What Was “Asian Security?”

Securing Asia from what? For whom? How? And at whose expense?

Just got back from Australian National University. It’s common for Australians—especially Canberrans—to dump on Canberra. A poorly located fake city with too many lanyard-wearers, seemingly run by Australia’s national security state. But I was charmed by the place during this most recent trip; I think my fourth in as many years.

The ANU campus was idyllic, perfumed with what must’ve been eucalyptus, juniper, and pine (which I don’t remember being the case on previous visits). The mornings were cool, the days sunny with dry heat. Some of the buildings even had a faux Spanish-colonial style. It all evoked Palo Alto before “the techies came in Hummers and colonized the gutters.”

I spent the last few days there as part of a research workshop on “Asian security,” a theme that tends to be as vague as it sounds. Many of the world’s best-and-brightest scholars of Asian international relations were gathered and yet it felt like we were collectively blindfolded, groping at how best to make sense of our conjuncture.

That’s the puzzle I want to linger on here.

Before proceeding, a caution: If you’re not an Asia policy nerd or an IR scholar, my feelings won’t be hurt if you skip this one. If I’ve piqued your interest though, then by all means read on! But it’s going to get wonky.

Who Cares About Asian Security?

Everyone seems to accept that we’re living through a period of ruptural change, but how we describe, diagnose, and respond to it is what matters. While Asian security scholars—a tribe I’m still part of, albeit with a critical eye—must relate their specialties to this ruptural change, they struggle to do so because they don’t have a theoretical account of it in the first place.

I suppose Asian international relations—and especially Asian security—is just far more conservative than I had once assumed and my dissatisfaction with the state of things owes to discovering that the hard way.¹

But “Asia hands,” as we sometimes call ourselves, shouldn’t be expected to offer much that’s new under current conditions: The answers to a system-level problem are not located within one specific region. Regional experts need a realistic working account of ruptural change in order to say useful things.

What Asian Security Meant to a Previous Generation

We fooled ourselves with a lot of the work we did in Asian security during a previous era. In the ‘90s, there was really no boundary to what could count as Asian international relations,² but research clustered around three major poles:

• Regionalism;

• Developmental statism; and

• US relations with Asia (ie, a geopolitical order that naturalized the US system of bilateral alliances, which was an expression of, at first, anti-communist containment and eventually US primacy).

These ways of thinking about Asia were misleading—a point I unpack below. But it was the latter research pole, a US-centered geopolitical order, that not only drew the most attention (and resources), but also that distinguished Asian security as a peculiar prism on Asian international relations.

That third pole—a US-centered geopolitical order—both facilitated and suborned the other two poles. The US actively intervened³ in Asian regionalism to ensure it remained both weak and anti-anti-American. And the idea of a “developmental state” not only depended on access to the US market and therefore dependency on US hegemony in a very literal sense. Developmental statism also justified government interventions that sometimes took the form of industrial policy but always took the form of labor repression to the benefit of Western/US capital.

As we transitioned into the ‘00s, one topic began pushing itself to the fore in a way that cut across all three poles: The rise of China.

Google n-gram showing references to the “rise of China,” which took off in the early ‘00s.

The rise of China was a brute material reality that was only possible because of Western de-industrialization, which in turn was a spatial fix to a crisis of capitalism; China positioned itself as the chief beneficiary of this process. But how scholars metabolized the rise of China depended entirely on their priors.

Analyzing its rise did not necessarily challenge the prevailing research about regionalism or developmental statism; only the premise of a US-centered geopolitical order. Since that latter agenda captured the largest attention share, and it was fundamentally at odds with the possibility of a Sino-centric Asia, a widening gap emerged: Between “hard” Asian security research that was almost entirely antagonistic to China’s rise and “soft” Asian IR research that saw it as a potential boon to the future of Asia’s ruling classes.

But these clusters of research were not the best ways to think about Asia at any rate.

Asian Security for Whom?

We need to rewire how we think, and that starts with revisiting how we thought about the past. Since the end of the Cold War, the security of a region called “Asia” has really only been about security in a highly circumscribed and hypocritical sense. You might say a Western sense.

