4. Regional security cooperation in the early 21st century
Transcript Of 4. Regional security cooperation in the early 21st century
4. Regional security cooperation in the early 21st century
ALYSON J. K. BAILES and ANDREW COTTEY
I. Introduction
Since 1945, especially since the 1990s, regionalism and regional cooperation have been growing features of world politics. In the decades after World War II, the cold war and decolonization resulted in the establishment of multilateral regional organizations across the world, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the predecessors of what is today the European Union (EU), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Organization of African Unity (OAU, the predecessor of the African Union, AU), the Arab League and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). (A list of these and other regional organizations is presented in table 4.1.) In the 1990s the end of the cold war and the advance of globalization triggered the so-called new regionalism, with the establishment of a number of regional cooperation frameworks, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) process, as well as efforts to rejuvenate and strengthen existing regional institutions and the creation of several sub-regional ones in Europe and Africa.
Security cooperation has been an important part of this wider phenomenon. Some institutions, such as NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), are explicitly and primarily security organizations. Most of the general-purpose regional organizations—such as the Arab League, the AU and the OAS—have significant security dimensions, as do a number of other smaller regional (or sub-regional) groups—such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Many regional and sub-regional organizations bridge the gap between traditional definitions of security and wider concepts of security involving democracy, human rights, and economic and environmental issues. Although many regional institutions are primarily economic and have no explicit or direct security role, even these are often implicitly designed to promote stability, conflict avoidance and the collective viability of their communities— important factors for security—by encouraging integration among their members. This was most obvious in the early development of European integration but is arguably also the case today in institutions such as APEC and the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR, the Southern Common Market).
Despite this trend towards regional security cooperation, there has been surprisingly little theoretically informed comparative analysis of the phenom-
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Table 4.1. Regional organizations and groups with security functions
Organization
Year founded
Africa
African Union (AU) Common Market for Eastern and
Southern Africa (COMESA) Community of Sahel-Saharan
States (CEN-SAD) East African Community (EAC) Economic and Monetary
Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Mano River Union Southern African Development Community (SADC)
2001 1994 1998 1999 1998
1975 1996 1973 1992
Americas
Andean Community of Nations (Andean Pact)
Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
Central American Integration System (SICA)
Latin American Integration Association (LAIA)
MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market)
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
Organization of American States (OAS)
Rio Group
1969 1973 1991 1980 1991 1994 1948 1987
Asia
Australia, New Zealand, United 1951
States (ANZUS) Security Treaty
Asia–Pacific Economic
1989
Cooperation (APEC)
Association of South East Asian 1967
Nations (ASEAN):
ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) 1994
ASEAN Plus Three (APT)
1997
Conference on Interaction and 1992
Confidence-building measures
in Asia (CICA)
Number of members Website URL
53a
www.africa-union.org
20
www.comesa.int
23
www.cen-sad.org
3
www.eac.int
6
www.cemac.cf
15a
www.ecowas.int
7a
www.igad.org
3
–
14a
www.sadc.int
5a
www.comunidadandina.org
15
www.caricom.org
7
www.sgsica.org
12
www.aladi.org
4
www.mercosur.int
3
www.nafta-sec-alena.org
35a
www.oas.org
19
–
3
–
21
www.apec.org
10a
www.aseansec.org
25a
www.aseanregionalforum.org
13a
www.aseansec.org/16580.htm
17a
www.kazakhstanembassy.org.
uk/cgi-bin/index/128
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Organization
Year founded
Number of members Website URL
Economic Cooperation
1985
10
Organization (ECO)
Pacific Community
1947
26
Pacific Islands Forum
1971
16a
Shanghai Cooperation
2001
6a
Organization (SCO)
South Asian Association for
1985
8a
Regional Co-operation
(SAARC)
Europe and Euro-Atlantic
Arctic Council
1996
8
Baltic Council
1993
3
Barents Euro-Arctic Council
1993
7
(BEAC)
Organization of the Black Sea 1992
12a
Economic Cooperation (BSEC)
Central European Initiative (CEI) 1989
17a
Collective Security Treaty
2003
6a
Organization (CSTO)
Commonwealth of Independent 1991
11a
States (CIS)
Council of the Baltic Sea States 1992
12a
(CBSS)
Council of Europe
1949
46a
European Union (EU)
1951
25a
North Atlantic Treaty
1949
26a
Organization:
Euro-Atlantic Partnership
1997
46a
Council (EAPC)
Nordic Council
1952
5
Organization for Security and 1973
55a
Co-operation in Europe:
Stability Pact for South Eastern 1999
40a
Europe
Southeast European Cooperative 1996
12a
Initiative (SECI)
Visegrad Group (V4)
1991
4a
Western European Union (WEU) 1954
10a
Middle East
Arab League
1945
22a
Arab Maghreb Union
1989
5
Council of Arab Economic Unity 1964
10
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 1981
6a
Organization of the Islamic
1971
57a
Conference (OIC)
www.ecosecretariat.org
www.spc.org.nc www.forumsec.org.fj www.sectsco.org
www.saarc-sec.org
www.arctic-council.org – www.beac.st
www.bsec-organization.org
www.ceinet.org –
www.cis.minsk.by
www.cbss.st
www.coe.int europa.eu.int www.nato.int
www.nato.int/issues/eapc/
www.norden.org www.osce.org
www.stabilitypact.org
www.secinet.info
www.visegradgroup.org www.weu.int
www.arableagueonline.org www.maghrebarabe.org www.caeu.org.eg www.gcc-sg.org www.oic-oci.org
a Lists of members and further details of these organizations are given in the glossary in this volume.
