ABSTRACT
Does the Asian-Pacific Council (ASPAC) represent a false start or a lost opportunity in the institutional history of Asia-Pacific regional security? Was it a stepping-stone towards an Australian-Japanese security partnership or a millstone weighing down their developing relationship? Now largely forgotten, when ASPAC is remembered, it is usually done so with distaste. Variously described by contemporary observers as a ‘diehard anticommunist’ and ‘anti-Chinese’ alliance, even a ‘first step towards a Northeast Asian Treaty Organization’, ASPAC was also disparaged for numerous other failings.2 It was said to be ‘rather somnolent’, ‘an exercise in collective soliciting’, and ‘little more than another regional body for discussion of economic problems [whose] scope was modest and . . . future unclear’.3 In one post hoc assessment, an expert on Asia-Pacific regionalism noted that ‘ASPAC never became an influential organisation . . . [since it] was not able to generate much regional cooperation’.4 Australian scholars have been particularly scathing: ‘ASPAC was used to denote a ministerial meeting suggesting a form and degree of organisation not supported by the factual situation. The purposes of ASPAC have been vague from the beginning’, claimed one foreign policy expert.5 It not only offered ‘little evidence of any radical innovations in Pacific diplomacy’, but ‘ASPAC barely deserved serious discussion . . . since it seems doomed to a quiet and unlamented demise at an early date’.6 Finally, and most recently, it has been criticised for exacerbating Japanese-Australian differences: ‘[ASPAC] highlighted . . . different Australian and Japanese outlooks on relations with China’.7
