East Asia is a pandemic epicentre. The last two pandemics, the 1957 ‘Asian flu’ and the 1968 ‘Hong Kong flu’ (and probably the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ as well), originated there and the region is likely to remain a cradle of emerging infectious diseases in the future. Drawing on this book's over-arching theme of a regional–global nexus, this chapter analyses the security significance of an East Asian health problem that threatens to ignite a worldwide health crisis. Notwithstanding the possibility of biological warfare, microbial threats to human health come from within a state rather than from a state. And states have an innate inability to contain by themselves a highly contagious disease that transcends political borders. For the purpose of security analysis, therefore, the capacity of a state to project power is not the primary concern of this chapter. Rather, the focus for analysis is how the weakness of a state can threaten to weaken others. As regards the regional–global nexus, the path to security is overwhelmingly through state and non-state actors cooperating to reduce collective vulnerability rather than a competition for power in the international order.

In general, so-called ‘transnational’ security challenges defy any arbitrary delineation between regional and global security. Indeed, pandemic influenza as a security challenge is not region-specific; a pandemic is global by definition. However, for epidemiological reasons, any worthwhile analysis of the likely origins of a pandemic and the opportunities for preventing or delaying such an event requires an East Asian focus.

Introduction

A core aim of this volume, as stated by William Tow in chapter 1, is to study ‘how Asian security politics will affect international security or will, in turn, be influenced by global events and structures’. International relations theories, including theoretical perspectives on regional order, are only partially helpful in addressing this question. The existing literature on the nexus pays far more attention to how global forces shape regional orders, than to examining the other side of the coin, how regions determine global order, a question that ought to figure prominently in a genuinely two-way relationship.

For example, two major recent contributions to the study of regional orders (which have also been discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of this volume), Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver's (2003) Regions and Powers, and Peter Katzenstein's (2005) A World of Regions, both claim the centrality of regions in world politics. They emphatically endorse David Lake and Patrick Morgan's earlier assertion that with the end of the Cold War, regions have become ‘substantially more important’ sites of conflict and cooperation than in the past (Lake and Morgan 1997b: 7). But a closer look at these works (both theory and empirics) shows that they pay far more attention to how systemic forces, especially global power configurations, affect regional security, than to how regional actors and processes, especially outside Europe, shape global security politics and economics.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the global state system has been populated by one dominant power and several other important powers, none of which should rightly be characterised as a ‘peer competitor’ of the United States (Ikenberry 2002). The United States is the sole global power with the capacity to exert decisive influence across different regions of the world, diplomatically, economically and militarily. Its military spending far exceeds that of any other state or combination of states, and its military technology grants it effective control of the global commons (Posen 2003). The US economy, measured in terms of gross domestic product, remains more than twice as large as that of any other individual nation-state (Economist 2006b: 26). The European Union is collectively an economic peer of the United States, but lacks the degree of coherence and coordination in foreign and defence policy required for global power projection.

In terms of material capabilities we live, at least for now, in a unipolar system. As the United States has learned with difficulty in recent years, however, even a unipolar state cannot be everywhere, much less control events or simply dictate international outcomes. A unipolar state, just like any other state, does not always get what it wants and is forced to make choices and set priorities.

The rise of China and India poses new challenges for the management of economic and security relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Writers in the realist tradition (for instance, Gilpin 1981; Levy 1983; Mearsheimer 2001) identify power transitions as the periods in which the international system historically has been most prone to major international conflict. Rising powers frequently are impatient with the role and status afforded them in the existing system. Existing great powers seldom succeed in fashioning an appropriate response that satisfies the new challengers. For realists, even in the absence of systemic wars, power transitions may still have a significant negative impact on global welfare because of the relationship they assume to exist between the distribution of power and economic openness – a relationship summarised as hegemonic stability. For realists, the Great Depression of the 1930s represents the classic example of economic costs arising from power transition and the absence in the international system of a single hegemonic power (Kindleberger 1973).

Accordingly, the common assumption in much of the contemporary literature is that rapid economic growth and the emergence of new economic giants will inevitably lead to conflict – in a worst case scenario, to military confrontation. In an anarchical environment, states are unable to learn the lessons of history, and governments are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors (Schweller 1999).

As Asia's great powers – China, India, Japan, Russia and perhaps Iran – assert their prerogatives over the next decades, they will reshape the global order in their interactions with each other and with the United States. Whether this next evolution in the polarity of the international system can be mediated within existing institutions is a key question. Global institutions such as the United Nations (UN) helped to mediate transitions from wartime multipolarity to Cold War bipolarity and then to post-Cold War unipolarity, but at a cost of declining relevance as councils in which the great powers resolved their conflicts or found common ground on the compelling issues of the day.

