Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies)

Can Turkey become a member of the European Union? Does Australia qualify as an Asian country? Regional organizations, such as the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, engage in practices that promote a sense of collective identity among their members, yet these practices often entail the differentiation and exclusion of certain states as outsiders. Constructing Regional and Global Order develops an original theoretical framework that outlines how regional organizations construct and interact with difference and investigates the implications of these interactions for regional and global order. Through detailed empirical analysis, it compares the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in terms of the nature of their collective identities and their interactions with outsider states, such as Morocco, Turkey, and Australia. Building on case studies including Greek-Turkish and Australian-Indonesian relations, the book contends that regional organizations can promote conflict beyond their boundaries, if and when they construct outsider states as threats to their identities.