66 - ‘Talking Their Walk’? The Evolution of Defense Regionalism in Southeast Asia

Summary

Historically an ad hoc, uneven, and for the most part uncoordinated process, Southeast Asian defense cooperation has evolved incrementally from bilateral efforts to the incorporation of multilateral initiatives including ministerial-level meetings. With unresolved territorial disputes and residual mistrust continuing to color intramural relations despite more than four decades of regionalism, the aims of Southeast Asian defense collaboration have understandably remained limited, focused as they have been on informal confidence building, trust creation, mutual reassurance, and where conditions have permitted, embryonic preventive diplomacy. In riposte to a host of nonconventional (or nontraditional) challenges that partly define the contemporary security milieu in Southeast Asia, defense cooperation has expanded beyond dialogical activity to include practical and actionable responses to natural and humanitarian disasters, challenges in the maritime domain, international terrorism, pandemic outbreaks, and the like. The ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting (ADMM) framework, for example, is designed to facilitate the upgrading of national and regional capacities for managing specific nonconventional security problems, many of which are transnational in character. However, the inclusion of this “operational” element by no means indicates that ASEAN is ready to formally embrace preventive diplomacy, even less conflict resolution, in any systematic or substantive way. If anything, contrary to past ASEAN practice, the deliberate avoidance of grandiloquent gestures in the ADMM's narrowly defined remit arguably reflects the desire among ASEAN's defense practitioners to “talk their walk” — exercise a visionary restraint that is more or less commensurate to actual practice — rather than attempting, and likely failing, to walk their talk.

DEFENSE REGIONALISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

In May 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ASEAN leaders inaugurated the ADMM. The development marked a departure of sorts from the way Southeast Asian states had until then engaged in regional defense cooperation. Four years later in Hanoi, Vietnam, ASEAN leaders launched the ADMM+ grouping composed of defense ministers from the ASEAN countries and eight of the regional organization's dialogue partner nations. For many, the establishment of these forums is no less remarkable especially for a region for which the categorical rejection of collective defense, whether with or without the great powers, has long been a sine qua non of regional organization. The existence of the ADMM and its extraregional appendage reveal a contemporary Southeast Asia not loath to institutionalized multilateral defense dialogue and cooperation at the highest levels with major military powers.