The way our research clusters were structured allowed us to believe that Asian security was about preserving a regional order based on the sovereign equality of states and a shared norm of non-interference in domestic affairs. America’s bilateral alliance system was supposedly a force bolstering all that. But that’s a stylized understanding of what was actually going on. In hindsight, Asian security was:

• States with repressive autonomy in relation to citizenry;

• Restraint in relation to other states; and

• Deference in relation to transnational capital.

This is a distinction with tremendous difference, and it should be the basis on which we understand how Asia is changing today.

The “East Asian peace,” which I wrote a book about, was an imperialist peace in the sense that the purpose of stability was not to seek equality, inclusion, or deeper forms of security; it was to facilitate collusion between the state and capital interests. It was a peace for rulers to get rich, not die trying. What scholars talk about as economic interdependence (which is also how I describe it in the book) came at the expense of economic sovereignty for Asian nations. Discourses of “developmental states” and “non-interference” were not wrong, but they did more to obscure than describe this reality.

Regional order, meanwhile, was a ruling-class bargain sustained by transnational elites—who more resembled each other than they did the people in whose name they governed. Elites had to link up with one another to naturalize this bargain, and those meetings came in diverse shapes, sizes, and locales, collectively referred to as “regional architecture.” But crucially, that architecture of meetings functioned to affirm the core tenets of how Asia worked: elite-driven repressive autonomy toward citizens; restraint between states; and deference to transnational capital.

The norm of non-interference (respect for sovereignty) became narrowly about preventing state interventions in other states. It did not apply to transnational capital, which could (and did) dictate domestic affairs, even though that necessarily came at the expense of economic sovereignty.

This ruling-class order was not as originally intended.

The Bandung Conference of 1955—a founding moment of Asian regionalism—had serious anti-colonial ambitions, shot through with an understanding that national liberation was never meant to be about nationalist ruling classes as such. Most of the governments in attendance were some version of socialist. Regionalism—intended as a form of anti-imperialist geopolitics—had been part of the Third World imaginary; a relational order that avoided both capitalist and Soviet imperialisms.

How far we’ve fallen.

Ironically, Asian regionalism came to be the most perfect expression of neoliberal governance; a tool of what Kwame Nkrumah would have recognized as neo-colonialism. Asia’s regional architecture now comprises dozens of multilateral arrangements and institutions. None of them—certainly not the big ones like APEC, EAS, and ASEAN+3—have labor representation. Neither are unions or redistribution ever part of the agendas for these confabs. Instead, most of Asia’s regional institutions have given a voice (and sometimes co-governance) to multinational firms and finance capital.

New Mental Models Needed

The vocabularies of our moment—rising nationalism, great-power competition, critical minerals, supply chain resilience, weaponized interdependence—are Shibboleths of a failed status quo. Our mental models for approaching questions about Asian security are not fit for purpose.

Radical change is afoot, and the premise of the Canberra workshop where I presented is sound, even much needed. But simply accounting for individual discontinuities assumes that there was something fundamentally correct about our mental models and that seems entirely unwarranted at this point. So what’s the story?

Strip away the scholar-coded language. Asia’s imperialist peace facilitated a corporatist regionalism that redounded to the benefit of US hegemony and ruling elites for quite a while…and aspects of that world is rapidly fading. An imperialist peace is an inherently brittle peace; it’s a miracle it lasted this long. But in any case, the bargain that kept it all going—ie, the bargain that facilitated repressive autonomy toward citizens, restraint between states, and cheap labor for transnational capital—is the benchmark we need in order to see change clearly.

Is the repressive autonomy of states toward their citizens decreasing or increasing?

The proliferation of surveillance tech and the growth of national security states means the capacity for (and audacity of) state repression is growing. That’s very dystopian. But to what extent do Asian states feel pressure to uphold civil or human rights? Do they have a freer hand than in the unipolar moment to deny rights to workers or civil society on behalf of either regime stability or capital investments in their countries? Those are questions worth monitoring.

Is the norm of restraint among states holding or fraying?

