4. South-East Asia and the new Asia-Pacific security dialogue

Summary

In 1993 Asia-Pacific witnessed the creation of an ASEAN Regional Forum, designed to eventually encompass all the states of the region. The year also saw the first informal Asia-Pacific summit meeting, held in Seattle, Washington, following a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). A key role in these developments was played by South-East Asia, a subregion of growing economic importance, relative peace and largely co-operative international relations, particularly its most economically and politically buoyant segment, the six states—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand—which form the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The nascent regional dialogue that has emerged in Asia-Pacific in the past decade, in both the economic and security areas, is a welcome development for global security. As the fastest growing region of the world in economic and trade terms, it is heartening that Asia-Pacific is moving towards discussion of its region-wide security problems in a co-operative framework rather than towards using the weapons which it is increasingly able to afford.

Although the original ideas on regionalist co-operative structures for Asia-Pacific came from the region's periphery—Australia, Canada and the Soviet Union—it is ASEAN that has provided most of the momentum of the past few years. In contrast, North-East Asia, lacking subregional structures and plagued by major continuing security challenges, has been largely passive—with the important and relatively recent exception of Japan.

While it remains to be seen how effective the new ASEAN Regional Forum and future APEC summit meetings will be in helping to create true regionalism, in producing practical regional security benefits or in tackling specific security problems, the fact that the states of Asia-Pacific are developing a `habit of dialogue' is in itself no mean feat.