When, in January 1995, China seized territory from the Philippines in the South China Sea, the states of East and Southeast Asia conspicuously balked at meeting the challenge that this peremptory action posed. Despite the fact that it happened in a strategically sensitive area (a natural bottleneck between the Pacific and Indian Oceans) and that there are multiple competing regional claims to territory in that sea, there was no vigorous and determined response, no firm condemnation uttered by any of the region's leaders.

Predictably, Asian spokesmen and many non-Asian analysts alike sought to explain--and justify--this pale response as being somehow culturally determined. And, in these terms, the episode has significance beyond itself. For as their economies continue to achieve rapid growth and as their weight in the world increases, East Asians insist that they have found a new, distinctive--and by implication superior--Asian way of coping with global political and social issues, including those arising from security concerns.

Westerners who take an interest in such matters have become familiar with the kind of argument involved: "Sorry, we cannot possibly agree to such formal arms control [or whatever] as is preferred in the West; it is not the way we Asians handle security." In particular, they claim to be unique in seeing security as "comprehensive", as involving much more than mere military measures. And in general, they claim that their approach represents distinctive civilizational values and modes of behavior that set them apart from the rest of the world--and, particularly, from the cruder and blunter West.

What is one to make of such claims? Might they be true? If not, what is their origin, and what do they tell us about Asian anxieties and hopes?

It is true that many current political and economic practices in East Asia are distinctive. But to explain them in terms of some supposed cultural essence is, I shall argue, superficial, unconvincing, and--in the not-so-long run--dangerous. Much of what is claimed to be distinctive by dint of culture is not. Moreover, even if it is different, it is foolish for Asians or anyone else to presume that what is distinctive is, simply by virtue of that fact, superior and destined to succeed.

What is "Asia"?

There is one basic reason why Asian culture or civilization cannot tell us much about Asian security: Because, except in the simple geographical sense, there is little that can be identified convincingly as "Asian"--that is, something that is both common to all or most of the countries and societies of that region and different from what prevails outside the region (and particularly in the West). Metternich once famously described pre-unification Italy as little more than "a geographical expression." Despite many claims to the contrary, it is difficult to see why the same may not be said of contemporary Asia.

The area covered by the term is immense and the diversity within that area is great. The distance from, say, Tokyo to Jakarta is greater than that between London and Lagos or New York and Lima. London is closer to Beijing than is Sydney. When security is the subject under discussion, it is particularly relevant to keep such distances in mind.

Within this vast area there is little to support the assumption of cultural or civilizational unity and continuity. On the contrary, what one finds are great diversity and rapid change. Several of the world's great religions--Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism, each one representing a distinctive ethical and metaphysical position--coexist there. The historical experience and social patterns of Asian states vary enormously, and there have been few if any of the great common experiences--the dominance of one religion, a unity of the sort imposed by Rome, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment--that mark the history of the West.

While the region as a whole has been experiencing very rapid economic development and modernization during recent decades, the rate at which the process has impacted on various parts of the region--and even on various parts of individual states like China and Indonesia--has varied widely. It is also true that what it has impacted upon has been very different from case to case. In his recent book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, for example, Francis Fukuyama is concerned to emphasize the relevance of culture to economic performance. But in the process of doing so in the case of Asia, what he stresses are not the similarities between key aspects of Chinese and Japanese culture, but the differences. He even maintains that in some crucial respects the latter is closer to the United States than it is to Confucian society.

It would appear from all this that the cultural unity of "Asia"--the claim that this huge conglomeration of states and societies shares common values, outlooks, and modes of behavior--is largely a myth. But myths, of course, serve purposes and can create new realities. In the case of the elites of Asian countries, the most important purpose of the myth of "Asia" seems to be to facilitate the handling of two problems: their relationship to the West and their adaptation to modernity--two different but related tasks.

The nearest thing to a common historical-cultural experience that the countries of Asia have gone through has been the profound impact on them of the West, whether in the form of the outright colonization experienced by most of Southeast Asia, the division into spheres of influence experienced by China, or the controlled and selective adoption of Western technique and institutions engaged in by Japan. The very term "Asia" was imported from the West, and it was in Western eyes and minds that the region first existed as a single entity. It was from Western intellectuals and in reaction to Western power that Asians first learned to speak of "Asian unity" and "Asian opinion" and "the rise of Asia." It was also from the West that Asians acquired the concepts of nationalism, democracy, and liberty that they subsequently deployed to repudiate Western domination.

As the processes of economic development and modernization have gathered impressive momentum in the last decades of the century, the insistence on Asian authenticity and uniqueness has served another purpose: to provide some sense of stability, continuity, and reassurance in societies that are changing at a bewildering rate. In this sense, the myth may be taken as representing what Albert Camus once described as "the cry of men in the face of their destiny." The supposed "Asian" virtues of thrift, family values, and the work ethic are, after all, little different from what the Western world used to call "Victorian" values. Like the Victorians before them, East Asians are discovering that with modernization come, eventually, changes in values and habits once thought to be immutable; and like the Victorians they have therefore found it necessary to emphasize, laud, and idealize what they had previously taken for granted, but which they now realize is under threat.

