For much of its 25-year existence, ASEAN was extremely reluctant to openly identify itself with security concerns because it did not want to be seen as taking sides in the Cold War.

This has changed with the end of the Cold War. ASEAN has now shown active interest in not just Southeast Asian but also broader Asia-Pacific security issues. The Singapore Declaration issued last year at the Fourth ASEAN Summit states that “ASEAN should intensify its external dialogues in political and security matters by using the ASEAN Post- Ministerial Conferences (PMC).”

Last month, senior ASEAN officials met their counterparts from the seven dialogue partners — the US, Japan, the European Community, South Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — in a conference devoted exclusively to security matters. These discussions can be expected to continue during the ASEAN PMC next month. Indeed the PMC seems to be emerging as an important Asia-Pacific forum for security discussions.

Two inter-related questions arise. Why the need for an Asia-Pacific forum for discussions on security? What can it realistically achieve?

The simple answer to the first question is that there has so far been no forum where the countries of East Asia, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand can sit together to discuss security concerns. For reasons of history and heterogeneity, there has been no equivalent of either a collective defence alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) or a forum like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).

Western Pacific security has rather been based on an American military presence and America's bilateral defence treaties and arrangements with various countries which were concluded in the earlier years of the Cold War to protect these countries from aggression by the Communist powers.

Many feel that this structure cannot by itself deal satisfactorily with all the problems of post-Cold War East Asia where, except on the Korean peninsula, there are now no clearly defined adversarial relationships. Although the Asia Pacific region is today more peaceful that at any other time since the end of the Second World War, there is disquiet that these good times will not last through the next decade if the strategic changes already in motion take an undesirable turn and produce new enmities and tensions.