Abstract
The organizational roots of the EU and ASEAN lie in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter shows that the normative arguments influencing their foundation date much further back, as they were deeply intertwined with the transformation of the institutions of the global international society in the early twentieth century. It reconstructs how the increasingly powerful challenges to colonialism in Europe and Southeast Asia laid the normative groundwork for regionalism. The chapter thus puts the foundation of both regional organizations in the context of global decolonization processes and traces the implications of the successes, but also the dysfunctionalities and ongoing normative tensions resulting from decolonization for the subsequent institutional developments in both regions. The normative arguments surrounding decolonization therefore set the scene for the regional organizations’ diverging trajectories until this day.
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Notes
- 1.
These were Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
- 2.
Malaya was the name of the federation that existed on the Malay Peninsula until the formation of the state of Malaysia in 1963.
- 3.
A rare exception is Domínguez’s (2007) study of how colonial legacies such as imperial territorial boundaries were converted into norms between independent countries in Latin America, and how the Organization of American States (OAS) reflects these norms.
- 4.
- 5.
The only polity whose independence European states acknowledged at least formally was the Kingdom of Siam.
- 6.
Article 29 of the Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law, which sought among others to eradicate statelessness, leaves the applicability of the agreement in colonies and protectorates to the discretion of the signatory states (see also Société des Nations 1922, pp. 88–89).
- 7.
Some accounts of the events ascribe the leading role merely to the Council of the ‘Big Fourʼ Western powers, but Satow (1922, p. 190) notes that a Japanese member was included in the proceedings of the Council.
- 8.
The permanent members were the UK, France, Italy and Japan. The US was not a member of the League because Congress refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty establishing the League.
- 9.
Cochinchina was the name of a French colony (1862–1954) in what is today Southern Vietnam.
- 10.
This strategy was also used by anti-colonial actors in Africa (Crawford 2002).
- 11.
A similar pattern applies in the Philippine case, where the United States recognized the country’s independence in 1946 but made sure to keep a special relationship by asserting privileged access to the country’s natural resources through the so-called Parity Amendment.
- 12.
The latecomers in this respect are Singapore, which entered the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 and became an independent state two years later, West Irian, which Indonesia took over from the Netherlands in 1969, East Timor, which gained independence from Portugal in 1975 (but only became a fully sovereign state in 2002 after decades of Indonesian occupation), and Brunei, which remained a British protectorate until 1984.
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Spandler, K. (2019). Decolonization: Setting the Stage for Regionalism. In: Regional Organizations in International Society . Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96896-4_3
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