
International Law in the Asia-Pacific: A Marriage of Convenience
The Asia-Pacific region1 is home to around 60 per cent of the world’s population (4.5 billion people), possesses the largest regional share of the global economy (one-third of GDP), covers almost a third of the world’s land area, and encompasses the vast resources of the Pacific and Indian oceans. It includes the world’s most populous states, China and India, as well as four of the world’s eight declared nuclear-weapons states (China, India, Pakistan and North Korea). About half of the world’s maritime trade passes through Asia,2 while a third of global shipping transits through the South China Sea alone.3
Asian and Pacific states played a very limited role in the early development of international law and the institutions of global governance, including the economic and security dimensions. Historically, many were ‘rule-takers’, initially due to colonial coercion (including conquest by force, as well as the imposition of unequal treaties) and later because of their weakness as developing states after 1945. Post-war, existing and newly independent Asian states broadly accepted the largely statist framework and institutions of international law. They embraced those elements of international law that suited their interests at a time of state consolidation – including aspects covering decolonization, statehood, sovereignty, non-interference, development, the law of the sea (and associated resource rights), and the right not to consent to treaties or submit to compulsory international dispute settlement.
Many Asian states were, however, reluctant to embrace other areas of international law that were perceived to impinge upon their sovereignty, including those associated with labour standards, human rights, environmental protection, free and fair elections, the rule of law and international criminal law – if not normatively, then at least in its application in national and international courts. There were, of course, powerful exceptions, as under the constitution of a democratic India. There was also resistance in the region to the injustices of the post-war international economic order. The failure of so-called ‘third world’ efforts to reform that settlement in the 1970s resulted in many Asian states pivoting to embrace the neoliberal economic order from the 1980s onwards, a shift that subsequently has generated challenges and inequalities of its own. Chronic inequality within Asian states has become as pressing as inequality between Asian states and the West, with associated corruption, rights violations and risks of social and political instability.
Still today, compared with other regions, Asia has lower levels of treaty ratification, participation in international organizations and acceptance of compulsory adjudication. Many Asian states remain hesitant to support collective interventions in the domestic affairs of other states, such as pursuant to the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine, or by enabling accountability through the International Criminal Court. The absence of any regional security architecture, or deeply institutionalized regional organizations, has also left numerous ‘hard’ interstate security threats more difficult to resolve, including those stemming from the unfinished business of decolonization. Notable threats include conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the conventional and nuclear threats posed by North Korea, and tensions in the South China Sea. In addition, states have often resisted subjecting serious domestic unrest to international norms or supervision – with their reluctance evident both in respect of insurgencies (in Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan and the Philippines) and in respect of minority rights struggles (in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Tibet, West Papua and Xinjiang, among other countries or regions). Resistance to international law has also characterized domestic defensiveness towards historical sources of continuing ‘human’ insecurity: colonial violence against indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand; unremedied wartime atrocities, as between Japan, China and South Korea; the war crimes of the Sri Lankan civil war or the Bangladeshi war of independence; mass anti-communist purges in Indonesia in the 1960s; atrocities during the Cultural Revolution in China; the list goes on.
Despite the absence of any pan-Asian regional identity or institutions, sub-regional organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are driving incremental integration and generating ‘soft’ regional norms.
This context for international law is, however, changing in important respects. States in the region are increasingly developed, economically interconnected, technologically capable, diplomatically confident and conscious of the tectonic eastward shift in the global balance of power. Despite the absence of any pan-Asian regional identity or institutions, sub-regional organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are driving incremental integration and generating ‘soft’ regional norms. Individual states have also shown regional leadership on particular issues, such as Japan on trade liberalization and disarmament. Economic opportunities are sparking greater engagement on international laws and procedures for investment, trade and finance. Cross-border threats are stimulating enhanced cooperation on transnational crimes (such as terrorism, piracy and drug-trafficking), environmental harm (including climate change), resource conservation (such as biodiversity and shared fisheries) and human displacement.
Even on human rights, traditionally hostile attitudes are changing, with ASEAN slowly embracing regional norms and processes. In part, the changing international dynamics reflect domestic political changes. The number of democracies has slowly increased, and now encompasses most of South Asia (including the stalwart, India), the economic powerhouses of East Asia (Japan and South Korea), the huge state of Indonesia, and most of Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific island states). Some Asia-Pacific democracies are more troubled, however, with autocratic tendencies and/or disruptions of democracy evident in countries that include Afghanistan, Cambodia, Fiji, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
There remain, of course, various authoritarian regimes in the region that continue to limit the uptake of certain progressive dimensions of international law. These include, notably, Brunei, China, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea and Vietnam, as well as Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Asia’s disparate political systems, dispersed geographical nature and cultural diversity are major factors inhibiting the development of a pan-regional organization or of pan-Asian approaches to international law. Instead, approaches to international law will remain a mixture of bilateralism, creeping soft sub-regionalism, and alliance-building and/or unilateralism by emerging powers such as China and India.