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enon. There is a growing body of literature on the general phenomenon of regionalism in world politics, particularly the ‘new regionalism’ that has emerged since the 1990s.1 However, this literature has primarily an international political economy perspective, reflecting not only the fact that many of the new regional institutions are economic in nature but also an assumption that economic factors are the main drivers behind the new regionalism. This chapter addresses the gap in the literature by providing a generic framework for analysing regional security cooperation as an aspect of global, interstate and (where appropriate) intra-state security governance in the conditions of the first decade of the 21st century.2
Section II of this chapter addresses the issue of what defines a region, while section III reviews conceptual models of regional security cooperation, drawing on recent and contemporary history. Section IV examines emerging patterns of regional security cooperation since the 1990s, offering a new categorization of the direct and indirect security functions that regional organizations and cooperation processes fulfil. Section V discusses, and advocates further research on, the dos and don’ts for making regional cooperation benign yet effective in security terms and the conditions that promote or obstruct it in particular regions. The conclusions are presented in section VI.
II. Regions, regionalism and security
Both ‘region’ and ‘security’ are widely used but vague and contested terms. In world politics the term region has become most closely associated with the different continents of the world: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Oceania and Europe. Subcontinents (e.g., South Asia) and the areas surrounding seas (e.g., the Baltic and the Caspian seas) are sometimes also referred to as regions. An additional distinction may be drawn between regions and sub-regions, with the latter understood as geographically distinct sub-areas of continents, although the two terms are often used interchangeably and the difference between them is sometimes blurred.
Geography alone, however, does not define regions in world politics.3 Regions are political and imagined constructs just as nations are: they are shaped both by local countries’ concepts of identity and connections and by
1 Hurrell, A., ‘Explaining the resurgence of regionalism in world politics’, Review of International Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (Oct. 1995), pp. 331–58; Fawcett, L. and Hurrell, A. (eds), Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order (Oxford University Press: New York, N.Y., 1995); and Mattli, W., The Logic of Regional Integration: Europe and Beyond (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
2 Chapters reviewing security conditions in individual regions have appeared in several recent editions of the SIPRI Yearbook. E.g., Hollis, R., ‘The greater Middle East’ and Rosas, M. C., ‘Latin America and the Caribbean: security and defence in the post-cold war era’, SIPRI Yearbook 2005: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005), pp. 223–50 and 251–82.
3 Russett, B. M., International Regions and the International System (Rand MacNally: Chicago, Ill., 1967); Cantori, L. J. and Speigel, S. L., The International Politics of Regions: A Comparative Approach (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970); and Buzan, B. and Wæver, O., Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003).
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the way outsiders view and react to them—vide the use of the names Near East and Far East at a time when Eurocentric imperialist visions were dominant. The recognition or willed construction of regional and sub-regional systems, interstate groupings and organizations is similarly driven by historical and cultural factors and by a range of subjective perceptions and preferences as much as by any objective logic. Regions can be ‘made’ as part of a conscious policy programme, as happened with European integration in the 1950s, and as some observers see happening now in regions like Latin America and East Asia in an effort to balance potential US hegemony.4 A similar interplay of motives determines the definition and the aspects of security that a given set of countries will select for their activities. All these explanations are needed to understand why real-life regional ventures sometimes leave out countries that seem geographically to belong to the region or take in additional countries; why several security-related groups with different memberships and agendas can coexist on the same territory; why sub-regional groups form in some regions but not others and often lack an obvious geographical basis; and why a region as defined in security terms may not have the same boundaries as it does for economic, climatic, cultural or other purposes. This chapter’s subject of study is necessarily those regions and sub-regions that governments have created and deemed to exist and which can directly or indirectly shape security-related policy.
III. Conceptualizing regional security cooperation
How can regional security cooperation be conceptualized and understood? At least four models of regional security cooperation have prima facie relevance for the 21st century: alliances, collective security, security regimes and security communities.
Alliances are one of the oldest forms of international cooperation, designed for both defence and attack (typically by military means) against a common external, or even internal, threat or opponent. They use cooperation as a means to an end rather than a good in itself, and an alliance’s membership necessarily excludes the enemy. These relatively zero-sum characteristics are matched by the often negative practical impacts of the alliance method on international security: even a purely defensive alliance may heighten its members’ threat consciousness more than it eases it, may exacerbate tensions and entrench dividing lines, and may take part in competitive arms acquisition. Alliances that turn on internal enemies (whether aberrant states or religious or ethnic groups) can also radicalize the latter and encourage them to seek external backers. On the other hand, an alliance should at least reduce the likelihood of war between its members by promoting confidence, encouraging dispute avoidance and resolution, and perhaps triggering cooperation in other non-
4 The USA was deliberately not invited to the new East Asian Summit meeting in Dec. 2005. McGregor, R., Mallet, V. and Burton, J., ‘A new sphere of influence: how trade clout is winning China allies yet stoking distrust’, Financial Times, 9 Dec. 2005, p. 11.
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security areas. Both ASEAN and NATO may be seen as examples of this type of dynamic. Despite the ending of the classic East–West confrontation in 1989–90, NATO and (albeit much less intensely) a number of other groupings continue to fulfil at least some of the roles associated with alliances.
