Regional Military-Security Cooperation in the Third World: A Conceptual Analysis of the Relevance and Limitations of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)

In the Third World, regional military-security cooperation has evolved through three frameworks. The advent of the Cold War saw the emergence of two competing frameworks, one of which may be termed ‘autonomous’ and the other, ‘hegemonic’. A review of these frameworks and their practical manifestations points to some important lessons concerning the limitations of regional military-security cooperation in the Third World. By using these lessons as a conceptual framework, the paper analyses the role of ASEAN, which the paper finds as a third framework in the evolutionary adaptation of regional military-security cooperation in the Third World. Within this framework, the four main criteria of evaluation applied to ASEAN are: (1) ASEAN's role in intra-member conflict resolution, (2) the structure of military-security cooperation within ASEAN, (3) the types of military-security cooperation undertaken by the ASEAN members, and (4) the conflict between ASEAN's professed aspirations for regional autonomy versus the need felt by its members for great power security guarantees. On the basis of such an evaluation, the paper establishes the major features and limitations of ASEAN and examines whether these are similar to some other contemporary subregional groupings in the Third World groupings.