The text of the TPNW was agreed during a relatively short negotiation period. It includes comprehensive prohibitions regarding participation in any nuclear weapon activities, including undertakings not to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. The Treaty prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons on national territory and requires states parties to prevent and suppress any prohibited activity by persons within or on their territory or under their jurisdiction or control.

Regional pan movements (Pan-Slavism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Africanism and so on), which proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were a hugely popular genre of political affiliation (O’Loughlin and van der Wusten, 1990). They appealed to supranational identities unified by ethnic, religious, geographical or other forms of likeness, especially in places where that unity was disrupted by political, geographical, territorial, national and international division and borders. Thereby, pan movements existed and indeed bloomed in the spaces between states, nations and empires. These movements were each distinct in their politics, in their formalized structures, appeal and reach. While at times pan movements were imperialistic, supported by various geopolitical theorists, they were also vehicles for emancipatory and anti-colonial politics, with pan-national movements in particular serving as important vehicles for transnational relations and creating a sense of regional identity and cohesion (Acharya, 2012; Sorrels, 2016). Despite the popular appeal of pan movements throughout the 20th century, most groups and their ideologies had almost or entirely dissipated by century's end. This chapter sets out to investigate the lasting effects of two of the largest global pan movements, Pan-Asianism and Pan-Africanism and examine their lasting contributions to the debates surrounding the process of Globalizing IR. To situate them in the context of a global perspective on regionalism in international relations, the chapter raises three key questions: how did these two movements function to advance ideas about anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism? How did they take inspiration from each other, and function to both resist and accelerate region-specific nationalism and internationalism? And in the postcolonial world, how can their lasting effects on global order be traced and understood? By focusing the analysis of these two groups around these issues and investigating the agency they granted to various actors at specific moments, it is argued that pan movements have had a largely unrecognized impact on the shape and form of global order, with lasting impacts today.

As early as 1819, the Pan-American political leader Simón Bolívar created the first union of independent states in Latin America, establishing a long tradition of strong regional identity across the continent (Arana, 2013; Davis, 2018; Ingulstad and Lixinski, 2018). So too in Asia did leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru in India to Ozaki Yukio and Kagawa Toyohiko in Japan promote variants of world federalism from 1858 onwards (Acharya, 2012; Lawson, 2018).

The Greek Pavilion in the 57 Venice Biennale of Art, hosted an exhibition titled Laboratory of Dilemmas. As the informative note explained at the entrance of the site: ‘Laboratory of dilemmas is a narrative video installation based on Aeschylus’ theatre play Iketides (Suppliant women) and the dilemmas it poses between saving the Foreigner or maintaining the safety of the Native, which attempts to expose the anguish, puzzlement and confusion of individuals and social groups when called upon to address similar dilemmas’. According to the note: Iketides ‘is the first literary text in history that raises the issue of a persecuted group of people seeking asylum …. . The King is faced with a major dilemma … If he doesn’t help them he will be breaking the sacred laws of hospitality and violating the principles of Law and Humanism, leaving the Suppliants to the mercy of their pursuers who might well destroy them.’

Introduction

Regions have become critical levels of interaction to address local, regional and global socio-ecological changes in recent years. At the same time, regions are traditionally decision-making and negotiation mechanisms for economic and security cooperation in Central Asia, Africa, East Asia and Asia-Pacific. While regions are heavily featured in international relations (IR), there is no agreement on the definition, position, potential and practices of regions and regional institutionalization processes. Regardless of being the result of a natural process or a government-induced policy, geographical proximity has always played a pivotal role in defining regions (Mansfield and Milner, 1997). Another important element when discussing regions is their place within the international system. Regions can be local (micro), regional and global, but they can also be communities (non-states actors) and described as sub-regions (Uyar Makibayashi, 2015).

East Asia, one of the most dynamic areas of regional and global economic movements, a centre of demographic diversity and movement of people and host to powerful and complex environmental changes and natural disasters, is one region where some of the leading sub-regional, regional and international regional frameworks are located, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), ASEAN+3 (ASEAN and China, Japan and South Korea), regional trade agreements, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). While most of the regional arrangements are framed around political-economic, social and historical alignments, environmental issues have also started to gain attention at regional level (Shaw et al, 2011; De Lombaerde and Soderbaum, 2013; Uyar Makibayashi, 2015). East Asia is a region that is strongly affected by environmental issues such that neighbours of the same ecosystem have come together to cope with consequences of their damage to the environment, environmental deterioration, and the impacts of environmental changes. The impacts of global and regional environmental issues have led to a greater interest in environmental cooperation and regionalism to bring more robust and effective solutions for environment-related issues (Elliott and Breslin, 2011).

