ABSTRACT
Regional security arrangements can make a number of contributions to peace and stability. For some, the primary roles concentrate on collective defence or conflict management – normally understood to include conflict prevention, conflict mitigation, and conflict resolution – that are pursued within or even outside the geographical boundaries of the arrangement’s participants. For others, the focus is on confidence and trust building in the first instance. In the Asia-Pacific region, various reasons militated against the establishment of an organization modelled on NATO (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002, Duffield 2001) and no pan-regional security arrangement has as yet been explicitly charged with conflict management as has been the case in Europe (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE) or, more recently, Africa (African Union). Instead, when the Cold War ended, the Asia-Pacific embraced against a backdrop of considerable strategic uncertainty what Michael Leifer termed the ‘extension of ASEAN’s model of security’ (Leifer 1996). This involved in 1994 the establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) as a forum for the discussion of regional security issues. Organizationally linked to the annual ministerial meetings of the states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ARF built on ASEAN’s collective experience of regular political-security dialogue and its members’ commitment to a canon of norms (the so-called ‘ASEAN way’) for the purpose of mutual reassurance. The ARF has proved to be a rather unique security forum. First, although it is still generally understood as a ‘process’ rather than as an institution, security dialogue and cooperation pursued under its auspices have assumed clearly identifiable patterns. In effect, both have to some extent become regularized and thus institutionalized. Yet the ARF does not have its own secretariat and participants still rely for active administrative support on the ARF Unit (which was established only in 2004) located within the ASEAN Secretariat. Second, embracing 27 participants at present,1 the ARF is the only regional forum that brings together all the world’s key powers: the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, and the European Union. Notably, it is also the only regionally structured security dialogue that is at least nominally led by a group of small and middle
powers composed of the ASEAN member states. In the official language, ASEAN remains the ‘primary driving force’ of the ARF. Third, there is probably no other multilateral regional security framework that, at least as regards the Asia-Pacific, has been able to divide opinion in quite the same way. Indeed, among commentators the ARF generated almost from the very beginning much headshaking or hunching of shoulders in mostly quiet, but sometimes also vociferous frustration. Criticisms and concerns with respect to the ARF have essentially been revolving in particular around: (1) its role and effectiveness in adequately addressing shifts in the regional balance of power, particularly China’s rise; (2) the leadership role of ASEAN within the ARF at the expense of greater influence on the part of non-ASEAN countries, such as Australia, Japan, and the United States; (3) the difficulties in moving the ARF’s focus unambiguously beyond confidence building to preventive diplomacy, as well as its failure in embracing practical security cooperation; and, linked to this, (4) the perceived irrelevance of the ARF as a ‘talk shop’, including its apparent limitations that prevent the Forum from engaging in conflict and particularly crisis management. For Jones and Smith, for example, it is the focus on confidence building that has implied the ARF’s practical near-irrelevance in dealing with a vast array of security issues, not least bilateral disputes and conflicts (Jones and Smith 2006: 158-9). The ARF’s detractors can also point to the increasing availability of bilateral or other regional arrangements within the wider Asia-Pacific security architecture some of which would appear to be well suited for the purpose of advancing shared security interests and objectives, including practical responses.2
