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.