The concept of collective security emerged in the 20th century in response to the ambivalent effects of older-style balance-of-power politics and alliances. First attempted in the framework of the League of Nations and again in the United Nations (UN), a collective security system aims to prevent or contain war by assuring a response to any act of aggression or threat to peace among its members. To work as intended, any such system must include all states in a region or the world, and it directs its attention inwardly at their actions. Apart from the global UN, some larger regional entities—such as the AU, the OAS and the OSCE—may be viewed as institutions that explicitly or implicitly aim at, and at least partially produce, collective security.5 Notoriously, however, no such system has ever been made to work perfectly because of the evident problem—which is more difficult the larger the membership— of arriving at a common judgement and common will to act against offenders. Experience shows that the approach works well when there is consensus among the major powers but fails when faced with the largest dangers, including when the major powers come into conflict. The lessons here may indicate some limiting factors for the security aspirations of regional groups as well.
A third type of regional security cooperation is a security regime.6 Regimes are a common phenomenon in such non-security dimensions of international relations as the regulation of international trade and transport. They define norms—of a cooperative and generally positive nature—for states’ behaviour and often provide ways to implement, support and verify these norms. A security-related regime may cover broad prescripts for behaviour such as the non-use of force and respect for existing international borders, or may more concretely regulate certain types and uses of weapons or activities like military movements and transparency. Several regional constructs, notably the OSCE and some Latin American initiatives, may be understood as security regimes, as may regional arms control measures such as nuclear weapon-free zones or the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.7 The value of all such constructs depends on how well their norms are respected, and there is much debate on what features—in terms of internal power patterns, institutionalization, incentives and penalties—are needed to ensure observance. It should be noted that regimes with functional security goals may not need, or lend themselves to, a geographically contiguous membership. Indeed, some
5 For details see the subsection on ‘Security dialogue and conflict management’ in section IV below. 6 Jervis, R., ‘Security regimes’, International Organization, vol. 36, no. 2 (spring 1982), pp. 357–78. 7 On the 1990 CFE Treaty, and 1999 Adaptation Agreement, which has not yet entered into force, see Lachowski, Z., The Adapted CFE Treaty and the Admission of the Baltic States to NATO, SIPRI Policy Paper no. 1 (SIPRI: Stockholm, 2002), URL
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would argue that using limited groups to handle tasks like export control has zero-sum overtones and that certain regimes work best when fully global.8
A security community has been defined as a group of states among which there is a ‘real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some other way’.9 The concept was developed by Karl Deutsch in the late 1950s to reflect the particularly far-reaching goals of post-World War II European integration, which in turn placed Europe in a larger security community of the world’s industrialized democracies. A security community implies more intense, sustained and comprehensive interaction than any of the above models. Starting by removing the risk of conflict within the group, it can develop strengths that are greater than the sum of its parts for security tasks going well beyond the prevention of specific ills. Ambitions to build such communities have recently been displayed also in several non-European regions, but the nature and effects of regional integration in the security domain remain poorly understood. The EU experiment has eliminated conflict between but not within its states (vide Northern Ireland and the Basque region). The tendency of security communities to weaken internal frontiers potentially means that they can be more quickly affected by ‘transnational’ threats (e.g., terrorism, criminal traffic and disease). Their open-ended agendas tend to lead them to confront new security challenges as soon as old ones are settled and, in particular, to feel an impulse to start ‘exporting’ their surplus of security to others, notably in the form of peace missions (on which more below).
These four models can help in understanding the nature of, prospects for and limitations of particular forms of regional security cooperation; but they use a language that is rare today in the actual public discourse or decision making of the regions concerned. They also suffer from being relatively static, revealing little about why regional groups change their membership or agenda and why they may mutate from one form to another.10 Various alternative ways of categorizing regional structures could be mooted, for example in terms of their institutional or governance characteristics (i.e., their degree of institutionalization, the nature of any fixed decision-making procedures, their collective organs and funds, the depth of involvement of non-state and local actors, and so on). This would not, however, directly lead to judgements on security utility since experience shows that different institutional forms can be appropriate for different types of security task in different environments. For instance, when several security institutions exist in the same region, this could be because states prefer to address various aspects of security in a variety of procedural styles. The most straightforward way to approach a new understanding of regional groups is through the functions they perform in terms of security as such.
8 See chapter 16 in this volume. 9 Deutsch, K. W. et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Greenwood Press: New York, N.Y., 1969), p. 5. 10 On institutional change and ‘drift’ see the Introduction to this volume.
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IV. New patterns of regional security cooperation
This section examines the emerging patterns and functions of regional security cooperation as they have evolved since the 1990s. It proposes a four-way (but not exhaustive) generic framework for understanding contemporary regional security cooperation: security dialogue and conflict management, new forms of military cooperation, democracy and human rights, and economic integration and the wider non-military security agenda. Since the section looks for evidence of regional contributions wherever they can be found, it may seem to present an over-positive balance, but this has been done consciously in order to offset a more usual analytical tendency (both within and outside the most integrated regions) to see the glass as half empty. It can also be argued that some achievements of regional cooperation are ignored because of the difficulty of proving a negative (e.g., that conflicts would have been worse otherwise).
