR theory and its categories. That said, for the most part, it is the alliance between subjectivity and sovereignty identified at the outset of this paper that has dominated the theoretical turn in SEAIR and, as a consequence, defined the largely conservative parameters of regional security discourse.
Two Sovereign Subjectivities
Broadly speaking, two conceptual understandings arguably define how the problem of non-state subjectivity has generally been viewed in the study of SEAIR. The first understanding presumes an intentional subject, already given, who constructs security knowledge through an instrumental action. The second understanding presumes that construction operates in a deterministic fashion, thereby potentially making a mockery of human agency (Weber 2001). Thus understood, non-state subjects and/or agents in SEAIR are either autonomous, voluntarist actors with settled identities who construct the identity of the nation and influence its behaviour – “autonomous origins of meaning, registers of social value, and irreducible agents of history-making” (Ashley 1988: 245) – or passive recipients whose subjectivity is but a product of pre-given social structures or some ontologically prior constructor/author, and who exist principally to promote the interests and preserve the well being of the state and the regime which rules it (Butler 1993). In contrast to both these essentialist interpretations, what I aim to provide, at least in a preliminary way, is an understanding of subjectivity or agency in SEAIR which will allow for an investigation into its construction. Without valuing “linguistic” or “ideational” reasons over “material” ones, the contention here is that the constitution and instantiation of agency are intimately linked to security discourses generated by epistemic communities and students of them. As such, the very identities of non-state subjects as legitimate, productive agents of security are indebted to those articulations. Their practices, linked interchangeably with associated discourses, socially constitute not only the political world and the “sovereign” identities – statist or otherwise – that make up that world, but also their subjectivity as legitimate agents of security. As such, they are subjects that “emerge in history,” alternately constructing and marginalizing subjects while their own subjectivity is in process of being constructed and/or marginalized by others, including the state (Ashley 1987).
On the other hand, perspectives that refuse any inquiry into the construction of agency tend to foster ideological conclusions which severely constrain possibilities for progressive change in the security discourses and practices in SEAIR. This principally occurs through a shared desire for a settled subjectivity that is bounded, grounded and, in a sense, sovereign, whether in the case of states or, somewhat less evidently, non-state actors. Yet at the same time, it is just such an idealized desire which, more often than not, gets in the way of thinking outside of a state-centred IR discourse and towards a more holistic human-centred one, for the simple reason that the extant debate on non-state actors, “non-traditional security,” and the like in SEAIR remains for the most part state-oriented. To be sure, the emphasis in these discourses allows for the possibility of multiple social actors in the collective imagining of community. That said, the tacit assumption of contending perspectives that such collective imaginations tend to coincide with the boundaries of Southeast Asian nations – or, for that matter, those of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region or community, but ultimately a state-based one – also means that the parameters of IR discourse are significantly constrained.
Sovereign Subjectivity I:
Subjects as Instrumental Agents
Arguments in SEAIR that reflect the first essentialism presuppose subjects as pre-given instrumental agents of their own volition. The emphasis on non-state actors, whose perceived prominence in regional diplomacy and security has clearly benefited from the post-Cold War growth in both liberal-institutional- and constructivist-oriented scholarships in SEAIR (although they have figured in aspects of realist SEAIR). By focusing on the ideational influence of non-state agents on policy outcomes, these approaches highlight the efforts of individuals or institutions in shaping political outcomes in security policy (Goldstein and Keohane 1993). This understanding is especially prominent in works on Track 2 diplomacy, a “non-official” process which brings scholars and statesmen together in institutionalized settings towards the common object of promoting regional cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region through policy dialogues (Ball 2000; Evans 1994; Simon 1996; Woods 1993). More recently, Hiro Katsumata (2003) has contended that at least three “notable” ideas promoted by regional epistemic communities during the 1990s have since become “reality”: the ideas of common and cooperative security, which presume that regional security is indivisible; the formation of an intergovernmental forum for multilateral security dialogue, as evidenced by the establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum; and, the extension of ASEAN’s diplomatic style throughout the Asia-Pacific region so as to promote regional cooperation. For Katsumata, these can all be traced back to efforts of the ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies (ASEAN-ISIS), a region-wide “epistemic community” made up of security studies think-tanks from the ASEAN nations – a conclusion also held by a number of other analysts (Capie and Evans 2002; Kraft 2000; Simon 2002).
