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This article draws on ideas associated with "two-level games" to focus on the continuing difficulty within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) of reconciling national responsibilities and regional commitments. Using this perspective to examine three areas included in the remit of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community-migrant workers, "haze", and disaster management-it disaggregates some of the complex domestic and international pressures that can lead to varying regional outcomes. Whereas problems with regional cooperation are often simply laid at the door of recalcitrant governments or inadequate regional institutions, this lens foregrounds a different source of difficulties, in which significant domestic constituencies severely constrain what governments can offer to the region. Conceptualizing the national/regional interface in this way, however, also suggests ways through some of the sticking points. This lens therefore has implications for policy, advocacy, ASEAN's communication efforts, and its routine collaborative undertakings.

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Focusing both on the global domain and on Southeast Asia's regional international society, this article uses the English School's (ES) pluralist/solidarist spectrum to map and compare responses to the issue of migrant workers. This case suggests, firstly, that the complexity of the relationship between global and regional societies is exacerbated by the starkly diverging pluralist and solidarist streams within the former; secondly, that the informal, consensus-oriented methods of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, though often criticized, have proved useful at global level in moving dialogue forward in this contentious area; and thirdly, that regional international societies provide highly salient arenas for dealing with this issue, but still struggle with interregional difference and trans-regional challenges. The questions that the topic of migration foregrounds – the relationship between different levels of society, solidarist ambition, and regional potential – are questions on which the ES can already provide useful responses, but which also open up promising agendas for future work.

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