ABSTRACT
A firm consensus pervaded governmental and academic circles through the 1980s that multilateral security co-operation in the Asia/Pacific region was some combination of undesirable and unachievable. By the mid-1990s, opinion has moved in a very different direction, championing new multilateral processes and looking for effective ways to put them into practice. ‘The present enthusiasm’, writes one American author, ‘threatens to become as monolithic as the previous official skepticism’. 1
