The long road towards peace and cooperation in the South China Sea (SCS) started back in the late 1980s. This was after several decades of disputes and confrontation that began soon after the end of World War II when countries around the SCS first started making claims to sovereignty over features within the sea. In the late 1980s and before the conclusion of the Cambodian war through the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement, I recognized that prospects for peace and cooperation may finally have come to Southeast Asia, although there was still potential for worrying developments and conflicts in the SCS.

The countries around the SCS have a long history of confrontation and very little experience of cooperation. Armed clashes between China and Vietnam have occurred primarily in 1974 with the latest in 1988. Multiple territorial claims to islands existed, as well as claims to national maritime zones of jurisdiction, particularly in and around the Spratly Islands group. The island disputes were bilateral, trilateral or even, in some instances, multilateral. The rapid economic development of the countries around the SCS, particularly China, led to a scramble for the natural resources of the SCS, both living and non-living.

Strategic issues were also at stake. The strategic significance of the SCS to non-littoral countries could not be ignored. The sea-lines of communications through the area are significant both for the region and for world trade and the global economy. Consideration needed also to be given to increasing problems of pollution and the safety of navigation as well as to the protection of the marine environment and fragile marine ecosystems.

Then there were the political factors that inhibited the process of cooperation. The SCS is surrounded by countries that are vastly different from one another, in land size, population, per capita income, employment in fisheries, fish catch and consumption of fish per capita. Political systems also markedly varied from the communist/socialist countries of the northern littoral, namely China and Vietnam, to the non-communist southern and eastern insular countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei Darussalam). There was also the complicating factor of Taiwan/Chinese Taipei as a claimant. An important geographical fact is that the insular countries control maritime approaches to and from the coasts of the mainland SCS countries.