Great powers rarely rise peacefully within international orders that they did not create. This is all the more so when existing, exceptionalist powers refuse to proportionally give ground; there is, after all, nothing natural or inevitable about the US’s geopolitical dominance in Asia, nor indeed about the country’s self-proclaimed normative status as ‘leader of the free world’ and ‘global policeman’. Paradoxically, US President Donald Trump’s shift towards ad hoc, bilateral, transactional relationships, in place of permanent alliances enmeshed in international norms, creates space for other powers to fill the normative void, potentially empowering them and diminishing one of the US’s historical comparative advantages.4 Further, if the US comes to be seen as an erratic and unreliable partner, its traditional allies may turn elsewhere.
Despite occasional alarmist rhetoric about the threat of a rising China, there are as yet few signs of an ‘Eastphalian’ legal revolution being imminent. Until China emerges as a true superpower – which may not happen until after 2050, and even then, the country may not necessarily become the distinct hegemon – it may be too early to determine the eventual impact of China’s rise on the international legal order. China itself has accepted much of the international legal order on the grounds that this facilitates its economic growth, ensures its security from external threats and entitles it to opt out of binding international adjudication. China’s prosperity depends on remaining economically enmeshed with others; rupture would be economically catastrophic, and could consequently undermine the Chinese political leadership’s domestic authority.
Thus far, since entering the mainstream of the international legal order in 1971 (when it assumed its seat on the UN Security Council), China has largely played by the rules and been committed to UN multilateralism (wielding the veto fewer times than the US, and recently becoming a heavy supporter of both the UN budget and peacekeeping).5 It has not invaded other states, violently interfered in their internal affairs, or recognized the illegal acquisition of foreign territory by its allies (unlike, for instance, the US on various occasions since 1945). Its focus on domestic stability and economic development for much of the post-war era has limited its desire to exert normative leadership on the international stage. It duly accepted existing norms – such as through membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and compliance with the WTO’s compulsory dispute settlement system – to aid its progress.6 China is, for instance, currently defending both the WTO system and global climate change agreements against US efforts to undermine them.
China’s growing power and confidence in more recent years have been disruptive but not necessarily destructive (with the exception of its unlawful and provocative position in the South China Sea, although even this is geared more towards what it perceives as its defensive interests, rather than expansionism). It has pursued reforms within existing frameworks, including on world trade, climate change, disarmament, international development, and the distribution of power at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In tandem, China has increasingly constructed parallel – yet legally conventional – regimes within which it is able to exercise greater influence, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank (often referred to as the ‘BRICS Bank’), the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and the regional Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (to address terrorism and other security threats). This is little different to how other great powers seek to exercise influence. More of the same can be expected from China in the short to medium term.
Like other great powers, China also violates international law when it calculates that doing so suits its interests. Its performance on civil and political rights, and minority rights, is particularly dire. As with the US, the UK, Russia and France, its veto as a permanent member of the UN Security Council effectively gives it impunity. So, too, does its right to opt out of compulsory adjudication before the International Court of Justice (as all other permanent members of the UN Security Council, except the UK, have also done). But Chinese law-breaking is largely a matter of degree, not kind; its occasional violation of particular rules is (thus far) not directed at breaking down, or rebuilding, the entire edifice of international law.
The great unknown is what may happen as China’s power increases, as it grows in political confidence and military capability, and if its authoritarian political system persists. Some elements of international law may then come under more serious systemic strain, most notably the already weakly enforced areas of human rights, refugees, humanitarian protection in war, and international criminal justice – towards all of which some Western states have also shown ambivalence or hostility. These areas of international law are also ailing due to the retreat of US leadership and, in many countries (from President Trump’s America to Brexit Britain to Xi Jinping’s China), the unpredictable and inflammatory currents of nationalism, xenophobia and isolationism. Again, outright rejection of existing norms is less likely than efforts to selectively adapt them, for instance by insisting on an ‘Asian values’ approach to human rights,7 whereby the community is prioritized over the individual and socio-economic rights prevail over civil and political ones.
There is further volatility around the future of the WTO regime, because of protectionism by many states (including over agriculture, adversely affecting developing states), the displacement of multilateralism by discriminatory bilateral and regional agreements, disagreements over non-market economy status, the provocative instigation of trade ‘wars’, and the unhelpful blocking of appointments of WTO adjudicators. Outright abandonment of multilateralism by China is highly unlikely, but continuing fragmentation and contestation may erode or reduce gains. In a global economy, no state can unilaterally define the rules of engagement, but a tussle between superpowers can certainly inflict a lot of unnecessary collateral damage while the competing parties work out a compromise that everyone can live with.
Hubris, nationalism and exceptionalism are common adversaries of prosperity and security for all.