Regional security multilateralism and Darwinian principles

The Asia-Pacific region, widely defined to include Pacific Rim states with a stake in Asia and Asia’s processes, has hundreds of multilateral institutions. They range in function from the Animal Production and Health Commission for Asia and the Pacific to the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, with every conceivable type of organisation in between.

Clearly not all – or even many – are known outside their membership, and to a few scholars of multilateral cooperation. Equally clearly, many do not address fundamental issues of regional peace and stability. They are instead concerned with narrowly technical subjects such as fisheries, forestry or banking.

Yet they are all important in that they give the regional community the ability to cooperate to achieve common goals. This level of interaction is one of the most encouraging indicators of future regional stability.

Comparatively few of these multilateral organisations address peace and stability directly, but these few are joined by a number of mainly US-centred bilateral military alliances.

The multilateral organisations include multi-purpose cooperative groupings such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the pan-regional summits exemplified by the East Asian Summit and pan-regional ministers’ meeting such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus.  (The “plus” refers to defence ministers from outside ASEAN).

Many of the pan-regional meetings are centred on ASEAN, but many are not. For example, the US-centred alliance system dates from the early post-World War II years, when the US developed its “hub and spokes” model. These primarily bilateral alliances had the US at their centre, with spokes leading to – amongst others – South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.

There is also the Five Power Defence Arrangements group, which brings Australia, the UK and New Zealand together with Singapore and Malaysia. This was originally designed as a security guarantee for the two ex-colonial states, but is now about capacity and confidence-building as much as it is about territorial defence.

Many commentators assert that the “regional system” – the sum of all the institutions and their inter-relationships – is broken. We can readily accept one critique: there is nothing at all systematic about the arrangements.

The first standard criticism is about effectiveness. The argument goes that, despite the plethora of organisations, the region is less secure now than ever.

The second is about tidiness. There are many institutions that have overlapping memberships and functions. Many would like to see these institutions rationalised.

The third is around the style or best method of ensuring regional security.  A number of countries, including the US, believe the hub and spokes model has served the region well and should not lightly be discarded.

Yet China and some other countries prefer a new model of regional relations, replacing the “Cold War” thinking behind the bilateral alliance system. They emphasise cooperative and collective security approaches.

All these criticisms are based on a faulty assumption – that regional stability is a function of the regional architecture.

There may be some minor element of truth in this, but stability is as much to do with the desire of states as it is with the ways they choose to organise themselves. Stability is possible without organisation and even with organisation instability is always possible.

The word “architecture” beguiles us when it comes to regional security. We believe we can design, build and maintain a regional system to meet our desired ends.

Leaving aside the fact that we don’t have agreement about desired ends, regional systems are not mechanical devices that follow fixed laws of physics. Instead, they are socially constructed and interacting components. They operate within an environment that both shapes and is shaped by these components.

It’s better to think of the regional system as an organism that adapts to the needs of its environment. At times, adaptations cause extinction (think SEATO or the Asian and Pacific Council). At others, it will mean change to meet current needs. At yet other times, it will involve growing new limbs.

This is an incremental process that is not tidy, but is ultimately effective. If it weren’t, states would develop something that worked better. So we see variation in the range of organisations within the original system; selection in that some survive and others do not; and replication as models that work in one area are copied in others.

These are the attributes of Darwinian selection. Darwin was right about the natural world and he remains right – so long as we don’t force the analogy – in the organisational world.