Building security in Asia

Unresolved feuds and outside intervention leave lingering problems that require greater efforts to promote regional cooperation

The two-day Fourth Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia is due to open in Shanghai on Tuesday. It is expected to be a milestone event boosting dialogue, confidence building and interaction among Asian countries and promoting peace, stability and cooperation in a new Asia. President Xi Jinping will chair the summit and deliver a keynote speech elaborating a new Asian security outlook.

Due to interwoven historical feuds and current contradictions, the security in Asia, which stretches across 10 time zones and comprises 46 countries, is very complicated.

West Asia, a converging region of "five seas and three continents", has been plagued by the Palestine-Israel conflict. Terrorism and the unabated India-Pakistan conflict in South Asia have seriously hampered local economic development, while water and transport security pose security concerns in Central Asia. At the same time, the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and the territorial disputes in the East and South China seas are potential powder kegs in East Asia.

With tensions rising over the territorial disputes in the East and South China seas and the escalation of power struggles among the big powers in Central Asia, global security risks have further converged in Asia. Unresolved feuds among regional states, together with the intervention of outside powers, have put Asia in a more precarious position and made it a top priority for Asian countries to take practical measures to promote security cooperation among themselves.

Given the distinct security characteristics among different regions, it has been an arduous task for Asian countries to set up a forum for discussing the security of the whole of Asia. Asian countries first pushed for sub-regional security cooperation and this has achieved huge progress. The different regional associations, forums and alliances that have emerged in East, Southeast and South Asia, as well as among Arab nations, since the end of the Cold War have played an important role in defusing regional conflicts and promoting sub-regional political, economic and security cooperation.

But compared with the rest of the world, Asia still lags far behind in terms of regional cooperation and integration. The European Union has realized a high degree of integration and the euro is now poised to challenge the US dollar. The North America Free Trade Area, which tightly binds the United States, Canada and Mexico, has produced huge security effects. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the Pacific Islands Forum are active and the African Union has also played a crucial role in promoting the continent's political development.

Thus, the fact that Asian cooperation has long been confined to the sub-regional level makes people doubt whether a cooperative mechanism can be set up in Asia that includes all regional members.

However, since the end of the Cold War, Asian countries have never abandoned such an attempt. At the 47th United Nations General Assembly in October 1992, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, proposed that a platform including all regional countries be set up in Asia, to carry out dialogue and consultations on regional security and promote security cooperation, which was the original idea for the building of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia.

Over the past 22 years, the CICA, as it is known, has played a positive role in promoting Asian security through pushing forward cooperation among regional countries. With its membership expanding from the original 16 to 24, the CICA is broadly representative of Asia and serves as an effective platform for Asian countries to enhance mutual understanding and trust.

With the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as its basic norm, the CICA is committed to maintaining peace, stability, and security in Asia and providing different cooperation chances for countries in different regions on varying issues. The purposes and principles of the CICA have increasingly been recognized by Asian countries, and its distinctive manner of cooperation has contributed to the peace and stability of Asia and the world as a whole.

Asian affairs should be determined by Asia itself. As a big Asian country, it is China's mission and responsibility to promote Asian affairs being decided by Asian countries themselves and to push for the construction of a multilateral cooperative platform that covers the whole of Asia. China has extended support to the CICA from the very beginning. The active participation in preparatory work for the CICA from 1992 to 2002 made China one of its founding nations, and the new security outlook expounded by China's leaders at its 2002 and 2006 summit meetings received extensive endorsement from other participating countries.

The complicated security situation decides that Asia needs a widely recognized security concept and consensus to keep its security cooperation from being disturbed by regional hotspot issues and tensions.

The new Asian security outlook should focus on Asian development, given that the security issue in Asia has proved to be more of a development issue. The new security outlook should also focus on win-win results, given that only a win-win result can promote mutual adaptability among regional countries and promote common security. At the same time, it should also aim at creating good expectations for a security environment in Asia, as a driver of Asian development and cooperation.

The author is a researcher with the Institute of World Political Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.