Introduction

This chapter examines the conditions and circumstances that led to APEC’s creation in 1989 and its early years, focusing particularly on the structural forces and processes that generated middle power behaviour in Asia Pacific multilateralism. Launched amid the end of the Cold War, APEC was a significant advancement for the regional multilateral architecture. As superpower and military tensions decreased in the late 1980s, the launch of APEC reflected the acknowledgment by regional countries of the need for greater and more inclusive cooperation on economic issues. Certainly, the idea for APEC did not emerge out of the blue. Its inauguration in 1989 was a culmination of three decades of efforts to boost economic cooperation in the Asia Pacific, including the Pacific Trade and Development Conference (PAFTAD) and the Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC), both established in the 1960s. From 1980, the quasi-governmental Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) also assumed a vital role in laying the foundations for APEC (Drysdale, 2009, p 18). Nevertheless, APEC’s importance lies in the fact that it was the first regional organization in this field at the government level when it was inaugurated in 1989 (Keating, 2001; Park and Lee, 2009, p 98). Its ability to annually convene the political elites of regional countries at a time of significant international political change moreover imbued the economic forum with strategic and political intent. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, APEC was the only venue where multilateral talks could be conducted among policymakers and leaders of key regional countries such as Japan, China and the US, among others.

The success in getting APEC off the ground illustrated the ability of middle powers, such as Australia, Indonesia and South Korea, to shape the regional multilateral architecture. On the one hand, the behaviour of these three middle powers diluted stratification in the Asia Pacific by diffusing power away from the major powers. On the other, their behaviour also strengthened functional differentiation in the Asia Pacific as they took on initiatory and mediatory roles in the APEC initiative. While the origins of APEC could be traced to the combined efforts of Australia and Japan, due to various reasons Australia became the public face of the initiative.