ASEAN has been unseated as the primary driver of Asian integration. On the one hand, China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is integrating the region through geo-economic statecraft that, while providing a public good to some developing countries, aims to create more economic autonomy for China. On the other hand, China’s growing economic, military, and diplomatic footprint in Asia has created new regional alignments – and resurrected others – that are contributing to a sea change in the emerging superpower’s influence in the region.

What does this mean for Asian regionalism? Can ASEAN remain a key anchor in the regionalization process? And what alternatives are arising as countries in the region re-calibrate their national interests to manage the pressures emanating from the escalating China-U.S. rivalry? This presentation will examine these questions by analyzing how China-U.S. relations are in fact driving the reconfiguration of Asian regionalism, and how socio-economic development and security concerns in particular are shifting the axis of Asian regionalism away from its ASEAN centre (if it ever was) toward competing visions of Asian regionalization.

About the Speaker: Stephen R. Nagy
APF Canada Distinguished Fellow Stephen R. Nagy is originally from Calgary, Alberta and is currently a Senior Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the International Christian University, Tokyo. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from December 2009 to January 2014. He obtained his PhD from Waseda University, Japan in International Relations in December 2008.