ABSTRACT
Security communities emerge when a group of states collectively renounce violence as a means of resolving their differences with an attendant significant muting of disputes among them. ASEAN came to exhibit such characteristics in its diplomatic role during the Cambodia conflict. As discussed in the previous chapter, ASEAN’s collective action over Cambodia had a salutary effect on intra-ASEAN relations. Unity against an external challenge helped to divert attention from intra-mural differences. As early as 1982, S.Dhanabalan, the Foreign Minister of Singapore, was claiming that intra-ASEAN conflicts had ‘either become irrelevant or been muted considerably’.1 In 1986, Dr Noordin Sopiee, Head of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies of Malaysia, had claimed that the ‘sum total’ of ASEAN’s contribution to regional peace and stability:
has been to bring the ASEAN area to the brink of what Karl Deutsch has called a pluralistic security community. Such a system is one at peace, where no nation continues to accept war or violence as an instrument of policy against another community member and where no actor seriously prepares for war or violence against another. There is no guarantee that such a situation will be sustained in the future. Peace is always a constant struggle. But to come close to being a security community from a starting point so distant within a time span so comparatively short is no mean achievement. Admittedly the ASEAN security community has in part been the result of other factors, not the least of which was the perception of extra-ASEAN threats. But without the existence of ASEAN there would today be no such quasi-security community. And history tells us that common external threats can lead to division as well as unity.2