This is not to say that ideas by themselves – certainly not those purveyed by the local scholarly community – invariably exert a causal impact. Indeed, ideas are more likely to influence policy if they “fit” well with existing ideas and ideologies in a particular historical setting (Sikkink 1991: 26; Goldstein 1988). As one scholar has allowed, “persuasiveness is an inherently relational concept, determined as much by the shape of current economic and political circumstances as by the shape of the ideas themselves” (Hall 1989: 370). Perhaps more appropriate than most, however, is the view that the interpretive influence of epistemic communities is best understood in terms of their production of “semi-official narratives that authorize and provoke certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing counter-narratives from emerging” (Said 1993: 324). This certainly appears to have been the case with efforts by the ASEAN-ISIS at promoting comprehensive security – a “new organizing concept for security” for the region (ASEAN-ISIS, 1992, 1993a, 1993b). Comprehensive security found resonance with Southeast Asian nations because the concept legitimizes rather than undermines established regional principles, not least state sovereignty and non-interference (Alagappa, 1988; Dupont, 1995; Gilson 2007; Wanandi, 1991). In sponsoring and sanctioning the state as much as being state-sponsored and sanctioned, narratives that compliment the region’s non-state epistemic agents can partly be considered as a form of statecraft that works to authorize the state and inscribe its agential powers, while at the same time excluding narratives that promote alternate subjectivities particularly at the expense of states (O’Tuathail and Agnew 1992).
The debate over just how efficacious Southeast Asian non-state actors have been in advancing their preferred security ideas and norms is nevertheless joined by the shared supposition
regarding the instrumentality of epistemic agents. This much is clear in works that adopt a considerably less charitable – and arguably realist – view of non-state agents. For instance, David Martin Jones and Michael Smith take umbrage to what they perceive as the willingness of those communities to forfeit their privilege of critique and role as the nation’s intellectual conscience (Smith and Jones 2001a, 2001b, 2002). Regarding SEAIR discourse as a seriously flawed enterprise, they dismiss security intellectuals who, in their view, flatteringly but fallaciously portray ASEAN as “the basis of a new regional identity and dispensation,” as “scholar-bureaucrats” whose words and actions help preserve the regional diplomatic status quo, at the expense of a more democratic/participatory regionalism (Jones and Smith 2001a: 844; cf. Acharya 2003). Elsewhere, they fault the collusion between scholars and statesmen wherein the former provide the requisite ideological ballast to a dubious brand of regionalism which the latter have erected, one full of talk but empty of substance (Jones and Smith 2001b). In their view, the so-called “ASEAN Way” – long lionised by ASEAN’s advocates – serves as a discursive tool which practitioners and intellectuals of statecraft employ, knowingly or otherwise, to rationalize and legitimize political authoritarianism throughout Southeast Asia. In this sense, it may be said that the very ideas and norms advanced by SEAIR scholars “have been used to codify existing practices rather than to initiate new forms of order. Ideas have not made possible alternatives that did not previously exist; they legitimated political practices that were already facts on the ground” (Krasner 1993: 238). No doubt, the implication arising from the charge levelled against SEAIR by Jones and Smith centres upon the reprehensibility of those political practices legitimated by security intellectuals supportive of ASEAN.
Such conclusions inadvertently foster the impression of the region’s security intellectuals as without agency or instrumentality, or very little of which to speak. Yet this is not what Jones and Smith seem to want to convey, since their criticism appears to be premised on the supposition that the region’s “scholar-bureaucrats” have essentially (and, presumably, shamelessly) ceded their moral-cum-political authority to speak truth to power – or at least truth that is un-beholden to and emancipated from the repressive power of an autocratic Singaporean state. Do SEAIR scholars “maintain the delicate balance between intellectual political orthodoxy and openness to expert criticism and new ideas which they have so far successfully managed?” (Wallace 1998: 229) Do they skilfully speak truth to power without bitterly offending those in power? To these questions Jones and Smith’s riposte is a resounding “No” – not because those intellectuals cannot but that they would not. The tacit liberal humanism in Jones and Smith’s texts – ostensibly realist readings of SEAIR – is therefore unmistakable. More importantly, the form and extent of political subjectivity which these authors implicitly attribute to the community of “scholar-bureaucrats” in effect involves a relatively high level of agency and instrumentality, without which the charges they level at the latter would be incomprehensible. In other words, the agency of non-state epistemic agents is better understood in terms of their decision to vigorously promote and protect the interests and agenda of their autocratic masters rather than dispute them; they instrumentally align their lot with the state. Indeed, their dismissals of ASEAN as an “imitation community” and a “rhetorical and institutional shell” with an “essentially ersatz quality” are possible only by refracting the Association’s institutional practices and “accomplishments” – and the scholarship of epistemic communities which celebrates and sanctions them – through the ideological prism which governs their text (Jones and Smith 2001b, 2002).
