| In contemporary international relations, many regional organizations engage in 'community-building,' practices that construct, promote, and sustain a sense of collective identity among their member states. The international relations literature (e.g. Adler and Barnett, 1998; Wendt, 1994, 1999) has focused on the positive implications of collective identity for sustained peace and cooperation among states within such communities. Moreover, Wendt (1999) has argued that these collective identities are the instantiating processes of an ongoing systemic transformation towards a Kantian culture of collective security. Through a comparative study of the community-building practices of the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), this dissertation demonstrates that the security implications of collective identity formation are more complex and contingent, and not entirely positive.; Because collective identities, like all other forms of identity, are constituted in relation to difference, community-building constructs outsider states as different and creates the potential for the perception and representation of their differences as threatening to the community identity. As a result, community-building produces security implications also beyond the community, and may possibly help perpetuate conflicts between insider and outsider states. By bridging the liberal and critical constructivist approaches in the international relations literature, I develop a framework of self/other interaction that both identifies this potential for identity threat and conflict, and specifies the social conditions under which it is realized. I show how the potential for identity threat is or is not realized through in-depth analyses of the meanings that structure the interactions between EU and Turkey, Morocco, and Central and Eastern European states, and between ASEAN and Australia and Myanmar. I then show how community-building may help perpetuate conflicts between insider and outsider states by demonstrating the effects of EU's and ASEAN's community-building discourse respectively on the meanings that structure Greek-Turkish and Indonesian-Australian relations. |