Security dialogue and conflict management
At the most basic level, regional security institutions serve as frameworks for communication and dialogue among their members. Regular meetings of heads of state or government, ministers and lower-level officials, and the military arguably help to build trust between states, avoid miscommunication, resolve disagreements and develop a sense of common interests and identity. The EU and its predecessors have done much to overcome historic patterns of enmity between the countries of Western Europe, especially France and Germany; and founding of MERCOSUR in Latin America in 1991 has had a similar role in reinforcing the rapprochement between Argentina and Brazil that has existed since the 1980s. Analysis of the cause–effect cycle between institutions and changed relationships is, however, disputed and problematic: it may be argued that the conflict resolution is as much a facilitating factor as a consequence of regional cooperation.11
Since the 1990s there have been significant efforts to extend (geographically) the pacifying effect of long-standing regional security frameworks, in particular in Europe and Asia. In Europe, the enlargement of the EU and NATO has been based in significant part on the view that their success in contributing to the emergence of a security community in Western Europe can now be extended to Central and Eastern Europe. The EU and NATO are now seen as doing for Germany and Poland or Hungary and Romania, among others, what they did for Franco-German rapprochement in the 1950s and 1960s (and in avoiding open war between Greece and Turkey). During the 1990s the EU and NATO made accession conditional in effect on candidates’ resolving conflicts with neighbouring states, thus encouraging governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe to conclude treaties reaffirming exist-
11 Haftendorn, H., Keohane, R. O. and Wallander, C. A., Imperfect Unions: Security Institutions over Time and Space (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1999).
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ing borders and guaranteeing ethnic minority rights and to establish new forms of cooperation such as joint peacekeeping forces and cross-border economic zones. Following the 2004 ‘big bang’ enlargements of the EU and NATO, the two institutions now face the perhaps even more difficult challenge of extending their integrative model to the Western Balkans.12 In the 1990s ASEAN followed a somewhat similar enlargement process: between 1995 and 1999 taking in Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam and, controversially, Myanmar. As part of this enlargement process, all four countries signed ASEAN’s 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, which commits signatories to prevent disputes from arising and to renounce the threat or use of force to resolve disagreements.13 Parallel to this, the ASEAN Regional Forum was established in 1994 as a means of promoting dialogue with ASEAN’s neighbours in the wider Asia–Pacific region. Since then the ARF has become an established feature of the region’s international politics.14 Most recently, China signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in 2003—an arguably important achievement for ASEAN and the ARF given unresolved disputes between China and ASEAN members over the South China Sea.15
A number of regional organizations have developed more explicit and formal mechanisms for the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts among their members. Since the end of the cold war, for example, the OSCE has developed semi-permanent missions and the use of special envoys in areas of actual or potential conflict and has used the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities to help prevent and resolve conflicts relating to ethnic minorities. Similarly, the African Union has established new mechanisms for conflict management: the AU Commission includes a Commissioner for Peace and Security, a Peace and Security Directorate (incorporating a Conflict Management Centre) and an Early Warning System, and is supported by a Panel of the Wise (composed of five ‘highly respected African personalities’) tasked to provide advice and support.16 Since it was established in 2002, the AU has engaged in a number of political mediation missions for internal conflicts in member states (in the Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Somalia and Sudan). The OAS has its own Office for the Prevention
12 On recent and future developments in the Western Balkans see appendix 1A in this volume. 13 The text of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia is available at URL. 14 Khong Y. F., ‘The ASEAN Regional Forum: still thriving after all these years’, Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) Commentaries no. 46/2005, IDSS, Singapore, 27 July 2005, URL . 15 Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s the OAS expanded by accepting a number of Caribbean countries and Canada; its 35 members (of which, Cuba is suspended from participation) now include all independent states of the Americas. Organization of American States, ‘The OAS and the inter-American system’, 2005, URL . 16 Protocol relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union, Assembly of the African Union, First Ordinary Session, Durban, 9 July 2002, URL . See also Williams, R., ‘National defence reform and the African Union’, SIPRI Yearbook 2004: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004), pp. 231–50.
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and Resolution of Conflicts for the design and implementation of conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms.17
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is the most developed example of a regional construct that goes beyond internal peace goals to use collective modes of action externally, designed inter alia to help avoid and manage conflicts beyond the EU’s borders. While the EU has had its well-known failures and setbacks, including those in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia on its own doorstep in the 1990s, the trend has been for a steadily growing ambition, reach and diversity of the CFSP and, since 2000, its military instrument, the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). Other institutions, such as ASEAN and MERCOSUR, include elements of common policies towards their wider regions, an example being ASEAN’s leadership role in the ARF and its dialogue with large neighbours like China. However, none has gone as far as the EU in attempting to develop a wider common foreign and security policy. For the moment, the strongest dynamics in regions other than Europe seem to run either towards the better projection of shared regional interests in world economic and functional negotiations (e.g., talks in the World Trade Organization) or towards fending off unwanted external security influences by gaining better control of the region’s own internal weaknesses.
New forms of military cooperation
Regionally based military cooperation has historically focused on either cooperation driven by and directed against (perceived) external enemies or efforts to contain the risks of such confrontation through regional arms control agreements and military confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs). The best-developed set of CSBMs are those concluded in the frameworks of the OSCE and its predecessor, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), since the 1970s,18 the CFE Treaty, and the nuclear weapon-free zones agreed in various regions of the world. More recently, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have concluded a set of agreements limiting their deployment of military forces in mutual frontier zones.19 Other regional organizations, such as the OAS, have engaged in more limited discussions on arms control, CSBMs and military transparency. Overall, however, regional arms control and CSBMs are far from having been explored to their full potential.20
17 Organization of American States, Department of Democratic and Political Affairs, Office for the Prevention and Resolution of Conflicts, ‘Work plan 2005’, Washington, DC, 2005, URL.