Contrast their conclusion, however, with the following reflection by the late Michael Leifer, who was no apologist of ASEAN. Where Jones and Smith’s scholars and statesmen pontificate futility and vainglory, Leifer’s engage themselves vigorously (or are urged to do so) in “conservation,” namely, the incessant prosaic labours of constituting, buttressing and reinforcing the regional status quo: “It is well understood that conservation cannot be achieved by standing still… Nonetheless, regional order in the practical sense for ASEAN will depend on adequate attention being paid to the commonplace, which requires special attention because it is commonplace and, therefore, in danger of being taken for granted” (Leifer 1987: 21). Regional order and institutionalism, he seems to imply, is ultimately about instantiating and hence remaking boundaries and borders – the “commonplace” elements which hold up the purported ontological integrity and primacy of states and, by extension, the state system. It is a delicate acknowledgement that articulations of “commonplace” anarchies, dangers and fears – spurring, in turn, appeals for collective vigilance – are at times necessary in order that the limits of state-centric discourse can be affirmed and sustained (Tan 2005: 83). It is the fragile admission that “sovereign states” and regional institutions like “ASEAN” are partly the effects of representational practices that can be made to work only so long as alternate or rival voices are excluded or silenced (Ashley 1988; Said 1993).
Sovereign Subjectivity II: Subjects as Abject Beings
Contrary to the way political agency and instrumentality are assigned in the first instance, a second essentialism involves the treatment, explicit or tacit, of Southeast Asia’s epistemic communities as abject and/or passive subjects, almost always at the mercy and service of a prior author or constructor. In this regard, an intriguing essay by Kanishka Jayasuriya (1994), which explores the efforts of Singapore-based epistemic agents in the post-Cold War construction of regional identity, is particularly illustrative of such reasoning and will be considered at length here. Seeking to denaturalize the reification of “region,” Jayasuriya’s text, following Neumann (1994), analyzes multiple regional identities as effects or products of state elite discourses in the region. Noting the importance of understanding how regional definitions are produced as well as who produces them, the text concludes that while “[non-state] policy communities played some role in the management of various regional discourses, the production of regional identities has been pre-eminently a state sponsored project” (Jayasuriya 1994: 412). Furthermore, he suggests these communities function primarily as “cheer leaders” for regional political elites by “disseminating the language of regionalism.” In this respect, the notion of non-state agents working outside of the control and influence of the region’s governments would seem inconceivable to not a few, as Jones and Smith’s notion of “scholar-bureaucrats,” as we have earlier seen, readily attests.
Jayasuriya’s text presents at least two conceptual conundrums. Where his and those of Jones and Smith part ways is in their dissimilar ascriptions of epistemic agency. First, his implication that discourses of regionalism are absolutized – totally captured and controlled – by state elites, such that epistemic communities end up as unofficial mouthpieces of regional governments, is a tricky argument to sustain even if the impression is such. In response to the notion that “the state spans 8
the essential sector of disciplinary practices” – in short, state absolutism – Michel Foucault answers:
I do not mean in any way to minimize the importance and effectiveness of State power. I simply feel that excessive insistence on its playing an exclusive role leads to the risk of overlooking all the mechanisms and effects of power which don’t pass directly via the State apparatus, yet often sustain the State more effectively than its own institutions, enlarging and maximizing its effectiveness (Foucault 1980: 72–73).
Simply put, security intellectuals working to “sustain the State,” as Foucault has put it, may volitionally co-opt with the state or be coerced into the task, but this does not mean that they are to be dismissed as mere stooges of their political masters, void of contestation – a contention even scholars of authoritarianism writing in the main, at least since Scott’s (1985) work on resistance, can make but only with great care. Second, the contention that these intellectuals are merely “disseminating the language of regionalism” for state elites suggests that regional security discourse is merely a collection of inert linguistic codes simply manipulated by knowing agents of and for the state who constitute meanings and then transcribe them into discourse. As such, purporting to conduct a “genealogy of regionalism,” Jayasuriya’s explanation and attendant conclusion comprise a problematic totalization of the state’s privileged role as sovereign actor in its will to power and truth via its regionalism discourse. Nevertheless, as with Foucault’s unease over the notion of the absolutist state, so also should Jayasuriya’s explanation be treated with caution.
In response to Jayasuriya, a critic has thus argued:
[A]ny intellectual discourse on the project of “Asian” regionalism would have to take into account the existence of divergent and contesting “projects” and “practices.” As with every other conceptual entity, “the region” is a historically contingent, social construction. State discourses very often possess a competitive edge in reality construction, but never a monopoly. A “genealogy of regionalism” in which the construction of an imagined community beyond the nation-state is seen to have been the sole prerogative of state elites who enjoy a complete monopoly over the fabrication of ideas disavows the plurality inherent to society. Despite the “hermeneutics of suspicion”
it displays towards the state, Jayasuriya’s account privileges – indeed, it absolutizes – the discourse of the state (Wong 1995: 688, emphasis added).
