Changing security cultures in Europe and Southeast Asia: Implications for inter-regionalism

Abstract

Recent development in Southeast Asia demonstrates a slowly but steadily changing security culture from, first, an informal, consensus-based and often hidden way of managing security to a more open and explicit discourse and, second, from a statist realist definition of security as hard or military security to a broader, liberal understanding that covers the whole spectrum of human, economic and environmental security. This security culture in the making also touches upon formerly tabooed issues such as sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. The paper argues that the new approach has removed obstacles in relations between Europe and East Asia and contributed to the emergence of security as a cornerstone of the co-operation agenda since 1998. At the same time, however, a rapid translation of the inter-regional discourse on security into a working programme or even specific policies is hindered by the prevalence of diverging views on the nature, scope and degree of institutionalisation in Europe-East Asia relations.