18 Lachowski, Z., Confidence- and Security-Building Measures in the New Europe, SIPRI Research Report no. 18 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004).
19 Trofimov, D., ‘Arms control in Central Asia’, A. J. K. Bailes et al., Armament and Disarmament in the Caucasus and Central Asia, SIPRI Policy Paper no. 3 (SIPRI: Stockholm, July 2003), URL
20 See chapter 15 in this volume.
ALYSON J. K. BAILES and ANDREW COTTEY
I. Introduction
Since 1945, especially since the 1990s, regionalism and regional cooperation have been growing features of world politics. In the decades after World War II, the cold war and decolonization resulted in the establishment of multilateral regional organizations across the world, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the predecessors of what is today the European Union (EU), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Organization of African Unity (OAU, the predecessor of the African Union, AU), the Arab League and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). (A list of these and other regional organizations is presented in table 4.1.) In the 1990s the end of the cold war and the advance of globalization triggered the so-called new regionalism, with the establishment of a number of regional cooperation frameworks, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) process, as well as efforts to rejuvenate and strengthen existing regional institutions and the creation of several sub-regional ones in Europe and Africa.
Security cooperation has been an important part of this wider phenomenon. Some institutions, such as NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), are explicitly and primarily security organizations. Most of the general-purpose regional organizations—such as the Arab League, the AU and the OAS—have significant security dimensions, as do a number of other smaller regional (or sub-regional) groups—such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Many regional and sub-regional organizations bridge the gap between traditional definitions of security and wider concepts of security involving democracy, human rights, and economic and environmental issues. Although many regional institutions are primarily economic and have no explicit or direct security role, even these are often implicitly designed to promote stability, conflict avoidance and the collective viability of their communities— important factors for security—by encouraging integration among their members. This was most obvious in the early development of European integration but is arguably also the case today in institutions such as APEC and the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR, the Southern Common Market).
Despite this trend towards regional security cooperation, there has been surprisingly little theoretically informed comparative analysis of the phenom-
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Table 4.1. Regional organizations and groups with security functions
Organization
Year founded
Africa
African Union (AU) Common Market for Eastern and
Southern Africa (COMESA) Community of Sahel-Saharan
States (CEN-SAD) East African Community (EAC) Economic and Monetary
Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Mano River Union Southern African Development Community (SADC)
2001 1994 1998 1999 1998
1975 1996 1973 1992
Americas
Andean Community of Nations (Andean Pact)
Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
Central American Integration System (SICA)
Latin American Integration Association (LAIA)
MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market)
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
Organization of American States (OAS)
Rio Group
1969 1973 1991 1980 1991 1994 1948 1987
Asia
Australia, New Zealand, United 1951
States (ANZUS) Security Treaty
Asia–Pacific Economic
1989
Cooperation (APEC)
Association of South East Asian 1967
Nations (ASEAN):
ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) 1994
ASEAN Plus Three (APT)
1997
Conference on Interaction and 1992
Confidence-building measures
in Asia (CICA)
Number of members Website URL
53a
www.africa-union.org
20
www.comesa.int
23
www.cen-sad.org
3
www.eac.int
6
www.cemac.cf
15a
www.ecowas.int
7a
www.igad.org
3
–
14a
www.sadc.int
5a
www.comunidadandina.org
15
www.caricom.org
7
www.sgsica.org
12
www.aladi.org
4
www.mercosur.int
3
www.nafta-sec-alena.org
35a
www.oas.org
19
–
3
–
21
www.apec.org
10a
www.aseansec.org
25a
www.aseanregionalforum.org
13a
www.aseansec.org/16580.htm
17a
www.kazakhstanembassy.org.
uk/cgi-bin/index/128
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Organization
Year founded
Number of members Website URL
Economic Cooperation
1985
10
Organization (ECO)
Pacific Community
1947
26
Pacific Islands Forum
1971
16a
Shanghai Cooperation
2001
6a
Organization (SCO)
South Asian Association for
1985
8a
Regional Co-operation
(SAARC)
Europe and Euro-Atlantic
Arctic Council
1996
8
Baltic Council
1993
3
Barents Euro-Arctic Council
1993
7
(BEAC)
Organization of the Black Sea 1992
12a
Economic Cooperation (BSEC)
Central European Initiative (CEI) 1989
17a
Collective Security Treaty
2003
6a
Organization (CSTO)
Commonwealth of Independent 1991
11a
States (CIS)
Council of the Baltic Sea States 1992
12a
(CBSS)
Council of Europe
1949
46a
European Union (EU)
1951
25a
North Atlantic Treaty
1949
26a
Organization:
Euro-Atlantic Partnership
1997
46a
Council (EAPC)
Nordic Council
1952
5
Organization for Security and 1973
55a
Co-operation in Europe:
Stability Pact for South Eastern 1999
40a
Europe
Southeast European Cooperative 1996
12a
Initiative (SECI)
Visegrad Group (V4)
1991
4a
Western European Union (WEU) 1954
10a
Middle East
Arab League
1945
22a
Arab Maghreb Union
1989
5
Council of Arab Economic Unity 1964
10
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 1981
6a
Organization of the Islamic
1971
57a
Conference (OIC)
www.ecosecretariat.org
www.spc.org.nc www.forumsec.org.fj www.sectsco.org
www.saarc-sec.org
www.arctic-council.org – www.beac.st
www.bsec-organization.org
www.ceinet.org –
www.cis.minsk.by
www.cbss.st
www.coe.int europa.eu.int www.nato.int
www.nato.int/issues/eapc/
www.norden.org www.osce.org
www.stabilitypact.org
www.secinet.info
www.visegradgroup.org www.weu.int
www.arableagueonline.org www.maghrebarabe.org www.caeu.org.eg www.gcc-sg.org www.oic-oci.org
a Lists of members and further details of these organizations are given in the glossary in this volume.
