Cooperation is What India Makes of It – A Normative Inquiry into the Origins and Development of Regional Cooperation in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Issue 2 (4th May 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Michael, Arndt
• Is Part Of: Asian security. Volume 14:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 119
• Page End: 135
• Publication Date: 2018-05-04
• Subjects: Asia -- Politics and government -- Periodicals; Asia -- Foreign relations -- Periodicals; Asia -- Military policy -- Periodicals; 355.03305
• DOI: 10.1080/14799855.2017.1347636
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1479-9855

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Successful multilateral economic, political or security cooperation as best exemplified by organizations such as the EU or ASEAN invites the question why comparable organizations have never been established in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Rim, two geo-strategically important world regions. This article foregoes political-realist arguments and offers an alternative explanation for the failure of regional multilateralism in those two regions by using the social-constructivist framework of norm localization. This framework, based upon third-generation norm diffusion, provides a new analytical toolbox for analysing the general puzzle why one region may accept a particular norm while rejecting another. Arguing the case for the existence of a special South Asian regional variation of multilateralism which is termed 'Panchsheel-multilateralism', the article examines the process of the localization of the global norm regional multilateralism and analyses how this norm became institutionalized in the form of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). The main argument of the article is that the global norm of regional multilateralism has been localized into a principally Indian influenced model of multilateralism, based on the latter's cognitive prior. Consequently, there has virtually never been room for any genuine multilateral cooperation, while tangible cooperative results are found in the bilateral domain only.