At the dawn of the 21st century, there is still no discernible integrative civility to the diplomacies practised by nation-states inhabiting the panregion stretching from the Kurile Islands in the northern Pacific down to that part of the Indian Ocean rim formed by the contiguous borders of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and India. A thin community founded upon a negative peace groups these states in the sense that they have not resorted to conventional war to resolve bilateral disputes, but they have yet to foster a political community on the order of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Presently, what is evident is a cacophony of diplomatic postures that have produced accidental peace through procedures of tentative toleration. By ‘cacophony’, we are referring to the malaise in the Asia-Pacific in forging consensus towards creating a Deutschean security community. States occupying the Asian rim of the Pacific Ocean seem to aspire towards myriad embryonic developmental goals ranging from affirmations of postcolonial identity to culturally-defined economic preferences. The North American and Latin American partners of Asia-Pacific regionalism tend to favour a pan- Pacific regionalism that opens up free trade opportunities regardless of the unequal development statuses of the participating states. In the arena of both military security and non-traditional security issues, the cacophony of diplomacies is even more evident. The romance of the nation-state, for instance in the Malaysian, Filipino, Thai and Indonesian cases, continues to shape non-negotiable Westphalian understandings of sovereignty that play well amongst domestic political constituencies. Even supposedly ‘hyper-globalized’ Singapore is plagued by citizen-led questioning of the socio-economic impact of liberal immigration policies towards foreign talent, while on the other hand, the justification of the role of its highly modernized armed forces tilts towards realist arguments.

In this light, this chapter argues that disputes over the formation of, consolidation of, or empathy towards common values are a significant obstacle to the fulfilment of the potential of diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region. The existing plurality of diplomacies suggests that dissension is the order of the day, vindicating the defection of nationalist politics from regionalist projects. Values are involved in the sense that they serve as loud indicators of standards of behaviour that imply baselines from which nation-states and their representatives feel their way in negotiations towards ‘community’ with other nation-states and non-state actors.