Table of Contents
Prior to the 1990s, a tangible East Asian security architecture remained elusive. This was not for want of trying. Several ill-fated efforts were undertaken to establish regional groupings which, over time, provided the basis for a more substantial East Asian security architecture. These included the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO)—an eight member grouping established in 1955 that began to lose members and was finally dissolved in 1977, and both Maphilindo and the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA).[1] Likewise, in Northeast Asia, the Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC)—a South Korean initiative established in 1966 and comprising nine member countries—struggled due to the diverging perceptions and interests of its membership, and finally collapsed in 1975.[2] Flowing from this legacy was the more successful sub-regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), founded in 1967 and expanded via several avenues, including a major security component, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). But even ASEAN’s initial collaborative functions were essentially economic, political and cultural.
This paucity in regional security dialogue stands in stark contrast to the situation today where, according to one recent estimate, over 100 such channels now exist at the official (Track 1) level and in excess of 200 at the unofficial (Track 2) level.[3] To be sure, this startling growth in regional security cooperation has been neither steady nor straightforward. The volume of such institutions and activities plummeted in the immediate aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, for instance, and temporarily lost the attention of policymakers in the process. Yet there can be little disputing the fact that regional security cooperation has since recovered well and, moreover, that the general trend in such activity across the decade and a half since the beginning of the 1990s has been an upward one. ASEAN, of course, has been one of the key drivers or ‘architects’ behind this trend. This chapter evaluates the effectiveness and the shortcomings of the most prominent ASEAN processes. It considers the outlook for these, before concluding with an Australian perspective on their desirable future development.
Before reflecting upon the effectiveness and shortcomings of ASEAN processes, it is necessary to firstly acknowledge that this evaluative task is an inevitably subjective one. As Amitav Acharya has observed:
Despite decades of intense debate, international relations theory provides no agreed and definitive way of assessing what constitutes ‘success’ and ‘effectiveness’ in regional organizations. Understanding the effects of Asian institutions on state behavior and regional order depends very much on the analytical lens used.[4]
By way of example, many if not most regional players will tend to assess regional security cooperation not in terms of its immediate outcomes, but rather as a process through which confidence is built, consensus reached and common regional understandings or ‘norms’ arrived at.
This issue of analytical subjectivity notwithstanding, it is, I think, possible to identify a number of areas where ASEAN processes have unequivocally fallen short. None of these processes, for instance, has proven able to respond effectively to the major crises that have erupted in East Asia during the past decade and a half—the North Korean nuclear crises of 1993–94 and today; the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis; the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis; the crisis in East Timor of 1999; the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis or the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Partly as a result of the consensual style approach to decision-making which has emerged as the preferred modus operandi for most if not all of these processes, they have also tended to move rather slowly toward implementing their stated aims and objectives. In the case of the ARF, for instance, it has experienced real difficulties in moving from the confidence-building to preventive diplomacy phase in its evolution, contributing toward the perception that it is nothing more than a ‘talk shop’.[5]
These criticisms notwithstanding—and even if one does not accept the proposition that dialogue and discussion are useful as ends in and of themselves[6] —there are areas where tangible benefits have accrued from the recent growth in East Asian security cooperation. First and foremost among these accomplishments, in my view, has been the engagement of China in the regional security architecture which has taken place since the mid-1990s. This process has succeeded in significantly dampening regional apprehensions regarding China’s rise. At the same time, however, it is interesting to note that while a primary aim of engaging China through East Asian security cooperation was to ‘socialise’ it by exposing it to regional and global norms, Beijing has proven rather adept at ‘socialising’ many of the institutions to which it is a party. By way of example, in the case of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP)—the official Track 2 analogue of the ARF—China’s deepening involvement has actually allowed it to shape the direction and outlook of this leading Track 2 institution, particularly in relation to the issue of Taiwan.
Further, although ASEAN processes have been somewhat ineffective in responding directly to regional crises, they have periodically served as useful venues for the discussion of highly sensitive or controversial issues that might otherwise not have been discussed, or as ‘circuit-breakers’ to stalled diplomatic relationships. The then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was able to meet with his North Korean counterpart on the sidelines of the 2004 ARF meeting, for example, which marked the first high-level contact between the United States and North Korea since former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s visit to Pyongyang in 2000. More recently, the Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers held a productive 20-minute meeting on the sidelines of the 2006 ARF, helping to alleviate somewhat a deepening rift in China-Japan relations. So, in sum, it seems fair to conclude that ASEAN processes have served as more than mere ‘talks shops’ and that they have produced some tangible successes, albeit highly qualified ones and often only at the margins.
Added to this, the very existence and continued evolution of ASEAN can itself be counted as a success. It is always important to consider counterfactual scenarios in international politics, and to contemplate what type of Southeast Asia might exist today were it not for the existence of ASEAN. It is certainly no small feat that a ‘shooting war’ amongst its members is today all but unthinkable. As Rodolfo Severino of the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) recently put it:
The constant interaction and sense of common purpose among the Asean members have built mutual confidence and dissipated some of the mutual suspicion that is a legacy of past differences and an outgrowth of current disagreements. ... Partly through the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in South-east Asia and partly through its own practices, Asean has set regional norms for the peaceful relations among states—respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the peaceful settlement of disputes, non-interference in the internal affairs of nations, decisions by consensus, equality of status, and so on.[7]
[1] John S. Duffield, ‘Asia-Pacific Security Institutions in Comparative Perspective’, in G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (eds), International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, p. 248. Also see Charles E. Morrison and Astri Suhrke, Strategies of Survival: the Foreign Policy Dilemmas of Smaller Asian States, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1978; and Leszek Buszynski, SEATO, The Failure of an Alliance Strategy, Singapore University Press, Singapore, 1983.
[2] See C.W. Braddick, ‘Japan, Australia and the ASPAC: the rise and fall of an Asia-Pacific cooperative security framework’, in Brad Williams and Andrew Newman (eds), Japan, Australia and Asia-Pacific Security, Routledge, London, 2006, pp. 30–46.
[3] See Japan Center for International Exchange, Towards Community Building in East Asia, Dialogue and Research Monitor Overview Report, 2005, available at <http://www.jcie.or.jp/drm>, accessed 5 May 2008.
[4] Amitav Acharya, ‘Regional Institutions and Asian Security Order: Norms, Power, and Prospects for Peaceful Change’, in Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003, p. 228.
[5] See, for example, Paul Dibb, ‘A New Defence Policy for a New Strategic Era?’, in Clive Williams and Brendan Taylor (eds), Countering Terror: New Directions Post ‘911’, Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence no. 147, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, 2003, p. 64.
[6] See, for example, Anthony Milner, Region, Security and the Return of History, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2003.
[7] Rodolfo C. Severino, ‘Asean in need of stronger cohesion’, Straits Times, 9 December 2006.