The English School and ASEAN.

This paper argues that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can be credibly and usefully described and explained using an analysis based in the English School (ES) of International Relations (IR). Recent efforts to use constructivist theory to explain ASEAN have focused on changes in Southeast Asian regional identity to explain the durability of ASEAN. However, while ASEAN is the basis of a regional identity, this identity is too weak to explain intra-ASEAN cooperation. Indeed, East Asia remains a region committed to the primacy of state sovereignty, territoriality and nationalism. The ES offers an explanation of ASEAN's durability that focuses on the organization's symbolic importance as a representation of Southeast Asia's commitment to national sovereignty and the norms of the Westphalian system. The ES approach offers insights into the operation of the international system that distinguish it from Wendtian constructivism, and which are more in accordance with the realities of regional relations in the Asia Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]