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enon. There is a growing body of literature on the general phenomenon of regionalism in world politics, particularly the ‘new regionalism’ that has emerged since the 1990s.1 However, this literature has primarily an international political economy perspective, reflecting not only the fact that many of the new regional institutions are economic in nature but also an assumption that economic factors are the main drivers behind the new regionalism. This chapter addresses the gap in the literature by providing a generic framework for analysing regional security cooperation as an aspect of global, interstate and (where appropriate) intra-state security governance in the conditions of the first decade of the 21st century.2
Section II of this chapter addresses the issue of what defines a region, while section III reviews conceptual models of regional security cooperation, drawing on recent and contemporary history. Section IV examines emerging patterns of regional security cooperation since the 1990s, offering a new categorization of the direct and indirect security functions that regional organizations and cooperation processes fulfil. Section V discusses, and advocates further research on, the dos and don’ts for making regional cooperation benign yet effective in security terms and the conditions that promote or obstruct it in particular regions. The conclusions are presented in section VI.
II. Regions, regionalism and security
Both ‘region’ and ‘security’ are widely used but vague and contested terms. In world politics the term region has become most closely associated with the different continents of the world: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Oceania and Europe. Subcontinents (e.g., South Asia) and the areas surrounding seas (e.g., the Baltic and the Caspian seas) are sometimes also referred to as regions. An additional distinction may be drawn between regions and sub-regions, with the latter understood as geographically distinct sub-areas of continents, although the two terms are often used interchangeably and the difference between them is sometimes blurred.
Geography alone, however, does not define regions in world politics.3 Regions are political and imagined constructs just as nations are: they are shaped both by local countries’ concepts of identity and connections and by
1 Hurrell, A., ‘Explaining the resurgence of regionalism in world politics’, Review of International Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (Oct. 1995), pp. 331–58; Fawcett, L. and Hurrell, A. (eds), Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order (Oxford University Press: New York, N.Y., 1995); and Mattli, W., The Logic of Regional Integration: Europe and Beyond (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
2 Chapters reviewing security conditions in individual regions have appeared in several recent editions of the SIPRI Yearbook. E.g., Hollis, R., ‘The greater Middle East’ and Rosas, M. C., ‘Latin America and the Caribbean: security and defence in the post-cold war era’, SIPRI Yearbook 2005: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005), pp. 223–50 and 251–82.
3 Russett, B. M., International Regions and the International System (Rand MacNally: Chicago, Ill., 1967); Cantori, L. J. and Speigel, S. L., The International Politics of Regions: A Comparative Approach (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970); and Buzan, B. and Wæver, O., Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003).
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the way outsiders view and react to them—vide the use of the names Near East and Far East at a time when Eurocentric imperialist visions were dominant. The recognition or willed construction of regional and sub-regional systems, interstate groupings and organizations is similarly driven by historical and cultural factors and by a range of subjective perceptions and preferences as much as by any objective logic. Regions can be ‘made’ as part of a conscious policy programme, as happened with European integration in the 1950s, and as some observers see happening now in regions like Latin America and East Asia in an effort to balance potential US hegemony.4 A similar interplay of motives determines the definition and the aspects of security that a given set of countries will select for their activities. All these explanations are needed to understand why real-life regional ventures sometimes leave out countries that seem geographically to belong to the region or take in additional countries; why several security-related groups with different memberships and agendas can coexist on the same territory; why sub-regional groups form in some regions but not others and often lack an obvious geographical basis; and why a region as defined in security terms may not have the same boundaries as it does for economic, climatic, cultural or other purposes. This chapter’s subject of study is necessarily those regions and sub-regions that governments have created and deemed to exist and which can directly or indirectly shape security-related policy.
III. Conceptualizing regional security cooperation
How can regional security cooperation be conceptualized and understood? At least four models of regional security cooperation have prima facie relevance for the 21st century: alliances, collective security, security regimes and security communities.
Alliances are one of the oldest forms of international cooperation, designed for both defence and attack (typically by military means) against a common external, or even internal, threat or opponent. They use cooperation as a means to an end rather than a good in itself, and an alliance’s membership necessarily excludes the enemy. These relatively zero-sum characteristics are matched by the often negative practical impacts of the alliance method on international security: even a purely defensive alliance may heighten its members’ threat consciousness more than it eases it, may exacerbate tensions and entrench dividing lines, and may take part in competitive arms acquisition. Alliances that turn on internal enemies (whether aberrant states or religious or ethnic groups) can also radicalize the latter and encourage them to seek external backers. On the other hand, an alliance should at least reduce the likelihood of war between its members by promoting confidence, encouraging dispute avoidance and resolution, and perhaps triggering cooperation in other non-
4 The USA was deliberately not invited to the new East Asian Summit meeting in Dec. 2005. McGregor, R., Mallet, V. and Burton, J., ‘A new sphere of influence: how trade clout is winning China allies yet stoking distrust’, Financial Times, 9 Dec. 2005, p. 11.
