Chapter 1 outlined the major conceptual aspects necessary to the classification of a security community. In building on these considerations, the present chapter develops an understanding of the key processes behind the emergence of a security community. The chapter also seeks to discern how various domestic, material, and ideational factors interrelate with one another and potentially contribute to integration and the formation of a stable peace. Understanding the processes and pathways behind security community formation not only equips the analyst with an ability to foresee many of the obstacles to security community formation, but can also aid the development of an understanding, in later chapters, of the most efficient and effective approach to resolving any possible obstacles to realizing the goal of a security community. The likelihood of ASEAN successfully responding to these obstacles is a separate issue and one that will be addressed in the final chapter of this study (see Chapter 8).

NORMS AND THE COLLECTIVE IDENTITY OF THE STATE — THE CAUSATION BEHIND COOPERATION AND PEACE?

For the purpose of this investigation, the conceptual framework follows the second wave literature on norms with a primary focus on the ability of norms to affect “state behaviour via domestic political processes”. This branch of the literature seeks to ascertain the domestic salience of transnational norms via an examination of “changes in domestic discourses, national institutions, and state policies”. The question of who instigates these “changes” is examined through (and partially answered by) various social theories on structure and agency. Agents are the actors in politics who have the power to exercise and display choice, reflexivity, learning, and transformative capacity. While the central actor has traditionally been seen as the state (see below), recent literature has broadened the concept to include non-state actors such as international organizations, non-governmental organizations, transnational social movements, private economic actors, and epistemic communities (including civil society). Structure, by contrast, is the structured environment under which the agents act. The structure of a society, of a state, of a collectivity of states (for example, ASEAN), or of an international order is determined by the examined entity's ascertainable (or diverging) norms and identity (the ideational determinants of structure), together with its material capacities and institutions.