ABSTRACT
The need to create a regional organization able to meet a similar set of challenges to the ones faced in 1997 was behind a push, almost immediately following the crisis, towards increasing the level and scope of cooperation between ASEAN member states. The subsequent five years have seen an explosion of new regional meetings between officials and ministers from every sector. With these meetings have come new regional policies and practices whose cumulative effect, unintended or otherwise, has been to create a stronger sense of communality between the ten Southeast Asian states, and between these ten states and the three major states of East Asia (China, Japan and South Korea, making up ASEAN3).
