The ‘pluralistic security community’ concept as it applies in the Asia-Pacific region is based on the assumption that individual states can relate to one another more positively as their values and interests converge. In particular, the notion of a ‘pluralistic’ security community recently developed by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (1998: 30) of ‘a transnational region comprised of sovereign states whose people maintain dependable expectations of peaceful change’ is examined. Concrete instances of viable regional security communities now exist around the world and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is arguably one such case (Acharya 2001). Political realists still question whether states will ever overcome historical or structural rivalries to eventually form a multilateral security community on a regional scale. Reconciling those interests that usually shape state-centric rivalries with norms and values that often serve as preconditions for underwriting the security community-building process is the key to overcoming those tensions that most often impede security communities from evolving.

History suggests that economic interests may help pacify relations among states. This material condition alone, however, remains insufficient for the building and maintenance of security communities (Bearce 2003; Nye 1988). Can states build security communities only when they share economic interests, as commercial pacifists and institutional functionalists (or regional integrationists) lead us to believe (Glosny 2006; Green and Self 1996; Rohwer 1995; Rosecrance 1986, 1999; Teo Chu Cheow 2004; Tsunekawa 2005)? Some neo-classical realists even argue that weak states tend to ‘bandwagon’ with hegemons ‘for profit’ (Schweller 1994).

The term ‘Asian century’ has become a shorthand expression to conjure the rise of Asia in absolute and also, but more subtly, in dynamic and relative terms (see Abramowitz and Bosworth 2006; Sachs 2004). Not only are Asian states seen as increasingly important actors in international relations, but Asia is viewed as the regional theatre in which many of today's critical security dilemmas are being played out. Thus, to invoke a second, oft-repeated phrase: the global ‘centre of gravity’ is seen as shifting towards Asia. Just how far, how fast and how consequential any such shifting may be is a central question of this volume. Stated more specifically, it is concerned with how Asian security politics affects international systemic structures and events, and vice versa. This process is, in turn, driven by both material and non-material factors that will be decisive in shaping what type of world will emerge over the next few decades.

This volume has set itself the challenge of capturing the essence of the ‘global–regional nexus’. William T. Tow has set the stage in chapter 1 by embracing Muthiah Alagappa's vision of this term: ‘a concept that captures the mutuality of interaction between actors and processes at the two levels’ (Alagappa 2006). This chapter concentrates on the conceptual and theoretical features of Asian state relationships rather than on their more descriptive aspects.

As the Cold War recedes further into history, organising security has become manifestly more challenging. Recent international security debates have underscored how even the concept of ‘security’ is vigorously contested. The traditional preoccupations with state-centric survival and positionality are becoming increasingly supplanted by concerns that transcend sovereign borders and that focus on individuals and intra-state factions. The geopolitics of power-balancing and great power primacy is now coexisting with such dynamics as humanitarian politics, democratisation, climate change and pandemic controls to shape a new and broader set of security referents.

This paradigmatic evolution has been assessed extensively, and what role the Asia-Pacific region has played in this process has been an important component of the discussion. In recent years, important and highly respected works have appeared to assess this issue. Analysts have continued to disagree, however, over what is most causally important in determining and understanding the increasingly critical link between what happens in that region and how global security politics is ultimately shaped and implemented. It may be that providing a truly comprehensive definition is beyond the reach of any single study. Yet the effort to capture and explain its significance is decidedly relevant as Asia ascends to economic primacy, as it increasingly counts for more within the world's diplomatic channels and as it becomes a central factor in its military balance.

In evaluating issues within the so-called ‘new agenda’ in security studies, it is tempting to offer prescriptions addressing problems that affect world politics at the transnational and global levels of analysis. This is particularly the case for environmental issues, which have become progressively securitised within the discourse on international relations (Homer-Dixon 2001). To resolve environmental dangers such as resource depletion, energy security and anthropogenic climate change, much of the prevailing wisdom favours recourse to global civil society and global institutions (Barton et al. 2004). An under-appreciated fact here is that regional dynamics can affect outlooks towards global solutions perceived as the best way to address environmental problems in a variety of ways. On the one hand, excessive reliance on regionalism can make this task problematic. Conversely, however, regional solutions have in fact often proven far more appropriate than an exclusive reliance on global norms and laws, not to mention a weak global civil society that is still in its infancy.

In this chapter I explore this regional–global problématique in international environmental governance, with specific reference to the Asia-Pacific. I do so briefly in relation to various multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), and more expansively in relation to the regulation of trade in hazardous waste. I then conclude by examining in some detail the regional differences between Europe and the Asia-Pacific on the climate change issue, outlining the way in which the Eurocentric nature of the Kyoto Protocol contributed to its failure as a basis for developing effective responses to the issue.

