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JN May 1989, the former foreign minister of Malaysia, Abu Hassan lOmar, called on the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to form a Defence Community which would take them to new heights of political and military cooperation.I Though not clearly defined, the concept merits serious attention from anyone interested in ASEAN's past and future. Since its inception, the chief political goal of ASEAN has been to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts in the region. In this respect, ASEAN's concept of regional order has centered on the creation of a Southeast Asian defined in the Deutschian sense as a group of states whose members share dependable expectations of peaceful change in their mutual relations and rule out the use of force as a means of problem solving.2 In contrast, ASEAN states have consistently rejected a military pact. While the Malaysian minister's concept did not call for such a pact, it nonetheless represented a striking departure from the long-standing position of the ASEAN countries in favour of strictly bilateral arrangements in the sphere of military cooperation. As such, the very idea of an ASEAN defence community, implying the need for some form of trilateral or multilateral military arrangement within the grouping, constitutes a markedly different goal than the idea of security community
Amitav Acharya (Tue,) studied this question.