East Asia lacks an institutionalized international society comparable to Europe’s

Evidence

Apart from the extent to which Chinese hegemony at times brought occasional order to the region, an international society (in the British sense of the term) has not existed in East Asia as it has in Western Europe. In the late twentieth century Europe has been bound together by an extraordinarily dense complex of international institutions: the European Union, NATO, Western European Union, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and others. East Asia has had nothing comparable except ASEAN, which does not include any major powers, has generally eschewed security matters, and is only beginning to move toward the most primitive forms of economic integration. In the 1990s the much broader organization, APEC, incorporating most of the Pacific Rim countries came into existence but it was an even weaker talking shop than ASEAN. No other major multilateral institutions bring together the principal Asian powers. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 591

Categorization

• XREF: The British-school ‘international society’ framing (Bull, Wight) recurs in IR theory; also connects to the champagne-fairs/private-judges material on how institutions enable order among strangers.