Over the ensuing two decades, the hesitancy about multilateralism gradually eroded and we now have a rather rich menu of processes, principally, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Plus Three, the East Asia Summit (also ASEAN-led), together with more geographically specialised bodies like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Six Party Talks.

Still, it would be fair to say that there is an awareness that there has not been a commensurate development in the productivity and effectiveness of these processes. The number of processes has proliferated but the net outcome sometimes seems to be less than the sum of the component parts. The region, it would seem, has danced around the question of creating processes with the clear purpose and the weight of authority to actually require states to do something more than or different from their unilateral preferences to accomplish larger collective outcomes. As the Obama administration’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, Dr Kurt Campbell, put it in his confirmation hearings, multilateral processes in East Asia remain ‘very shallow’. Campbell went on to suggest that the United States would endeavour to harness the continuing interest in finding the right formula and try to direct it in ‘appropriate ways’.

If we could start over, if we can imagine we knew in 1989 what we now know, how might we have proceeded? A plausible answer would be that the skeleton or backbone of the multilateral dimension, to the set of tools for the management of regional affairs, would comprise three interdependent processes:

(1) A leaders’ forum to address all the global and regional issues of common interest and concern;

(2) A forum headed by Foreign and Defence ministers to address the security and defence agenda; and

(3) A forum headed by Trade and Finance ministers to address the economic and trade agenda.

As earlier contributions (including my own) to this dialogue suggest, the first process is a key part of Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal. Hadi Soesastro’s most recent post also picks up this theme as well as canvassing some interesting practical options to take matters forward.

One would not hold one’s breath while the existing processes are rationalised to accommodate such a vision. States are extraordinarily possessive of the acronyms they are identified with, all the existing processes can point to beneficial outcomes, and, as must obviously be acknowledged, not all states in the region are discontent with the present arrangements. Still, it may be useful to bear such a skeleton in mind as an architecture to be approximated (or simulated) if opportunities arise or can be created to adapt the existing processes.

Ron Huisken, Strategic and Defense Studies Centre, ANU