Regional Leadership §

Created Time: May 20, 2021 2:44 PM Database: Evergreen Database Last Edited Time: August 8, 2021 8:22 PM Type: Permanent Notes

Regional Leadership Theories and Ideas on Regional Leadership

What are the Functions, expectations and benefits of regional leadership? §

With regional leadership come certain expectations concerning behavior and benefits. Generally speaking, we can categorize this into four different aspects.

1. The first is the provision of regional public goods through regional leadership benefits not only the leader actors but the regional community as a whole.

   For example

   • fostering a stable security environment
   • sustainable development in the region
   • reducing the region’s poverty levels
   • reducing ‘development asymmetry’ among states.
   • The provision of such goods

2. how regional leadership can resolve collective action problems, especially arising from decentralized bargaining among groups (i.e. region-based or otherwise) of states or other types of actors. In this case, members will ‘delegate functions of agenda management, brokerage and mediation to more powerful countries.

3. regional leader actors are expected to lead the regional community-building process

   ⇒ development of

   • regional organizations

   • regional frameworks

   • regional community-building mechanisms

     ⇒ development of

     • international
     • global society.

4. Regional leader are expected to champion and represent the interests of the regional community in the wider global community such as

   • G8/G20
   • World Trade Organization (WTO)
   • United Nations

5. Mainstream thinking on international leadership

Much of the new literature on regional leadership is dominated by the work of American scholars, and is thus somewhat preoccupied with the US superpower position and status that exhibit the following characteristics:

• The US-oriented empirical studies
• A tendency to adopt a unitary state-centric approach of studying both the form and exercise of leadership
• A general fixation on hegemony, hierarchy and harder forms of power exercised by leading state
• A focus on power-based analyses of leadership, with a strong emphasis on hegemonic dominance, and increasingly unipolar actions

Distinguishing Regional Powers §

Flemes (2007) argues that regional powers may be distinguished by the following determinants:

• claim to power: claim of being the biggest power
• power resources: source of where they get their power from
• employment of foreign policy instruments
• acceptance of leadership by regional neighbor states.

Their principal roles are as stabilizer of regional security affairs and rule maker in the regional economy, and thus this approach draws upon certain tenets of Hegemonic Stability Theory .

Challenge of Regional Leadership (SEA) §

Other scholars have stressed both the internal cohesion and capacity of states to perform exercises of regional leadership, thus alluding to the importance of domestic political factors generally.

Ex: Indonesia being East Asia’s second largest country in terms of geographic size and population, and has in the past been the default regional leader of the Southeast Asian community.

However, Indonesia has often lacked the essential internal cohesion and capacity to perform regional leadership functions even at this sub regional level, especially in the aftermath of the 1997–8 financial crisis. Thus, internal capacity for leadership at the regional or wider international levels is critical.