The irony of Asian elites engaged in such defensivist assertions is underlined by the fact that they recite their litany of praise for things Asian while wearing clothes designed in nineteenth-century Europe and speaking the language of Anglo-Saxon tribes; that they write their articles and send their faxes about Asian cultural virtues in cities dominated by glass stump buildings, only occasionally topped by perfunctory pavilion roofs; that they discuss their uniqueness and unity while sipping a Glenfiddich or a French cognac, or while playing a game with a small, dimpled white ball, invented in the fog-bound dunes of the northeast Atlantic.

What is East Asian Security?

While it is relatively easy to debunk the notion of a unified and enduring Asian or East Asian culture, that does not mean that there are no distinctive features of East Asian security. As Fernand Braudel has demonstrated, while culture can change fairly rapidly, there are basic determinants of what he calls civilization that change only very slowly if at all. In such deeper structural aspects of East Asian conditions we may well discover something that is distinctive about East Asian security.

While geographic features may, in themselves, be as close to immutable as anything can be in international politics, their strategic significance can change rapidly because of technological innovation: railroads in the nineteenth century, aircraft and missiles in the twentieth century. Their strategic significance may also change as the dynamics of great power politics alter--and, as recent history testifies, this can happen with dramatic speed. For much of the Cold War, great historians and clever contemporary strategic analysts alike saw the geography of East Asian security as being primarily dominated by the continental contest between Russia and China. But as the Cold War faded in East Asia, other basic geographic features have reasserted their importance.

First is the obvious fact that much of what we call East Asia is not far from the Pacific Ocean. Just as it is sometimes useful to think of Russia as essentially a continental power, so it is useful to think of East Asia as concerned with maritime issues. Territorial disputes are likely to be primarily about islands and resources below the sea. Military concerns will probably hold out a large role for naval and air power, and relatively less for land forces.

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.

Where formal, legal agreements are harder to achieve, even in Europe, people have tried to build security through more informal mechanisms intended to create greater openness and transparency. This is evolving as a hopeful feature in arms control in the Middle East and is one of the few areas of success for the CSCE. The essential argument for openness is that it avoids the necessity of identifying adversaries formally and makes it easier to solve problems of loss of face, because states are required to make concessions to common sense rather than to sworn adversaries. The claimed value of openness is said to be that the more all sides know about the military planning of others, the less paranoia is likely to get the better of them. The logic seems impeccable.

And yet East Asians have even found this minimal form of security building to be enormously difficult. As a result, East Asia's level of international society, at least as manifest in the extent of its formal security accords, is less developed than anywhere in the world, bar only Africa. To take a striking example, while East Asia has some of the most prosperous, literate, and sophisticated societies in the world, the region's governments cannot bring themselves to publish basic data on defense doctrine and military spending.

Various explanations have been offered for this seemingly odd behavior. It has been suggested that East Asians do not need formal transparency because they have informal ways of reducing risks. The ASEAN Regional Forum and other regional dialogues concerning the South China Sea have been held out as examples of how the informal system works. But when the arrangements are tested, as they were in the case of China's seizure of Mischief Reef from the Philippines in January 1995, few of the informal mechanisms seemed to operate. Or did they?

Living With China

What happened in January-February 1995 illuminates how security thinking really operates in the region. China had agreed with ASEAN in 1992 that it would not change the status quo in the South China Sea, and so it was clever enough to seize territory where it only had to use force against fishermen. Precisely because there was no mechanism to ensure transparency (e.g., regular surveillance of disputed territory), China was able to create new facts on the ground (when it is above the tides) without a formal challenge or any military response from the Philippines. When the Philippine government eventually discovered the violation of its territory, it faced the difficult task of compelling a Chinese withdrawal rather than simply deterring action. Not surprisingly for such a weak country, the Philippines chose not to mount such a physical challenge. Neither did the Philippines formally request that either its ASEAN allies or the United States come to its support. The result was that no leader in the region (including the normally outspoken Australian Foreign Minister, who was touring the region at the time) chose to speak out against the Chinese action.

It is true that this sort of behavior did keep the peace, but it was the peace of appeasement. It was easy to demonstrate that East Asians could avoid war through informal means, but then so could Neville Chamberlain. The very informality and lack of openness in the policies of the states of the region was critical in ensuring that nothing was done to meet the Chinese challenge. Had there been greater transparency, these states might have been confronted with tough choices. In the event, they were able to pretend that none existed.