In the process of conceptualizing regionalism within the Globalizing IR movement, this chapter raises some questions about how the environment itself, as one of the natural endowments of any given region, as well as emerging environmental issues can contribute to regions, regionalism, regional institutions and regionalization processes.

Functionalism is both a theory and an empirical observation that seeks to survey different nations through their common societal interests and problems without emphasizing power politics, nationalism or religious, cultural and ideological differences (Mitrany, 1966). It can be characterized as an issue-specific and technocratic approach to (regional) politics. It has been applied to the analysis of regional integration, international organizations and multilevel governance, and in interdependence literature (Wolf, 1973; Pagoulatos and Tsoukalis, 2012; Söderbaum, 2016). Despite its popularity in the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s, the theory does not figure prominently in recent contributions to the rapidly growing body of literature on regional cooperation or comparative regionalism. It is argued that the new literature on comparative regionalism should keep away from classical functionalism because it is an idealistic theory and it does not explain developments outside Europe (for example, Moravcsik, 1993; Hoffmann, 1995; Dannreuther, 2014). Against this established backdrop, the starting point of this chapter is to challenge this perception and demonstrate the usefulness of classical functionalism's relevance to present-day regionalism.

Two studies have so far applied classical functionalist theory to the Caspian Sea region, namely Blum (2002) and Petersen (2016). However, they both fall into the common trap of judging the functional developments in the Caspian Sea region against an explicitly European benchmark, as do other scholars. Petersen (2016: 151) concludes that: ‘The integration currently underway in the energy and transport sectors has not placed pressure on other sectors to follow suit, the way that coal and steel integration in Western Europe did in the 1950s.’ In the same vein, Blum (2002: 171–2) concludes that unlike the post-Westphalian system, the Caspian littoral states do not share their sovereignties and autonomous decision-making right with the Caspian Environment Program (CEP), which means it represents traditional high politics. Both scholars expected to find European-style cooperation and integration without acknowledging the Caspian Sea's historical, political, economic, material and normative distinctiveness. By applying a Eurocentric approach, these works ignored the specific characteristics of the Caspian Sea of cooperation and its distinct set of political, economic and social goals set by the littoral states. As a result, they ended up sceptical and less convinced by the assumptions of classical functionalism because they were oriented too much on the European experience.

Advocates of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) invariably view nuclear weapons as a threat to international peace and security. The ideals presented by the humanitarian disarmament movement challenge conventional nuclear deterrence policies and defense doctrines currently held by the nuclear-weapon states and their allies. An aim of the TPNW is to challenge basic deterrence assumptions with the intention of advancing normative change by delegitimizing nuclear weapons and changing how they are perceived throughout the world. The position of some states that nuclear weapons provide a military deterrence for overall global security and protection against war is under increasing scrutiny and now there is an actual treaty – the TPNW – opposing this position.

Nothing about developing and implementing a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons is easy. While supporters of the TPNW undoubtedly claim a victory in its coming into being, its opponents note its shortcomings warning of the adverse and dire consequences. The degree to which such concerns will materialize remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the adoption of the TPNW has marked the beginning of a new schism in the international community. The word schism is appropriate in this context, loosely defined as “a split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief.”

In the burgeoning realm of global governance, ethics has occupied an increasingly prominent place in recent years. One of the buzzwords of the last two decades or so has been ‘accountability’, a term which carries overtones of proper behaviour, control and responsibility. Persons in a position of leadership emphasize their concern for such things as full financial disclosure and transparency. The humanitarian intervention over Kosovo may have been illegal but was nonetheless, many have claimed, ethically justifiable. Codes of ethics have been devised both for the international bar and, somewhat lukewarm, for the international judiciary. The infamous ‘torture memos’ have thrown into perspective the need for legal advisors to behave ethically; writings have appeared on the ethical aspects of humanitarian missions, and several studies have been published focusing on the ethics of the international legal order as such, the ethics of international commercial arbitration, or the ethics of the international bar.

This edited volume has been a collective effort of scholars who are determined to honour, revive and rediscover the global in world politics. What makes this volume even more timely is the changing world order in which Western hegemony is gradually being challenged and in which we are all moving towards a more multipolar world. This change requires adjustment.