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security areas. Both ASEAN and NATO may be seen as examples of this type of dynamic. Despite the ending of the classic East–West confrontation in 1989–90, NATO and (albeit much less intensely) a number of other groupings continue to fulfil at least some of the roles associated with alliances.
The concept of collective security emerged in the 20th century in response to the ambivalent effects of older-style balance-of-power politics and alliances. First attempted in the framework of the League of Nations and again in the United Nations (UN), a collective security system aims to prevent or contain war by assuring a response to any act of aggression or threat to peace among its members. To work as intended, any such system must include all states in a region or the world, and it directs its attention inwardly at their actions. Apart from the global UN, some larger regional entities—such as the AU, the OAS and the OSCE—may be viewed as institutions that explicitly or implicitly aim at, and at least partially produce, collective security.5 Notoriously, however, no such system has ever been made to work perfectly because of the evident problem—which is more difficult the larger the membership— of arriving at a common judgement and common will to act against offenders. Experience shows that the approach works well when there is consensus among the major powers but fails when faced with the largest dangers, including when the major powers come into conflict. The lessons here may indicate some limiting factors for the security aspirations of regional groups as well.
A third type of regional security cooperation is a security regime.6 Regimes are a common phenomenon in such non-security dimensions of international relations as the regulation of international trade and transport. They define norms—of a cooperative and generally positive nature—for states’ behaviour and often provide ways to implement, support and verify these norms. A security-related regime may cover broad prescripts for behaviour such as the non-use of force and respect for existing international borders, or may more concretely regulate certain types and uses of weapons or activities like military movements and transparency. Several regional constructs, notably the OSCE and some Latin American initiatives, may be understood as security regimes, as may regional arms control measures such as nuclear weapon-free zones or the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.7 The value of all such constructs depends on how well their norms are respected, and there is much debate on what features—in terms of internal power patterns, institutionalization, incentives and penalties—are needed to ensure observance. It should be noted that regimes with functional security goals may not need, or lend themselves to, a geographically contiguous membership. Indeed, some
5 For details see the subsection on ‘Security dialogue and conflict management’ in section IV below. 6 Jervis, R., ‘Security regimes’, International Organization, vol. 36, no. 2 (spring 1982), pp. 357–78. 7 On the 1990 CFE Treaty, and 1999 Adaptation Agreement, which has not yet entered into force, see Lachowski, Z., The Adapted CFE Treaty and the Admission of the Baltic States to NATO, SIPRI Policy Paper no. 1 (SIPRI: Stockholm, 2002), URL
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would argue that using limited groups to handle tasks like export control has zero-sum overtones and that certain regimes work best when fully global.8
A security community has been defined as a group of states among which there is a ‘real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some other way’.9 The concept was developed by Karl Deutsch in the late 1950s to reflect the particularly far-reaching goals of post-World War II European integration, which in turn placed Europe in a larger security community of the world’s industrialized democracies. A security community implies more intense, sustained and comprehensive interaction than any of the above models. Starting by removing the risk of conflict within the group, it can develop strengths that are greater than the sum of its parts for security tasks going well beyond the prevention of specific ills. Ambitions to build such communities have recently been displayed also in several non-European regions, but the nature and effects of regional integration in the security domain remain poorly understood. The EU experiment has eliminated conflict between but not within its states (vide Northern Ireland and the Basque region). The tendency of security communities to weaken internal frontiers potentially means that they can be more quickly affected by ‘transnational’ threats (e.g., terrorism, criminal traffic and disease). Their open-ended agendas tend to lead them to confront new security challenges as soon as old ones are settled and, in particular, to feel an impulse to start ‘exporting’ their surplus of security to others, notably in the form of peace missions (on which more below).
These four models can help in understanding the nature of, prospects for and limitations of particular forms of regional security cooperation; but they use a language that is rare today in the actual public discourse or decision making of the regions concerned. They also suffer from being relatively static, revealing little about why regional groups change their membership or agenda and why they may mutate from one form to another.10 Various alternative ways of categorizing regional structures could be mooted, for example in terms of their institutional or governance characteristics (i.e., their degree of institutionalization, the nature of any fixed decision-making procedures, their collective organs and funds, the depth of involvement of non-state and local actors, and so on). This would not, however, directly lead to judgements on security utility since experience shows that different institutional forms can be appropriate for different types of security task in different environments. For instance, when several security institutions exist in the same region, this could be because states prefer to address various aspects of security in a variety of procedural styles. The most straightforward way to approach a new understanding of regional groups is through the functions they perform in terms of security as such.
8 See chapter 16 in this volume. 9 Deutsch, K. W. et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Greenwood Press: New York, N.Y., 1969), p. 5. 10 On institutional change and ‘drift’ see the Introduction to this volume.
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IV. New patterns of regional security cooperation
This section examines the emerging patterns and functions of regional security cooperation as they have evolved since the 1990s. It proposes a four-way (but not exhaustive) generic framework for understanding contemporary regional security cooperation: security dialogue and conflict management, new forms of military cooperation, democracy and human rights, and economic integration and the wider non-military security agenda. Since the section looks for evidence of regional contributions wherever they can be found, it may seem to present an over-positive balance, but this has been done consciously in order to offset a more usual analytical tendency (both within and outside the most integrated regions) to see the glass as half empty. It can also be argued that some achievements of regional cooperation are ignored because of the difficulty of proving a negative (e.g., that conflicts would have been worse otherwise).