The mischief on the reef in 1995 suggests that there is a deeper explanation for the absence of even minimal measures of transparency in East Asian arms control. It seems more likely that all states in the region recognize that they face a possibly overwhelming security challenge from China in the coming years. The ASEAN states in particular seem to have calculated that there is nothing much they can do to halt China's acquisition of territory that it claims as its own. They have thus preemptively chosen discretion over valor. They calculate, although it may be a self-fulfilling calculation, that the United States will not protect them from China, and know that they are too weak on their own to confront China. In short, this is a strategy where obfuscation rather than clarity has become a virtue and therefore even minimal formal agreements on security have been avoided.

This explanation should not be seen as excessively cynical, for it operates in other aspects of ASEAN states behavior. For example, there have been more than two decades of ASEAN promises of greater internal free trade, but the percentage of intra-ASEAN trade--something between 20 and 25 percent--has remained stubbornly unchanged. The reality behind the rhetoric is that economic policy, as with security policy, aims to serve narrow national interests. These are all new states, many of them still weak, whose governments still see themselves as active state builders. They recognize that their prosperity depends on the ability to make headway in a competitive world economy, which in turn requires them to pay lip service to the virtues of openness and interdependence. But the reality is that they distrust both virtues and suspect that openness, in particular, is a way for the more developed world to weaken and control them.

Not all East Asians behave as do the ASEAN states. South Korea and Japan take a more robust attitude toward China and both are keener to develop genuinely multilateral security measures. (Seoul and Tokyo have expressed sharp displeasure at China's nuclear tests, and have been very active in pushing for a UN Conventional Arms Register and for transparency measures.) Interestingly, both are more developed states and in many senses have been modernizing for longer than most Southeast Asians. Of course, both South Korea and Japan have some way to go in opening up to the global market economy, but at least in security terms they have seen more virtue in transparency. Could the explanation for the differences between Northeast and Southeast Asia have more to do with levels of development? It is certainly a plausible argument that the more advanced development of democracy in Northeast as opposed to Southeast Asia has something to do with the longer experience with economic modernization and the emergence of a vocal middle class. The larger size and power of Japan and South Korea may also have something to do with their propensity to take a more robust attitude toward China. (This may also help explain why, of all the ASEAN states, Indonesia and Vietnam are by far the most critical of China.)

To be fair, Southeast Asians do face a more objectively difficult security problem than do Northeast Asians. Southeast Asian states are generally smaller and weaker, and, with their ethnic compositions messier and domestic insecurities higher, they have what one may fairly call more complex patterns of worry. Worst of all, they are first in the firing line as China extends control over disputed territory. In the absence of any countervailing power, the Southeast Asians have chosen the realpolitik strategy of pre-emptive kow-tow, formerly known in the European cultural zone as "Finlandization", and now to some political scientists as "bandwagoning."

Security in Asia, Not Asian Security

Of course there are differences in the way states approach security, but these variations are usually better explained by the specific conditions of the region rather than by culture. In other words, the problem has to do with the security of East Asia as a region, not East Asian security.

In the case of East Asia, the most striking feature of the region is the looming power of China and that, more than culture, explains most of the distinctive aspects of contemporary East Asian security problems. But the difficulty of dealing with Chinese power, while understandable, is a bit embarrassing under the circumstances, and thus many East Asians prefer to take cover in cultural explanations for their timidity.

They may also do so because they are emboldened by their economic success to believe that they have found some unique secret of security success. Of equal, but less often stated, explanatory importance is the fact that cultural arguments provide cover for regimes that feel fragile and fear political pluralism. Those who insist that Asian security is culturally defined often fail to grasp the fact that societies, and especially modern societies, are composed of people with multiple identities. Indeed, it is the essence of the evolution of stable societies--in East Asia, as elsewhere--that as they modernize, they also evolve into complex civil societies with tolerance for differences among identities. East Asians, like other new members of the developed world, should seriously consider whether what they are about is not creating something that is a rival to the West, but rather adding new features to the mŽlange that is loosely called "the West", or the modern world. Appeals to simplistic nationalism, or even more simplistic regionalism, are often heard in modernizing societies that are not sure of their place in the world but know at some level at least that their values are rapidly changing. It is the mark of a modern society that, as it develops a well-grounded civil society, it leaves much of this narrow ethno-speak behind. With current rhetoric about East Asian values in mind, one may profitably recall Elena Bonner's eloquent reply to Alya Solzhenitsyn: "Don't give me that Russian people shit! You make breakfast for your own children, not for the whole Russian people!"

If the East Asian search for self-definition was taking place in a secure and unchanging environment, there would be less reason to worry about the sometimes ludicrous notions of a unique and benighted Pacific way. But East Asia is at a crucial moment in defining its prospects for security and stability. By setting off toward intellectual dead ends, many East Asians are avoiding frank discussion of the most distinctive features of regional security--the power of China--and they do so at their peril. One of the many risks in such myopia is that East Asians will wake up one day and find that a risen China defines their future as it did for so much of their past. There will be nothing especially "cultural" about that.