Do Asian states still respect each others’ formal sovereignty? It’s not as sacrosanct as in the previous era. Intra-Asian restraint among states mostly holds strong, with the main exception being the recent Thailand-Cambodia conflict, which actually sheds light on the sources of ruptural change.⁴

The main question is whether we ought to expect China or the US to respect states’ political sovereignty and the answer to that is worrying. The US is obviously careening all of the place, seemingly with a death drive. China too threatens sovereignty violations when it interprets international boundaries as domestic ones. But the real predatory rationale for encroachments on sovereignty in this new era—and hence the erosion of the norm of interstate restraint—is primitive accumulation, which I address in the next question.

Do states still defer to the imperatives of transnational capital?

In other words, do Asian states circumscribe their own economic sovereignty (partly in the form of labor repression) because it’s what global trade and finance demand? The answer used to be yes, 100%, but answering that question now is not so simple because international finance is increasingly tied to the power of individual states.

As an example, Indonesia exploits its own nickel reserves, but its nickel economy runs primarily on the import of Chinese skilled labor, depends on Chinese investment, and seeks the transfer of Chinese intellectual property/knowledge production. This means that even Indonesia—a country whose natural resources better position it for economic growth than most Asian countries—must nestle itself within a Chinese geopolitical orbit. It can hedge, it can try to non-align, but it cannot antagonize. It must cooperate with China.

So the old bargain of states disciplining its own society’s workers on behalf of foreign investment still holds, but it doesn’t look like it once did. In a world of declining profits and fiscal crises, capitalists have no choice but to turn to different methods of accumulation. Those methods—forms of primitive accumulation—are effectively the techniques of empire, including spheres of influence. They give salience—and a roadmap—to militaries. And to finance militaries, you have to stoke nationalist sentiment…often at the expensive of public welfare, which ripens politics for the rise of far-right movements.

So what we call “great-power competition” is inter-imperial rivalry, which is a permission structure for primitive accumulation. But to engage in this form of power politics requires exploiting (not tamping down) various kinds of exclusionary nationalism in order to justify the state siphoning society’s resources to build up militaries that must prepare to either engage in or defend against primitive methods of accumulation.

That’s our brave new world. To say that it’s more complex than it once was is obviously true, but how it’s grown more complex should be understood according to the three dimensions that Asian security was operating along the entire time:

• States with repressive autonomy in relation to citizenry;

• Restraint in relation to other states; and

• Deference in relation to transnational capital.

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1. Asian security was already in a vocational crisis before the world started unsettling our epistemic understandings, having really lost relevance in two directions. One is public facing, having little to say to the people that doesn’t simply justify the further accumulation of state power. The other loss of relevance is with policy elites themselves. Scholars who work on security issues relating to Asia have no shortage of dialogue with and “access” to government officials—much too much if you ask me. But we’re increasingly caught in a ghettoized zone of knowledge that’s more about description (what’s happening) and less about explanation (why it’s happening). And policymakers, who have no time for dissenting views anyway, often want to meet with Asian security experts to sell them on government views, not the other way around. I’m sure the denizens of the national security state are open to advice from Asian security scholars in principle—I was when I wore a lanyard—but in practice there really isn’t much usable (policy relevant) insight forthcoming. Over time, we’ve ended up in a situation where Asian security scholars must shape their views to conform to state power accumulation. That is, we either end up becoming critical of the state, at which point we lose the state’s patronage, or we become the state’s mouthpiece, manufacturing consent by offering intellectual validation for what policymakers are already doing. Try as I might, I’ve discovered no third lane.

2. “Asian security” as such is a post-Cold War interdisciplinary object. But its origins are really in Asian studies—thick-description-based accounts of a foreign land that were CIA-funded and a minor part of Western efforts to prosecute anti-communism during the Cold War. A must-read symposium appeared about the national security state and Asian studies in the pages of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1997. The contribution from Bruce Cumings is especially worth a read.

3. I talk about America’s role in ensuring “weak and open” regionalism at length in Pacific Power Paradox.

4. The Thailand-Cambodia conflict is nominally a tiny territorial dispute, but it’s being triggered by criminal networks on both sides of the border that control illicit casinos, cyber scams, and human trafficking. Thailand cracked down on Cambodian organized crime, and that dragged both states’ militaries into a clash. We should expect that, in a world of state capitalism and declining opportunities for profit, criminal sources of wealth accumulation will not only flourish but align with state power.