REGIONAL SECURITY IN EAST ASIA: Challenges to Cooperation and Community Building ^ Introduction AILEEN S.P. BAVIERA IN NOVEMBER 2007, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) marked forty years of existence and its ten member states signed an ASEAN Charter that would provide the legal and institutional framework for the organization. The Charter, in its preamble, refers to their commitment to “intensifying community building through enhanced regional cooperation and integration, in particular by establishing an ASEAN Community comprising the ASEAN Security Community, the ASEAN Economic Community, and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, as provided for in the Bali Declaration of ASEAN Concord II.” Even while it has taken ASEAN forty years to institute a formal framework that would henceforth direct its efforts at building a Southeast Asian community, it has also been at the hub of parallel initiatives to involve other regional countries in multilateral cooperative arrangements, including the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Plus Three, and most recently the East Asia Summit which is expected to pave the way for a putative East Asian Community. Beyond East Asia, ASEAN is actively engaged in trans- regional dialogues including the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) and the Forum for East Asia and Latin American Countries (FEALAC), giving substance to its principle of open regionalism. A number of new trends and developments appear to be pushing the East Asian community building project forward. At the global or trans- regional level, these include the perceived shortcomings, in the face of increasing interdependence and globalization, of more comprehensive regimes such as World Trade Organization and APEC, or even the United Nations, in addressing the challenges of building the post-Cold War 1 Introduction REGIONAL SECURITY IN EAST ASIA: AILEEN S.P. BAVIERA Challenges to Cooperation and Community Building architecture for international politics and the international economy. By their Amitav Acharya, in Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: default, states are opting for smaller and more manageable arenas where ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (Routledge, 2001) examines the both collective rule-making and the promotion of national interests may be extent to which ASEAN may already have become a “security community”, effectively pursued. Regionally, the more important factors driving an East as “a group of states which have developed a long-term habit of peaceful Asian community at this historical juncture include the rapid pace of economic interaction and ruled out the use of force in settling disputes with other integration taking place, the rise of China and the strong need perceived by members of the group”. Acharya uses as his starting point the definition neighboring states to engage it, the weakened resistance by the United States developed by Karl Deutsch and others in the 1950s, which looks at a security to the idea of a regional grouping that does not formally include it, and community as the terminal point or end product of a process of integration 1 crucially, ASEAN’s willingness to play the role of a norm-entrepreneur that was originally intended to help cope with conflicts that arise from and organizer of the community building efforts, and other countries’ increased transactions and interactions among states. Acharya concludes, willingness to accept such a role. however, that the ASEAN approach to regional integration was different There are indeed indications that community building is being driven by from what Deutsch understood of a security community, with cooperation different and at times seemingly contradictory forces, such as the need to being pursued even in the absence of high levels of interaction, and the hedge against uncertainty – emanating from what Peou in this volume calls vision of community preceding the reality of interdependence. This, he the Hobbesian/Lockean viewpoint, and on the other hand, the Kantian desire attributes to ASEAN’s institution of norms of acceptable behavior, including to construct a new social reality characterized by inter-state cooperation and non-interference in internal affairs, non-use of force, avoidance of collective harmony. Most authors in this volume also emphasize that community building defense and the practice of the “ASEAN Way”. In turn, these norms in East Asia is work in progress, and moreover still in its early stages, being contributed to the development of a regional identity. neither irreversible nor hopeless. But the careful analyses devoted by our chapter The present collection of essays looks beyond the ASEAN security 2 3 writers – and many others now adding to the growing literature on regional community that Amitav Acharya, Jurgen Haacke , and Rizal Sukma among communities – give us a sense that we are standing witness to an important others, problematize, to explore the possibility that a broader East Asian security new phenomenon, perhaps one that may even have the potential to transform community might also come into being in the future. In comparison with international politics as we know it. And perhaps not. ASEAN’s forty years of evolution and to the even older concept of “Southeast How ASEAN defines its own community building process in terms of Asia” as a region, the concept of “East Asia” as a socially constructed - or the three pillars – security community, economic community and socio- imagined - collective entity encompassing both the states of Southeast Asia cultural community – raises interesting questions about the divisibility of and those of Northeast Asia is not necessarily of recent vintage. Long before such a process, or from the opposite view, the connectedness of their Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s doomed proposal for the respective goals of peace, development, and concord or harmony. While it formation of an East Asia Economic Grouping (EAEG) in 1990, Japan in may be conceivable to attain one goal ahead of the others, it seems close to the 1940s also had its dreams of leading a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity impossible to imagine how any one of them might be sustained without Sphere”, whose association with imperialism, wartime expansion and attainment of the other two. Indivisibility and interconnectedness aside, one domination had of course consigned it to the dustbin of history. must acknowledge that it is in the domain of security where the community It was not until 1995 that the first collective, inter-governmental interactions building process in this and many other regions of the world encounters the exclusively involving ASEAN, China, Japan and Korea took place, spurred most obstacles and pitfalls. Power rivalries, territorial and boundary disputes, by the need for these countries to coordinate their positions preparatory to arms races, terrorism, human trafficking, resource competition are but some the first Asia-Europe Meeting held in 1996. Subsequently, the 1997 Asian of the extant issues that come to mind. Financial Crisis and the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis 2 3 Introduction REGIONAL SECURITY IN EAST ASIA: AILEEN S.P. BAVIERA Challenges to Cooperation and Community Building underscored the importance of longer-term policy coordination among these or a “non-war” community in the East Asian region (consisting principally of countries, leading to the regularization of their meetings into what became the ASEAN Plus Three, while keeping an open mind to possible expanded billed as the ASEAN Plus Three. The first ASEAN Plus Three Summit was configurations). It traces its origins to an international conference organized in held in Manila in 1999, and since then there have been frequent meetings and November 2006 by the Asian Center, University of the Philippines, not th nd agreements on a wide range of issues at different levels of policy making. An coincidentally during the run-up to the 12 ASEAN Summit and the 2 East East Asia Vision Group (EAVG) was established upon the recommendation Asia Summit which were held in Cebu City in January 2007. of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in 1998, and subsequently an East The conference, which was supported by the Japan Foundation, pursued Asia Study Group (EASG) was formed, both in order to consider specific a number of objectives. It sought: (1) to review the concept of “security areas for ASEAN Plus Three cooperation. In the process, a decision was communities” and its relevance for East Asia; (2) to compare security made to convene an East Asia Summit as a step toward building an East perspectives and strategic cultures across the East Asian region; (3) to explore Asian community. It was understood, however that the community building viable areas and modalities of multilateral security cooperation in East Asia; process would be a gradual process and that the East Asian community (initially and (4) to examine the role and impact of actors outside East Asia on East referred to as “community” in lower case “c”, rather than as “Community”) Asian community building efforts. would be a long-term goal. Since the “East Asian Community” or EAC remains a long-term goal, to These early efforts in visioning a shared future for East Asia were taking speak of an East Asian security community at this time may seem to some place against the backdrop of heightening tensions between the region’s two observers little more than an exploratory exercise, especially as ASEAN itself,