Why is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism

In this paper, we explain why the U.S. government chose multilateral security arrangements in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. After reviewing the inadequacies of a number of universal and indeterminate explanations, we put forward three explanations—great power status, effi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International organization 2002-07, Vol.56 (3), p.575-607
Main Authors: Hemmer, Christopher, Katzenstein, Peter J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alliances
Asia
Bilateralism
Cold War
Cold wars
Cooperation
Debates
Defenses
Efficiency
Europe
Foreign Policy
Foreign relations
Geographic regions
Geography
Group Identity
Identity politics
Institutionalism
International Alliances
International Cooperation
International organization
International organizations
International political organizations
International relations
Liberalism
Military alliances
Multilateralism
National security
Neoliberalism
Policy making
Politics
Power
Regional identity
Regional organizations
Regional security
Regionalism
Regions
Social forces
Treaties
United States
United States of America
World War II
World wars
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Summary:In this paper, we explain why the U.S. government chose multilateral security arrangements in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. After reviewing the inadequacies of a number of universal and indeterminate explanations, we put forward three explanations—great power status, efficient responses to threats, and regional identity—which rely on the combination of material and social forces for their explanatory power. Starting with common rationalist explanations that focus on material capabilities and institutional efficiency to explain the forms of international cooperation, we add to them the important effect that America's collective identity had on the formulation of its foreign policy goals. U.S. policymakers believed that the United States was a natural part of the North Atlantic community but that Southeast Asia was part of an alien political community. This difference helped drive the U.S. government to adopt divergent policies in two regions that, far from being natural, were constructed politically only in the 1940s. We conclude by pointing to the advantage of eclectic combinations of rationalist and constructivist insights, with an extension to the politics of regional collective identity in the 1990s.
ISSN:0020-8183
1531-5088
DOI:10.1162/002081802760199890