The notion that state discourses on regionalism do not monopolise but rather compete with discourses produced by epistemic communities and others implies a plurality to authoritarian societies that liberals may not find entirely persuasive, not least where Southeast Asia is concerned (Jones 1998). Be that as it may, it is precisely because of and not despite his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” I argue, that Jayasuriya’s absolutist reading of state discourses is possible. The perceived deep, hidden meanings which purportedly underwrite the regionalism discourse, refracted through a Ricoeur-like hermeneutics of suspicion, understandably engender the conclusion that states are in fact in hegemonic control of security discourses produced by various sectors of society (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: xxii). But it does not automatically 9
imply that state elites therefore speak and act as pre-given subjects. Indeed, they are subjectivised themselves via the very discourse they aim to dominate. In contrast to the critical appreciation that all subjects without exception “emerge in history,” Jayasuriya’s text tacitly presupposes that states, as sovereign subjects, remain very much outside of history and practice. Although it engages in the discursive construction of multiple regional identities, the state is, nevertheless, represented as a metaphysical given with no account of constitutive processes. Ironically, Jayasuriya’s move to seek determinate causation through fixing the origins of the regionalism discourse in the state is rendered clearer when we compare his constructivist approach with so-called “essential core” explanations which his study purports to eschew.
Whether his text avoids rendering an essential core explanation is highly debatable, and there are good reasons that imply his ultimate recourse to a sovereign subjectivity. Taking a page from Neumann (1994) – upon whose work Jayasuriya is heavily reliant – essentialist views of regionalism are troubling precisely because they presuppose an objective entity independent of the social construction, say, of region by subjects. Essentialist positions assume that “the construct [of region] does not assert its authority as an “imagined community,” a cognitive construct shared by persons in the region themselves. Rather, it is the construct of one man – the allegedly sovereign actor” (Neumann 1994: 57). In fairness to Jayasuriya, the spirit of his analysis remains relatively faithful to Neumann’s conceptual parameters. Yet in attributing regionalism discourse to the sole prerogative and purview of the state, he paradoxically reifies the state – albeit as a sovereign collective, not individual, actor – thereby rendering it an ontologically prior given rather than social construction. Hence, despite the reference to the critical social strategy of “genealogy” in his study, what Jayasuriya’s text provides instead is a limited constructivist exercise that stops well short of pursuing fully the ramifications of constructivism. In this sense, it may be said of his analysis that it posits “a limit to the limit-attitude” – a move that condemns it to replicating elements associated with the more conventional appropriations from which it wants to be distanced (Campbell 1998: 224).
Toward a Democratic SEAIR Discourse
Both conceptions of sovereign subjectivity critiqued above hold to certain assumptions about subjectivity that ultimately do not permit inquiry into its construction. Whether praised or pilloried as volitional instrumental agents (Sovereign Subjectivity I), or reduced to abject subjects under a hegemonic state (Sovereign Subjectivity II), such views of non-state actors are possible only due to prior acts of naturalisation and reification. But if we accept the notion that practitioners and intellectuals of security function within a discursive space that imposes meanings and thereby create and maintain hyperrealist and state-centric worldviews from which policy positions derive, then the notion of the state need not be limited to important policymakers as understood within conventional security studies (O’Tuathail and Agnew 1992). It could also conceivably include nameless bureaucrats involved in the policy process, pundits who comment on security concerns, and academicians and analysts who supply the requisite intellectual ballast (Doty 1993: 303).
As such, the conventional view that Track 2 processes are “endogenous to the Asia-Pacific, but exogenous to the individual state policy-making elites of the region” (Higgott 1994: 368) – at 10
least from this critical standpoint – may be conceptually untenable. Rationalist-based efforts to glean an unadulterated causal linkage between a constructor and a constructed, which entail privileging either the state or some non-state epistemic agent as an originary presence, may simply be erroneous, since both state and non-state elements can equally comprise constituents of epistemic communities as well as the “effects” of the latter’s constitutive labours. But as we have seen, inscriptions of epistemic agency in SEAIR in principally instrumental and/or abject terms are largely insensitive to such alternative readings because of their ultimate recourse to settlements that privilege either intellectuals-as-actors or states without inquiring into their agency. Simply put, the idealization of a particular subject as an autonomous or sovereign actor arguably says more about our ideological preferences and collective constructions of political life than it does about the “real world” we purportedly study (Doty 2000: 139).
