Sample Chapter - United Nations University

22 Yoshinobu Yamamoto
forum) formed in the Asia-Pacific/ East Asian region. At that point, the
region found itself at the threshold of level IV in Table 1.1, the regional
society stage, i.e., regime creations both in economic and security areas
without serious security conflicts in the region. With that said, APEC was
a unique economic regime. First, it had multiple goals such as trade liberalization,
trade facilitation and economic (development) cooperation.
Second, it was not based on binding rules but on member countries furthering
its goals on their own initiative. And third, ASEAN played an
important role with respect to APEC. This was because, although Australia
(and Japan) took the initiative in forming APEC, it was in effect
created on top of ASEAN’s network of dialogue partners. This was the
start of ASEAN centrality – ‌the idea that ASEAN should be “in the
driver’s seat” of future regime creation in the Asia–Pacific and East Asian
regions. These characteristics suggest that APEC will stop at the level of
a regularized forum in Figure 1.2 and will need serious efforts to move
up to the level of a formal international regime with legally binding rules
and norms.
With the Cold War over, the Asia-Pacific (East Asian) region’s next
step towards becoming a regional society was the creation of the securityfocused
ASEAN Regional Forum(ARF). ARF was one answer to the
question of how to create an Asia-Pacific security system in a post–Cold
War world with no defined enemy (albeit with countries that were not
allies either). The basis for the idea of ARF, which held its first meeting
in 1994, was the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
(CSCE) with Australia and Canada pushing the idea for the Asia-Pacific
region. As with APEC, however, the main driver for ARF is ASEAN. A
principal goal of ARF is the fostering of trust among countries in the region,
and issues pursued include the creation of systems for preventative
diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution. From its beginning, participants
agreed that ARF was to be a forum for security dialogues, not a
place for binding rules or decisions. In terms of the reasons ARF took on
these characteristics, many parallels can be drawn with APEC. What
should be particularly emphasized here is that security-wise, with respect
to Table 1.1, the Asia-Pacific region is still a regional security complex (at
times, level III or sometimes level II), with a balance of power and inconsistent
values/‌norms in many areas. ARF was created with this state of
affairs in mind, and was intended more to maintain stability within that
state than to change it. 23 Of course, the Asia-Pacific and East Asian regions
do have their problems, such as the Taiwan and North Korea issues,
and acute level II conflicts that go beyond what ARF can handle have
flared up. At the same time, those issues also served to mark the existence
of what could be called “regional subsystems” (for example, Northeast
Asia) in the security sector.