From deglobalization to competing regionalism: Asia-Pacific region in the context of the emerging multipolar world order

The globalization model that took its shape in the second half of the 20th century is currently in a deep crisis, vividly manifested in the increasing fragmentation of the previously integrated economic space. Under these conditions, the leading actors in international relations are revising their economic policies, prioritizing security considerations over efficiency and seeking to tailor regional economic orders to their own needs. This trend is most pronounced in the Asia-Pacific, where competition between several models of regional integration is unfolding, effectively serving as a testing ground for one of the potential formats of the future world order. In this context, the rivalry between the integration models advanced by the United States and the People’s Republic of China, as the two principal centers of economic gravity in the region, comes to the fore. The U.S. economic strategy is subordinated to the goal of securing regional dominance; a pursuit that, amid the crisis of the neoliberal globalization model, is increasingly becoming an anachronism. China’s integration projects, by contrast, are aimed not so much at establishing regional hegemony as at building an economic architecture that would protect China from a recurrence of the ‘century of humiliation’. At the same time, the author argues that the main obstacle to the implementation of China’s strategy in the Asia-Pacific may lie not in trade and technological sanctions or military-political pressure from Western states, but rather in the structural problems of the PRC’s economy. The Sino-American economic confrontation poses new challenges to regional players while simultaneously opening up new opportunities for pursuing independent policies. In this regard, Japan’s strategy of economic integration in the Asia-Pacific merits particular attention; it can be regarded as a carefully calibrated and well-calculated attempt by Tokyo to occupy the niche of a normative, and perhaps also infrastructural, bridge between the competing centers of power. Finally, the policies of the ASEAN member states are of particular interest: by employing multi-vector diplomacy to build linkages among various integration frameworks, they benefit from the competition between them and carve out additional room for maneuver. In general, although the new multipolar world order is still in the making, the case of the Asia-Pacific already demonstrates that it will differ markedly from previous historical analogues in its considerably greater complexity and interdependence.

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