Everyday political knowledge and the construction of regional identity: The East Asian experience

East Asian is at the crossroads of economic realignments. Exponential growth of cross-border mobility of goods and capital since the 1990s has been accompanied by booming economic multilateralism, exemplified by the spurring number of free trade agreements and regional economic and financial architectures. Regional organizations like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its member states have sought to promote a regional identity through successive community building endeavors. This, however, has failed to gain traction. In large part, advances in economic integration are shadowed by economic pragmatism that defines the relationality between the region’s economies. This manifests in the persistence of interstate power plays and the lack of institutional deepening at the regional level. Moreover, the extant identity-building initiatives backed by the regional groups originally top-down, detaching from civil society groups would be critical to building up a regional identity. As such, the national recognitions persist even though the region has experienced dramatic economic transformations on every front. Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.