NIKOLAS BUSSE / HANNS W. MAULL Enhancing Security in the Asia-Pacific European Lessons for the ASEAN Regional Forum* BEITRÄGE/ARTICLES W hile security and stability in the Asia-Pacific are commonly seen as being ensured through US military supremacy and a US -led system of al­liances, more and more observers also recognise the value of multilateral security co-operation as sup­port, as a complement and eventually perhaps even as an alternative to the present security order. In this context, the ASEAN Regional Forum( ARF ) generally is considered the most important multilateral regio­nal security institution in the Asia-Pacific. The short history of the ARF is, to some extent, a history of rejecting European role models. From the very beginning, policy makers and academics in the Pacific Asia region have fiercely resisted any attempts at developing the ARF along the lines of OSCE , EU or NATO . Two arguments were usually put forward to justify this position. First and most importantly, many Asians felt that the security environment of their region was quite different from the European one. Thus, it was argued that many countries in the Asia-Pacific were preoc­cupied with problems of internal stability and economic development because the volatile pro­cess of nation-building had not yet been com­pleted, while European states by and large had developed into strong, well-consolidated nation­states(Ayoob, 1995 ). While Europe is predomi­nantly land-oriented, the Asia-Pacific is a mari­time region, and while the European security system had been strongly bipolar during the time of the Cold War, geo-strategic patterns in the Asia-Pacific were more complex, with an overlay­ing strategic triangle formed by the US , the Soviet Union and China, but stronger local and sub­regional influences than in Europe. The Asia­Pacific is also widely perceived as being qualita­tively more heterogeneous, more diverse and more difficult to organise than Europe. Lastly, it was pointed out that Europe benefitted from a dense network of regional institutions, while the Asia­Pacific was institutionally thin. Given all these differences, European security institutions with their focus on issues of military security seemed to be of little relevance(Mack / Ravenhill, 1995 ). A second line of reasoning leading to the same conclusion suggested that the institutional struc­ture of European organisations was not in tune with the dominant political culture in many parts of Asia. For example, the processes in the OSCE were seen as too legalistic, formal and rule-based for many ASEAN states who had made consensus­building and informal discussions the cornerstone of their own approach to regional co-operation (Maull, 1997 b). Although some of these objections may have – as we shall argue below – less relevance than often assumed, they had considerable influence on the Forum’s development over the past four years. Not the European but the ASEAN model has served as the main blueprint for the institutional make-up of the ARF . The Association’s revered principles of »musyawarah«(consultations) and»mufakat«(con­sensus) now serve as the basic guidelines for the work of the ARF and its various intersessional bodies. The stress is on bringing policy-makers and security personnel from the region together in order to facilitate trust and mutual understan­ding. This form of security dialogue was regarded as more promising than formal Western-style mechanisms of conflict resolution. Only selected European ideas such as»Confidence Building Measures«( CBM s) have been considered for imple­mentation. 1 * An earlier version of this text was presented at a semi­nar on»The Future of the ARF «, organised by the Insti­tute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Techno­logical University, Singapore, April 27–28 , 1998 . 1. Even in this case, progress has been quite limited. So far, the ARF has shied away from introducing a rigid CBM regime based on reciprocity, monitoring and sanction­ing. All measures carried out under the ARF umbrella, such as publication of defense white papers or observer missions, take place on a voluntary basis. IPG 3/99 Busse/ Maull, Security in the Asia-Pacific 227