From Rule Takers, Shakers to Makers: How Japan, China and Korea Shaped New Norms in International Economic Law Saadia M. Pekkanen University of Washington
[email protected] Henry Gao Singapore Management University
[email protected] Dukgeun Ahn Seoul National University
[email protected] Paper prepared for presentation at the Second Biennial General Conference of the Asian Society of International Law (Asian-SIL), 1-2 August 2009, Tokyo, Japan. Updated: 21 July 2009 1 From Rule Takers, Shakers to Makers: How Japan, China and Korea Shaped New Norms in International Economic Law Saadia M. Pekkanen, Henry Gao, and Dukgeun Ahn While the rise of Asia in the international economy has been widely noted, much less appreciated is the way in which that rise has interacted with the forces of international economic law (IEL). Perhaps the most dominant perception among both legal scholars and social scientists is still that formal law does not play much of a role in the East Asian region – that its institutions are weak, that it has a preference for non-legalistic methods and non-binding commitments which also extend to dispute settlement mechanisms, and that in contrast to highly legal systems as, for example in Europe, far more weight should be given to the competition of national economies and ethnic groups in growing markets than legal dimensions in the case of Asia even today.1 This very conceptualization that goes within and across Asian countries has also been extended to their behavior at the multilateral and international levels. Yet even those holding to the contrast between high levels of legalization in Europe and North America and low ones in the case of Asia in the early 2000s had also begun to note the increasing role of formal law in Asia .2 This shift towards legalism has been most prominent at the global multilateral level as a number of works have stressed the importance of law and legal processes by and for Asian countries in contexts such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) as well as through burgeoning Free Trade 1 See, for example, Peter J.