Introduction

What can we usefully say about the interplay between ‘global’ and ‘regional’ security structures and dynamics? How does our understanding of the regional–global security nexus help us to analyse the Asian security order and to make projections about future prospects? These two questions guide the discussion in this chapter.

Over the last fifteen years, Asia has experienced greater regionalism in economic and strategic terms than ever before. One might even argue that the development of a new regional power balance sustained by the balancing and engagement strategies of key regional players such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has intensified. In the course of these multilateral efforts, China has become an increasingly central component of the regional order-building process, both because of its increasing economic and military strengths, and as a result of its growing political and institutional influence. Because such positionality has been established in what is the world's wealthiest and arguably its most dynamic region, that country has arguably become the United States' most likely ‘peer competitor’ for the remainder of this century. China's growing power effectively thrusts the Asia-Pacific into a central position to affect the future course of international security.

In this context, the ‘global’ dimension of security is often thought about in terms of the interjection of wider US interests into this geopolitically vital region, juxtaposed against a ‘rising China’.

The ‘regional–global nexus’ runs implicitly through the often dichotomous debates over China's (re-)emergence and its broader strategic implications. Not surprisingly given their privileging of the state as the primary unit of analysis in international politics (see, for example, Waltz 1979), the voices of scholars of the realist/neo-realist persuasion have been particularly prominent in these debates. Many realists, for instance, argue that China will inevitably seek to convert its burgeoning economic and military power into regional (and conceivably even global) hegemonic status. The most prominent amongst these is John Mearsheimer, who follows the logic that ‘the overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states … [t]heir ultimate aim is to be the hegemon – that is, the only great power in the system’ (Mearsheimer 2001: 2). In the policy world, similar realist proclivities are evident in portrayals of China as a ‘strategic competitor’ whose growing regional influence in Asia needs to be ‘contained’, with a view to preserving the current US-led world order (see, for example, Rice 2000).

Many liberals, by contrast, see promise rather than peril in China's impressive economic growth. They see largely positive ramifications flowing from the fact that China is becoming increasingly enmeshed economically and engaged institutionally at both the regional and global levels.

Asia has arguably become the most critical region in an evolving international order. Geopolitically, the region includes three of the world's great powers – China, Japan and India – and two others, the United States and Russia, lie just beyond its peripheries and interact with it extensively. Demographically, over half of the world's total population is Asian and that total is forecast to reach 60 per cent by 2050 (United Nations 1999). Economically, it is projected that China and India alone will account for more than 50 per cent of global growth between 2005 and 2030 (Economist 2006a). Militarily, four key players in the broader Asia-Pacific – the US, Russia, China and North Korea – are nuclear weapons states. Asian defence budgets constitute the world's largest arms market (US$150 billion in purchases between 1990 and 2002) and the region's ‘defence transformation’ programmes are growing (Bitzinger 2004; IISS 2006b: 398–401; Tellis 2006a). The combination of spectacular regional economic growth, the cultural and religious diversity of its massive population base and the sheer material resources it will generate and consume over the course of this century justify the observation that ‘(t)here is now a broad consensus that the Asian continent is poised to become the new center of gravity in global politics’ (Tellis 2006a: 3).

Security analysts are increasingly concerned with how Asian security politics will affect international security or will, in turn, be influenced by global events and structures.

Introduction

This chapter examines the regional and global impacts of nuclear weapons development in two crucial areas of the Asia-Pacific: the South Asia subregion and North Korea. Both the South Asian and Northeast Asian subregions came to attention in the 1990s as a result of widespread concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation. While some of these concerns have been modified recently, this has occurred for very different reasons in each case. This has been a reflection of the quite different circumstances surrounding each of these developments, in terms of the motivations behind the states' search for nuclear weapons, the effects that each case of proliferation has had at the regional and global levels, and the way in which each of them has come to be viewed by the international community more broadly. What both episodes share, however, is the dubious distinction of having unsettled existing norms of regional and global strategic behaviour, of having ‘thrown down the gauntlet’ to prevailing nuclear powers dominating international security by crossing the nuclear threshold.

One way of viewing nuclear developments in these regions is to think of them as having become relatively ‘settled’. The Indian–Pakistan case is seen as sui generis, and as such is not viewed as posing a threat to states outside this direct relationship (although the China factor cannot be separated from this case).