ABSTRACT
The cases of ASEAN, ECOWAS, and the OAU/AU show various types of institutional change. Table 6.1 identifies how these regional security institutions (RSIs) changed their security focus and arrangements before and after actual/ expected changes in regional distributions of power. Although the degree of such changes varies across RSIs, the cases illuminate similar causes and outcomes of institutional change. Table 6.2 depicts the process of each RSI’s institutional change, showing the general validity of the two-step process of institutional change in RSIs. In each case, the actual/expected power shifts or vacuums, which were caused by various factors-such as great powers’ intrusions or retrenchments, the intensification or decline of regional great powers’ rivalries, and state collapse or near-collapse by civil wars-became the foremost security concern for member states of the RSI because such changes would be a source of destabilization for regional security. Accordingly, member states attempted to neutralize or mitigate the effects of these power shifts or vacuums by employing an RSI, which set the conditions for institutional change. Two findings in particular stand out. One is that although it is generally difficult to determine whether not only actual change but also expected change triggers institutional change, ECOWAS’s case from 1976 to 1981 provides a strong example of expectation playing a powerful role in institutional change. In this case, despite a relatively stable period in the West African strategic environment, ECOWAS member states’ expectations of the strategic change that might be caused by external actors such as the Soviet Union influenced institutional decisions to assume security functions, namely the PNA and the PMAD. The other is that it is the regional-rather than the global-distribution of power that member states of an RSI consider to be their direct security concern. Of course, the global power distribution still has influence. As illustrated by several cases addressing the period of the end of the Cold War, a change in the global distribution of power was so pervasive that its effects penetrated regional power balance, and it triggered RSIs’ institutional change. ASEAN created the ARF and ASEAN + 3; ECOWAS established ECOMOG to manage the Liberian conflicts; and the OAU created the Central Organ and eventually transformed itself into the AU. Great powers’ retrenchment at the global level at the end of the Cold War caused shifts in regional distributions of power.