Security dialogue and conflict management
At the most basic level, regional security institutions serve as frameworks for communication and dialogue among their members. Regular meetings of heads of state or government, ministers and lower-level officials, and the military arguably help to build trust between states, avoid miscommunication, resolve disagreements and develop a sense of common interests and identity. The EU and its predecessors have done much to overcome historic patterns of enmity between the countries of Western Europe, especially France and Germany; and founding of MERCOSUR in Latin America in 1991 has had a similar role in reinforcing the rapprochement between Argentina and Brazil that has existed since the 1980s. Analysis of the cause–effect cycle between institutions and changed relationships is, however, disputed and problematic: it may be argued that the conflict resolution is as much a facilitating factor as a consequence of regional cooperation.11
Since the 1990s there have been significant efforts to extend (geographically) the pacifying effect of long-standing regional security frameworks, in particular in Europe and Asia. In Europe, the enlargement of the EU and NATO has been based in significant part on the view that their success in contributing to the emergence of a security community in Western Europe can now be extended to Central and Eastern Europe. The EU and NATO are now seen as doing for Germany and Poland or Hungary and Romania, among others, what they did for Franco-German rapprochement in the 1950s and 1960s (and in avoiding open war between Greece and Turkey). During the 1990s the EU and NATO made accession conditional in effect on candidates’ resolving conflicts with neighbouring states, thus encouraging governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe to conclude treaties reaffirming exist-
11 Haftendorn, H., Keohane, R. O. and Wallander, C. A., Imperfect Unions: Security Institutions over Time and Space (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1999).
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ing borders and guaranteeing ethnic minority rights and to establish new forms of cooperation such as joint peacekeeping forces and cross-border economic zones. Following the 2004 ‘big bang’ enlargements of the EU and NATO, the two institutions now face the perhaps even more difficult challenge of extending their integrative model to the Western Balkans.12 In the 1990s ASEAN followed a somewhat similar enlargement process: between 1995 and 1999 taking in Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam and, controversially, Myanmar. As part of this enlargement process, all four countries signed ASEAN’s 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, which commits signatories to prevent disputes from arising and to renounce the threat or use of force to resolve disagreements.13 Parallel to this, the ASEAN Regional Forum was established in 1994 as a means of promoting dialogue with ASEAN’s neighbours in the wider Asia–Pacific region. Since then the ARF has become an established feature of the region’s international politics.14 Most recently, China signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in 2003—an arguably important achievement for ASEAN and the ARF given unresolved disputes between China and ASEAN members over the South China Sea.15
A number of regional organizations have developed more explicit and formal mechanisms for the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts among their members. Since the end of the cold war, for example, the OSCE has developed semi-permanent missions and the use of special envoys in areas of actual or potential conflict and has used the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities to help prevent and resolve conflicts relating to ethnic minorities. Similarly, the African Union has established new mechanisms for conflict management: the AU Commission includes a Commissioner for Peace and Security, a Peace and Security Directorate (incorporating a Conflict Management Centre) and an Early Warning System, and is supported by a Panel of the Wise (composed of five ‘highly respected African personalities’) tasked to provide advice and support.16 Since it was established in 2002, the AU has engaged in a number of political mediation missions for internal conflicts in member states (in the Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Somalia and Sudan). The OAS has its own Office for the Prevention
12 On recent and future developments in the Western Balkans see appendix 1A in this volume. 13 The text of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia is available at URL
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and Resolution of Conflicts for the design and implementation of conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms.17
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is the most developed example of a regional construct that goes beyond internal peace goals to use collective modes of action externally, designed inter alia to help avoid and manage conflicts beyond the EU’s borders. While the EU has had its well-known failures and setbacks, including those in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia on its own doorstep in the 1990s, the trend has been for a steadily growing ambition, reach and diversity of the CFSP and, since 2000, its military instrument, the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). Other institutions, such as ASEAN and MERCOSUR, include elements of common policies towards their wider regions, an example being ASEAN’s leadership role in the ARF and its dialogue with large neighbours like China. However, none has gone as far as the EU in attempting to develop a wider common foreign and security policy. For the moment, the strongest dynamics in regions other than Europe seem to run either towards the better projection of shared regional interests in world economic and functional negotiations (e.g., talks in the World Trade Organization) or towards fending off unwanted external security influences by gaining better control of the region’s own internal weaknesses.
New forms of military cooperation
Regionally based military cooperation has historically focused on either cooperation driven by and directed against (perceived) external enemies or efforts to contain the risks of such confrontation through regional arms control agreements and military confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs). The best-developed set of CSBMs are those concluded in the frameworks of the OSCE and its predecessor, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), since the 1970s,18 the CFE Treaty, and the nuclear weapon-free zones agreed in various regions of the world. More recently, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have concluded a set of agreements limiting their deployment of military forces in mutual frontier zones.19 Other regional organizations, such as the OAS, have engaged in more limited discussions on arms control, CSBMs and military transparency. Overall, however, regional arms control and CSBMs are far from having been explored to their full potential.20
17 Organization of American States, Department of Democratic and Political Affairs, Office for the Prevention and Resolution of Conflicts, ‘Work plan 2005’, Washington, DC, 2005, URL
18 Lachowski, Z., Confidence- and Security-Building Measures in the New Europe, SIPRI Research Report no. 18 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004).
19 Trofimov, D., ‘Arms control in Central Asia’, A. J. K. Bailes et al., Armament and Disarmament in the Caucasus and Central Asia, SIPRI Policy Paper no. 3 (SIPRI: Stockholm, July 2003), URL
20 See chapter 15 in this volume.