The multilateral era, dating from the end of the Second World War, holds two key and countervailing lessons for thinking about the polarity mediation capacities of international institutions. Over the course of half a century of polarity transitions, it has proved extraordinarily difficult to reform the decision-making systems of major institutions to reflect power shifts. But this has not affected the endurance of these institutions, which by and large have persisted despite the declining relevance of their representational structures. The continued construction of multilateral fora, both regional and global, partly reflects calculations that it is easier to set up new bodies than to reform or scrap existing ones. But this is not a perennial solution, because as the international stage becomes increasingly cluttered with institutions, there is less and less room for new inventions.

On 20 September 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States nine days earlier, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of the US Congress to explain who had perpetrated the attacks and how his administration would respond. President Bush made clear that ‘(o)ur war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated’ (Bush 2001). Bush described al-Qaeda as ‘a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations’, led by Osama bin Laden, with a network extending to sixty countries. In sum, Bush committed the US to an open-ended global war on terrorism:

The growing prominence of the individual as a significant factor in international relations is a striking characteristic of contemporary world politics. Yet the role of the state remains critical to ‘either reducing or exacerbating the underlying causes of threats to human security’ (Lee 2004: 102). The extent to which ‘traditional’ state-centric, and ‘non-traditional’ people-oriented, approaches to security politics are being reconciled in the Asia-Pacific is an increasingly central component of that region's international relations.

Long-standing tendencies by elites within the region to favour the preservation of absolute national sovereignty over the well-being of the citizens who live within a state's boundaries and to prioritise the power of the state over human rights or ‘good global governance’ are softening in the aftermath of recent transnational security events such as the Asian financial crisis, the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, bird flu epidemics and the Indian Ocean tsunami crisis. These events have threatened human safety and welfare across boundaries without regard to traditional security preoccupations by individual states. The importance of external military threats, structural changes that introduce new power balances, and competition over resources, ideology and faith remain critical to the ‘regional–global security nexus’. However, they are increasingly subject to ‘a mutually reinforcing dynamic between state, societal and individual security’ (Hoadley 2006: 20; also see Michael and Marshall 2007: 10).

Does it matter for security in East Asia whether governments operate democratic or authoritarian regimes? Where democratic change has taken place, do governments grow so accountable to their citizens that security is enhanced? Conversely, are governments that operate authoritarian regimes so unchecked that they are necessarily reckless in their policy-making, causing security to diminish? This chapter marks a preliminary effort to address these questions about causal relations between democracy and security in the East Asian setting. We will see that their answers have both regional and global implications. They show how governments in East Asia that operate different kinds of political regimes may achieve different security outcomes. Hence, they bear lessons too for governments outside the region which, in seeking to promote security, may favour particular regime types.

In this analysis, democracy is understood in ‘minimal’ procedural terms. In its twin dimensions, then, specified by Robert Dahl (1971), democracy involves respect for civil liberties, most notably, freedoms of communication and assembly, coupled with elections that are regular, fair and meaningful in their determination of top position-holders who wield state power. Following the Copenhagen School (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998), however, security is conceptualised in a more ‘holistic’ way. Though it includes traditional concerns of territorial integrity and sovereignty, the notion of security – and the discourse about security that governments conduct – has come in the wake of the Cold War to embrace such issues as economic development, cultural outlooks and sustainable environments.

Introduction

Maritime security in the Asia-Pacific attracts much attention at present, although many of the concerns are not new. A close relationship exists between regional maritime security and energy security. Increased regional interest in assured access to sources of energy partly explains the greater interest in maritime security. Conflicting claims to sovereignty over offshore islands and competition for offshore resources are a source of tension in Northeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, there are also disputed sovereignty claims. The security of shipping against the threats of piracy and maritime terrorism is of major interest, especially for the Northeast Asian countries, which depend so heavily on the security of the sea lines of communication (SLOCs) from the Middle East through the Indian Ocean to the Malacca and Singapore straits to the South and East China seas, for sustaining their access to energy supplies. Meanwhile, Asia-Pacific naval budgets continue to grow with consequent risks to regional security and the possibility of a ‘naval arms race’. This is particularly true in Southeast Asia (Kaneda 2006). Problems loom on the horizon, including increased competition for maritime hegemony between the major regional sea powers – China, Japan and India.

There is a large imbalance between regional oil consumption and production. The Asia-Pacific currently contributes 9.8 per cent of global oil production but consumes 28.9 per cent of total oil production (Wesley 2007: 33). The major regional sea powers are also the main regional oil consumers.