All said, the failure to take agency seriously as ultimately a political prerogative could prove detrimental to our efforts to grapple with contemporary regional developments, not least ASEAN’s express aims to establish an ASEAN Community by 2020 and to institutionalize a charter (Roberts 2005; ASEAN 2005). Equally interesting was the collective call by the region’s legislators at an ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Caucus (now the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Organisation) gathering in September 2005 for the suspension of Myanmar from ASEAN, should its ruling junta fail to release Aung San Suu Kyi and other opposition members within a year – a move at odds with the policy of non-interference typically adhered to by ASEAN nations, including Singapore (Lawmakers want ASEAN to suspend Myanmar 2005: 10). For some, these emerging region-wide patterns of liberalization and legalization are moulding an embryonic people-centred culture of “participatory regionalism” – with regional non-state actors at the forefront (Acharya 2003). As a past secretary-general of ASEAN has put it, “ASEAN’s chosen approach in building social cohesion is people-centred and community-based. It has to be” (Ong 2005). For others, such claims of progress are dubious: “But what happened to the original vision of a united, cooperative and mutually supporting ASEAN for the people of ASEAN? Unlike the European Union, which has kept the interests of the nations and peoples of Europe firmly in the forefront, there has been precious little development towards a “people’s ASEAN” (Noor 2005).
Against this backdrop, the perspective that non-state epistemic agents are abject lackeys of a pre-given absolutist state (Sovereign Subjectivity II) may concede that the state is relaxing its inveterate hold on regionalism as its exclusive preserve, thereby permitting certain “licensed” sectors of its population to participate in regional discourses. However, the highly limited agency which this state-centred argument affords Southeast Asia’s epistemic communities would likely give little credence to the aforementioned regional developments where promotion of a holistic, human-centred discourse in Southeast Asia is concerned. Much as the introduction of concepts like comprehensive security and human security in Southeast Asia, in the view of some, have expanded rather than limited the purview of states, so too the recently instituted and ratified ASEAN Charter could paradoxically facilitate the consolidation and enlargement of extant powers enjoyed by regional governments (Suhrke 1999; Tan 2002; Acharya 2007).
The perspective that non-state epistemic agents are instrumental agents in their own right (Sovereign Subjectivity I), as we have seen, includes affirmative and negative views. On the one
hand, the affirmative view (Katsumata) credits epistemic communities with a relatively high degree of agential freedom and sophistication. However, different though its assumptions are from Sovereign Subjectivity II assumptions, the outcome of its agency is more or less similar: the advancement of ideas and institutions that arguably enhance and entrench the dominance of the state. On the other hand, the negative view (Jones and Smith) castigates “scholar-bureaucrats” for ceding their moral responsibility to speak truth to power in their volitional, instrumental embrace of authoritarianism. Of the three arguments examined here this likely constitutes the most plausible conceptual understanding of epistemic agency with the potential to transform the regional status quo. Yet its crass caricature of security intellectuals who have sold out to an autocratic state ends up privileging the latter, if only inadvertently. Moreover, it is not immediately apparent whether its inherent liberal humanism can offer a sufficient basis for social change (Lévinas 1981; Tan 2006b).
The point here is not that these perspectives offer no useful insights; they clearly do. Nevertheless, their proclivity towards essentialism renders it difficult for alternative readings that could conceivably allow for the relaxation of the subjectivity-sovereignty alignment, which insists on a priori settlements about the ontological priority of states, on one hand, or of non-state actors on the other. If students of agency are serious about restoring a deeper appreciation for history and practice, then it must necessarily begin with the understanding that all subjectivities are sites of ceaseless political contestation and whose identities and materiality exist only via precarious balancing acts wherein diverse interpretive elements are variously included and, at times violently, excluded (Ashley 1987: 410). By setting aside the incessant pitting of pre-given state actors against pre-given non-state actors, the path towards a non-essentialist notion of subjectivity that necessarily begins with an acknowledgement of its debt to its “other” – without which agency would be unthinkable – becomes less implausible. This is not to imply that no democratic opening toward multiple ontologies and epistemologies is therefore permissible so long as extant understandings in SEAIR of subjectivity as sovereign continue to predominate. After all, the theoretical opening in post-Cold War SEAIR toward non-realist perspectives has engendered increased sensitivity for non-state subjectivities, as the foregoing discussion of epistemic communities and such go to show. At the same time, the primarily rationalist epistemology shared by many of those perspectives has meant that the recent democratization in SEAIR is largely a limited process and the discursive space it has carved out is a narrow one.
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