In order to assess the likely challenges that ASEAN will need to overcome to achieve its stated goals, this chapter develops a security community framework in a manner that is relevant to the international relations of Southeast Asia. This framework provides strong and clearly defined benchmarks for assessing the existence of a security community in a manner that clearly explains the primary obstacles to regional community building and helps develop policy-relevant insights concerning how best to overcome such obstacles. Undertaking this approach is important because, while the concept of a security community is a specialist term within scholarly literature, its “definition and usage must be convincing in its own right”. As Laurie Nathan contends, poor usage of the term in some of the recent literature has stripped the concept of any specific meaning. Furthermore, if the key proposition of security community literature can be empirically tested, applied, and accepted as a general theory, then there is the possibility of the concept gaining additional relevance as a policy goal (normative project) by “governments, international organisations, social movements and other relevant bodies throughout the world”. Therefore, while this chapter focuses on what is necessary for a coherent definition of a security community that is relevant to the ASEAN proposal, the next chapter also explains some of the major processes behind the emergence of a security community. Such an approach has the benefit of providing policy-makers, scholars, and students with some wide-ranging insights on the types of strategies to be implemented in the future to support the ASEAN's goals. The conceptual foundations of these two chapters will then be applied and tested in the empirical chapters that follow.

THE ASEAN PROPOSAL AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS

The emergence of a “security community” as a conceptual framework is largely accredited to the work of Karl Deutsch and his associates back in 1957. While some have claimed that this was the first substantive challenge to the realist paradigm, the manner in which Deutsch focused on the avoidance of interstate war implied a more eclectic framework with the opportunity to accept some of the contentions of the realist paradigm. Deutsch asserted that a security community could only exist where there are “dependable expectations of peaceful change”.