Agenda for the Asean Regional Forum

Agenda for the Asean Regional Forum

By Dr Harry Harding

Unless the ARF can move to a higher stage of development, it
may lose the support it currently enjoys in the United States,
says Harry Harding.

The Asean Regional Forum (ARF) has achieved remarkable
progress in a short space of time. It took only about five years
for the first proposals for an official multilateral security
dialogue in the Asia-Pacific region to be realized in the form of
the ARF. By comparison, it took about 20 years for the Asia-
Pacific region to transform the earliest concepts of regional
economic integration into the reality of APEC. Clearly, in part
because of the precedent set by APEC, the region was prepared to
address its security concerns in an innovative way.

In the four years since its first meeting in 1994, the ARF has
scored several additional successes. The annual meeting of
foreign ministers is now supplemented by a series of inter-
sessional meetings on more specific security issues. Major powers
once skeptical about multilateral security cooperation, including
both China and the United States, have become regular and more
enthusiastic participants in the process. The ARF seems to be
generating the "habits of dialogue" that its proponents have long
said would be a key prerequisite for creating a security
community in the region.

But the ARF's early successes should not blind us to the
problems that lie ahead. The ARF deals, after all, with highly
sensitive and controversial issues. Its agenda is not clearly
defined and is potentially vast in scope. Its membership includes
a number of nations whose strategic cultures favor bilateralism,
secrecy and deception, as opposed to the multilateral,
transparent mechanisms that the ARF seeks to promote. Perhaps
understandably, although the ARF has begun to foster "habits of
dialogue", it has not yet compiled a record of concrete
achievement. However useful talk may be, it has not yet led to
action.

Unless the ARF can now move to a higher stage of development,
I fear that the support that it currently enjoys in the US -- and
perhaps in other countries as well -- will begin to weaken.
Already, one hears two critiques of the ARF in America. One group
of analysts charges that the ARF is merely a "talk shop" that
yields few results, and that in a world of realpolitik it can
never be expected to produce anything tangible. These skeptics
may be willing to endorse continued routine American
participation, but will not advocate that it receive high-level
attention.

A second group of analysts makes a more serious charge: that
China is invoking the ARF in support of the proposition that
multilateral security arrangements can now replace the outmoded
bilateral military alliances of the Cold War. To these critics,
the ARF is not simply useless, but is positively dangerous. It
undermines the network of security alliances, centered on the US,
that have provided regional stability for the past several
decades.

These critics might well come to the logical conclusion that
the ARF should be disbanded, or that the US should withdraw from
active participation.

What can the ARF do to preserve its momentum and to confound
the skeptics? Let me make the following recommendations.

First of all, it is necessary to get the ARF's participation
right. Meaningful discussions of security matters require the
active participation of the military establishments of the
region. In the past several years, some military officers have
joined the foreign ministers as part of national delegations. But
military participation needs to be significantly upgraded, to the
level of ministers of national defense.

With a more appropriate participation, the ARF next needs a
more focused agenda. In today's world, the concept of "security"
has become unprecedentedly elastic, encompassing everything from
the conventional military balance to local territorial disputes,
and from international criminal activity to transnational
environmental problems. At present, the ARF is trying to deal
superficially with too many of these issues. The ARF must decide
which of these matters are so central that they deserve sustained
attention by the foreign ministers and defense ministers of its
member states.

In compiling that more focused agenda, the ARF would best be
advised to deal with issues that are crucial in importance,
multilateral in character and regionwide in scope. Other problems
can be left to sub-cabinet officials, bilateral negotiations or
sub-regional fora.

The issue that best meets this test is nothing less than the
regional balance of power. At a time when the relative power of
the major players in the region is undergoing rapid change, and
when suspicions of other countries' capabilities and intentions
are high, the ARF's mission should be to help create and maintain
a stable strategic equilibrium. The ARF should serve as the forum
in which information can be exchanged, mutual confidence can be
enhanced, and a regional security community can be gradually
created.

Increasingly, Asians emphasize the concept of "norm-building"
as the key to the constructive management of regional economic
and security issues. In the case of security, two norms are
especially important: transparency about intentions and
capabilities, and the non-use of force to resolve international
disputes. The ARF's primary purpose should be to create a region-
wide consensus on these two crucial norms.

The ARF could then try to move from principles to action. It
could operationalize these norms by providing common outlines for
defense white papers and military budget statements, by
establishing a regional arms register, and by setting guidelines
for advance notification of military exercises. Unlike in Europe,
where the CSCE (now the OSCE) attempted to limit military
deployments and exercises, the ARF would focus on making those
phenomena more transparent, relying more on community pressure
than on formal negotiation to impose limits on national
behavior.

If creating a stable strategic equilibrium is indeed the most
appropriate agenda for the ARF, what is the next step that can
most effectively be taken to refocus the organization's attention
on this critical problem? In my judgment, the evolution of APEC,
the region's multilateral economic organization, provides some
useful clues.

At the comparable stage in its development, APEC faced a
problem similar to that faced by the ARF today: it had resolved
its early membership issues, had met for several consecutive
years, but lacked a clear agenda. To address this dilemma, it
established an Eminent Persons' Group, which proposed the norm of
reducing barriers to trade and investment within a certain period
of time. An Eminent Persons' Group for the ARF might now be a way
of establishing consensus on the norms that will guide
multilateral security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region,
identifying the more concrete measures that could embody those
norms, and establishing a timetable by which those measures could
be put into effect.

Second, Asean has been a vanguard within APEC through its
commitment to the creation of an Asean Free Trade Area (Afta) ...
a more advanced, sub-regional version of APEC's broader
commitment to freer trade and investment. As Asean's new
Secretary-General, Rodolfo Serverino of the Philippines, has
recently suggested, Asean could similarly serve as a model for
the rest of the ARF, by formally adopting the norms of
transparency and the non-use of force, and by publishing data on
budgets, procurements, and deployments even before the other
members of the ARF were prepared to do so. Asean's example would
put considerable pressure on the rest of the region to follow
suit.

The ARF has achieved a lot in a short time. But the security
problems of the region are intensifying, and the ARF will lose
support if it loses momentum. It is time for far-sighted leaders
in the region to identify a focused agenda for The ARF and to
achieve some concrete results. The ARF's most appropriate mission
is to enhance the strategic equilibrium in the region by
promoting the norms of transparency and the non-use of force. An
Eminent Persons' Group and Asean can show how these norms can be
reflected in concrete action.

The writer is dean, Elliot School of International Affairs,
The George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA.