East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 14, Number 4, 2022

Abstract

Southeast Asia has long understood that effective national security goes well beyond military preparedness to encompass a variety of ‘non-traditional’ security issues. This idea is at the heart of political cooperation within ASEAN and competes with traditional notions of regional security in East Asia. Japan’s sogo anzen hosho (comprehensive security) philosophy has also underpinned its plurilateral pursuit of non-military security objectives since the 1970s. This goal has driven Japan to champion multilateral trade liberalisation and institution-building, and the whole of Asia has been the beneficiary. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly explores the idea of comprehensive regional security—an approach that embraces economic, environmental and energy security as well as military interests, and considers how they are collectively secured within today’s economically interdependent and politically cooperative regional system. The vocabulary developed in the face of growing geopolitical tensions— decoupling, dual circulation, friend-shoring, ‘strategic’ supply chains, securitisation—suggests that the big powers are working towards their own notion of comprehensive security. But there is nothing comprehensive, or regional, about this. Indeed, it subordinates key national interests to a process of geopolitical competition that is, by its nature, a zero-sum game. Securitising the economic arenas which facilitated the mutually-beneficial, cooperatively achieved growth of the past 70 years has unwelcome externalities for the rest of the world—at the expense of economic openness, growth and adaptable supply chains. Contributors in this issue recognise that comprehensive regional security can only be secured collectively: one country’s resilience to climate change, or access to free and well-served markets for energy and food doesn’t come at the expense of others’, for instance. They emphasise the ‘regional’ in comprehensive regional security for good reason. In East Asia multilateralism and international integration have a fighting chance against protectionism and hyper-nationalism. Asia’s homegrown multilateral platforms—including ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, the Asian Regional Forum, the East Asian Summit and now RCEP—offer powerful instruments for integrating the security and economic domains within multilateral rule-making and cooperation. Our Asian Review section suggests one way through the North Korean roadblock and scores political progress on gender equity in Indonesia. Show more