Second is the fact that one country--China--physically dominates East Asia. Leaving Russia aside, China is some 70 percent of East Asia. Roughly the same percentage of the East Asian population (including Russia in this case) lives in mainland China. China, or Chinese-occupied land, is within seven hundred kilometers of every East Asian state except Singapore. China has territorial disputes with every East Asian country except a few ASEAN ones. In short, China looms very large in its home region. In itself, of course, this is not uniquely distinctive, nor does it announce its own political or moral consequences; after all, by many of the sorts of raw measures used above, the United States dominates its region no less than China dominates East Asia.

East Asia also has a remarkable record, even more pronounced than Europe's, of having been responsible for its own political and economic life. While European internal life was influenced for centuries by the Islamic challenge, and in this century much changed as the result of American influence, East Asia has lived a more hermetic life. It had only sporadic contact with Europe before the coming of European imperialism in strength in the late eighteenth century, and until then the pattern of its internal and external affairs was set by the interactions of local units. Then, for two centuries, East Asia, along with most of the rest of the world, was dominated first by Europeans, then by the superpowers. But the abrupt collapse of Western empires and then the lifting of the Cold War overlay revealed what were mostly historically recognizable states. Consider the contrast with Africa or even North America, where indigenous patterns of domestic and inter-group relations (there were few, if any, states) were smashed beyond recognition by European imperialism.

Nonetheless, East Asia is at a crucial moment in shaping its international affairs. On the one hand, most of the region's states have deep historic roots and therefore seem "natural" both to their people and to other states alike. But on the other hand, these states are undergoing serious strains of modernization, and are in many respects weak both with respect to the cohesiveness of their civil societies and to their capacity to project either force or diplomatic constancy in their foreign relations. Faced with such a great gap between potential and actual state power, it is perhaps not surprising that many Asian elites seek ways to bolster their position and sense of place in the world. The result, again much as happened in Victorian Europe, is an attempt to invent tradition and, often enough, to make exaggerated claims about national character and values.

What is Not East Asian Security

Whether based on culture, geography, or something else, there is much that East Asians claim to be distinctive about their regional security that is clearly nothing of the sort. There is little distinctive tradition of thinking about military affairs and consequently no intellectually unique Asian literature on security policy. When it comes to the use of force, Asians, like everyone else, act according to the perceived needs of national interest and are constrained by the countervailing powers at home and abroad. Only when we discuss more nebulous ideas, such as "conflict resolution", do Asians begin to make any kind of case for having unique practices derived from their culture.

It is a mantra spoken by most people at meetings of the inter-governmental ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), or the non-governmental Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, that security in East Asia is special because it is "comprehensive" or "cooperative." Japanese officials were among the first to articulate what they meant by "comprehensive" security, which seemed to be no more than that the term should cover economic well-being and social stability, as well as military power. But in fact, there is little agreement about what "comprehensive" or "cooperative" security really mean, let alone how they could or should be applied in the real world.

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) demonstrated--if indeed demonstration was necessary--that all good arms control is comprehensive in the above sense: that it involves efforts in the economic and social spheres, as well as more orthodox military and political measures. In fact, the Europeans and Americans went so far in their desire to think comprehensively, and to be culturally correct, that they made some errors that seem downright silly after the end of the Cold War. For example, in the early 1980s there was much talk about why the Soviet "defense culture" made certain forms of arms control difficult if not impossible. Some explained the Soviet reluctance to make deep cuts in land-based ICBMs as the consequence of a cultural attachment to the earth of Mother Russia and thus distrust of a sea-based security system. But, as we now know, the Soviet Union could readily agree to cuts in land-based ICBMs when it was in its interest to do so less than a decade later.

Indeed, the CSCE experience suggests that comprehensive security is, if anything, a European concept. The three baskets of CSCE security, after all, were designed to build economic security, as well as the necessary civil society through human rights, without which it was thought that narrower military security was likely to be fleeting. It may be insensitive to point it out, but the fact is that it has been Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders who have spoken most vociferously in Asia-Pacific discussions about the virtues of comprehensive, common, and cooperative security. Clearly, this is partly because their societies have long been an integral part of the Western security community. It is also worth noting that, some Japanese writing excepted, Europeans were among the first to write about the value of comprehensive attitudes to Asia-Pacific security.

East Asians tend to argue that the CSCE was a distinctly European, culture-based process, and that non-Europeans cannot undertake CSCE-type arms control. But such an argument is harder to sustain now that the Middle East peace process has made progress in achieving at least some formal security agreements. Though they are hardly well developed at this point, even Arabs and Israelis have developed more innovative measures for security and arms control than Asians have managed in nearly a decade of toying with the subject. The Middle East peace process has developed mechanisms based explicitly on the CSCE experience. Exchanges about defense doctrine, mutual visits, and now even joint naval maneuvers have taken place in the context of the multilateral track of that process.

It is as sensible for security actually to be comprehensive and cooperative in Asia--as in the Middle East or Europe--as opposed to merely being talked about in such fashion. The difference is that in Europe and, to a much lesser degree in the Middle East, real steps have been taken to achieving such security, while East Asians--their billowy rhetoric aside--mostly prefer individual national efforts or particular bilateral ones. Where they have taken part in multilateral efforts, for example in United Nations operations in Cambodia or further afield, there is no evidence that East Asians behave differently in important ways from other states with similar levels of development. One cannot help but wonder if the reason for the unilateral or bilateral approach in East Asia has less to do with the search for an appropriately devised and culturally sensitive mechanism, and more to do with specific national priorities and differences of opinion about how to handle the major challenge to regional security: China. That is to say, East Asians may simply be suffering from a lack of will, or, to put it more generously, from a prudent desire to avoid a problem that is too big for them to tackle.

To the extent that there has been anything vaguely akin to arms control in East Asia, it has been informal. Troops have been reduced along the Sino-Russian frontier, and on the border between China and Vietnam. In all significant cases, what passes for arms control has not been negotiated but has rather been the result of an improvement in the broader relationship between the states concerned. Only in the last few years have China and Russia agreed on formal provisions for verification or regular military confidence-building measures.

Recent academic literature places much weight on cultural factors in explaining this pattern of Asian security behavior. Prominent among the explanations is the argument that there is a relative absence of resort to legal settlement of disputes in East Asian cultures generally because informal mechanisms are preferred--and that this inclination has spilled over to interstate dealings. While there is perhaps an element of truth to this, one wonders how much of the story it covers.

Just as important an explanation may be that formal arms control, with its complex legal formulae, is hard to achieve even when there are only two sides to the dispute, but virtually impossible when security involves many more than two antagonists. Leaving aside for the moment Gaullist pretensions, the Cold War in Europe was more or less two-sided and hence some progress was made in reaching formal accords. When the Cold War ended, it was instructive that the CSCE (and its acronymic successor, the OSCE) found it far more difficult to handle the more complex reality that emerged--witness Bosnia and the conflict in the Caucasus, to take only the two most obvious examples. Thus prospects for formal arms control may be more a function of the nature of the problem to be confronted than of the culture of the actors.