Mark Williams | Triumphs, Challenges and Threats: The Politics of the Asia-Pacific

Topics Discussed and Key Points:

● The main thesis of The Politics of the Asia-Pacific

● The biggest evolutions in the Asia-Pacific over the last 15 years

● Relationships between countries in the Asia-Pacific

● Major non-governmental actors in the Asia-Pacific region

● How average citizens regard tensions in the region

● How the pandemic impacted politics in the region

● Often overlooked factors by the West concerning politics in the Asia-Pacific region

Episode Summary:

Today on The Negotiation, we talk with Mark Williams, Chair of Political Studies at Vancouver Island University. He is the editor of The Politics of the Asia-Pacific: Triumphs, Challenges, and Threats, published by the University of Toronto Press. He previously authored a book on the politics of Indonesia titled Indonesia, Islam, and the International Political Economy: Clash or Cooperation?.

Says Mark: “My road to China is through this broader prism of the politics of the Asia-Pacific.”

In Politics of the Asia-Pacific, Mark discusses the so-called “East-Asian Miracle” as it was referred to by the World Bank in a 1993 publication. In that publication, it is said that the economic success of the Asia-Pacific had a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring.

This success did not come about by chance, of course; it’s by design, thanks to public officials working with government bureaucracies as well as heads of major industries to coordinate what is sometimes called a “developmental state model” for the region. This way, the government channels investment into specific industries to try to find and maximize comparative advantages rather than just leaving it entirely to market forces.

Mark notes that world order is a “nebulous” concept influenced by a number of different factors such as questions of legitimacy. But certainly, one pillar of world order is the distribution of power in the international system, and that distribution of power has shifted considerably over the past decade.

The dynamic between the different countries within the Asia-Pacific is characterized by “a thin degree of institutionalization”, or the delicate balance between the supreme sovereign authority of the state and the “pooling” of the sovereignty of every state for the purposes of maintaining a rules-based international order.

With this in mind, China looms over the rest of the countries in the region. Mark dissects the various moving parts that contribute to tensions within the Asia-Pacific and what Western observers need to consider when discussing these tensions. He touches on the question of why the Western conception of liberal democracy may be largely incompatible in Asia, and how ASEAN can serve as a dialogue partner to find a shared purpose between every nation in the region.

Key Quotes:

“Back in 1993, in this World Bank publication called ‘The East-Asian Miracle’, it said that, if it was random chance, the economic success of the Asia-Pacific would have had a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring.”

“By 2050, the Chinese economy will probably be about 150% the size of the United States. This is just an unprecedented transformation and redistribution of power in the international system.”

“The rise of China, and the uncertainties and anxieties that it provokes, is something that reverberates across Southeast Asia as well as Japan and South Korea.”

“This is going to be the approach to working with China: Every country in the region really needs to be careful about its bilateral relations. It needs to look for these multilateral relationships where possible, and that’s not easy to do.”