Abstract South-east Asian governments have long engaged in soft balancing—and particularly a variant dubbed ‘institutional balancing’—to constrain external powers and thereby pursue security and autonomy. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have occasionally used regional bodies to confront external powers directly, as they did in the 1980s against Vietnam. Since that era, individual ASEAN states or external powers have sometimes sought to lead confrontational and exclusive institutional balancing efforts against China or the United States. Few such efforts have gained traction, however. Instead, to enmesh and constrain external powers, members of ASEAN have relied primarily on drawing them into an inclusive web of ASEAN-centred institutions. In that context, inclusive institutional balancing has meant working within regional bodies to promote a desired balance of influence among external powers, within the relevant institutions and more generally in south-east Asia. This approach remains the norm, even as strategic tensions rise. This article examines why this is the case-an understudied question, given the important differences between confrontational and exclusive forms of institutional balancing. This article shows that confrontational approaches generally require a broad supportive coalition involving one or more powerful ‘anchor states’. Those conditions have been difficult to satisfy in south-east Asia, as this article demonstrates through a review of regional initiatives since the 1980s.
John D. Ciorciari (Mon,) studied this question.