As I write this, in Asia, the ten countries that comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a regional trade agreement with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Doing so instantly made them the world's largest trading bloc, surpassing that of the European Union (EU) or North America. In addition, a much smaller but equally important regional deal, the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), was struck between six nations in the Western Balkans. This agreement has established a common regional market that includes the freedom of movement of goods and people. While this development brings much hope for unity in the formerly war-torn Yugoslavia (bar Croatia and Slovenia), it is a clear challenge to the EU's dominance in the region despite the EU's open encouragement of the agreement. It also shows the Balkan states’ weariness of the drawn-out enlargement process and the unlikely outcome of them ever joining the EU. What is also significant with both deals is that the two actors who have been shaping the rules of global free trade and engineering regional trade blocs, the United States (US) and the EU, are not included. I am not suggesting the US or the EU are irrelevant actors, but both of these deals are a clear challenge to their status as dominant global and regional actors respectively. Therefore, both the US and the EU need to start engaging with the others and understand them for who they are, what they want and what values they represent rather than assuming what they should or could do and what they should embody. Doing so will allow these actors to remain relevant and maintain an international system based on values to which they too can relate.

This volume speaks exactly to these sentiments. It originates from a workshop organized around the annual lecture of the Leiden University Centre for International Relations (LUCIR), delivered by Amitav Acharya in early February 2018.

Introduction

China's role in the international order has been changing in the past 50 years; the country has gone from being a non-power, to a regional power (Fitzgerald, 1955: 114, 118), to an emerging global power, to having the second largest economy in the world and ambitions to be considered as a great power. Since Deng Xiaoping's decision to reform and open up the Chinese economy, subsequent leaders have looked to establish China's place within the international order but also within the regional order. As Rebecca E. Karl (1998: 1118) reflects, ‘Asianism … has been a recurrent theme of the twentieth-century Chinese (and “Asian”) history’. The concept of Asia, according to Karl, has changed over time from cultural debates in the 1930s linking India and China's Eastern spirituality and pitting it against Western materialism, to Pan-Asianism (as in Sino-Japanese sameness) advocated by, for example, Wang Jingwei to justify his collaboration with the Japanese during their occupation of China in the 1940s and to Mao Zedong's Third Worldism rhetoric. For our argument, however, the most intriguing is China's support of the so-called ‘Confucian capitalist network’. According to Dirlik (1997), this phenomenon is best viewed as a manifestation of East Asia's global postcolonial discourse and the postcolonial revival of the native pasts, which simultaneously contests a Eurocentric global order (Dirlik, 1995: 230). Therefore, considering Pan-Asianism (or Asian regionalism with inherent Asian values) as a constant, stable, ahistorical unit of analysis is problematic. What is more, East Asia as a region is infused with the core values of Confucius philosophy (Shin, 2012: 3).

For China, the 2008 Beijing Olympics demonstrated a rediscovered national pride and China's return as a global actor. It also reiterated the role Confucianism played in this narrative (Cohen, 2007). During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, over 2,000 voices chanted the Confucian saying, ‘You Peng zi yuan fang lai, bu yi le hu?’ (有朋自 远方来, 不亦乐乎/To have friends come from afar is happiness, is it not?), to the beat of drums from the Xia (夏) Dynasty (China Daily, 2008). Although China's Confucian revival began gradually during the presidency of Hu Jintao, references to Confucius philosophy accelerated under the presidency of Xi Jinping (The Economist, 2015).

Two central transformations occurred in the second decade of twenty-first century. The first is a whole new level of access to information about peoples’ habits. This is the ‘big data’ revolution: never before had it been possible to gather so much information about so many people, with such accuracy – specially gathered by huge online service providers such as Facebook, Google or Amazon, which record each of the action of their users. Thus, while marketing strategists or political campaigns have always sought to know the preferences of particular segments of the population, big data makes possible a truly high-resolution profiling of behaviours, which reflects the habits of specific individuals, and not only of demographic groups or certain geographical areas.

The TPNW represents an unprecedented departure from current practice in that it is the first multilateral treaty to ban nuclear weapons. It is supported by 122 nations, representing a sizable contingent of the world’s population spanning various geographical divides. Although not celebrated by all nations, and vehemently opposed by nuclear-weapon states, its adoption at the UN General Assembly in July 2017 marks a fundamental departure from the status quo regarding armament matters. The primary purpose of this book was to examine the TPNW within the broader legal, diplomatic and political context in relation to the existing nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament framework in international law, exploring the influence of the Treaty from various perspectives and its potential impact on the nuclear architecture as it stands today.