At the official level, the creation of the ASEAN Regional Forum started with the call of the ASEAN Summit for ASEAN to use the Post-ministerial Conferences (PMC) to “intensify its external dialogues in political and security matters”. The ASEAN Dialogue system, of which the PMC is the centrepiece, had originally been intended to link ASEAN with the leading developed countries for economic purposes — to expand the access of ASEAN products to the markets of the developed economies, attract investments from the developed countries, and seek development assistance from them. Although the Dialogues had not shied away from the discussion of political and security issues in the past, using the PMC to “intensify” such discussions, particularly with respect to the Asia-Pacific, would affirm the altered nature and purpose of the Dialogue system.

As preparations got underway for carrying out the ASEAN leaders’ mandate, it became clear to ASEAN's officials and those of its Dialogue Partners that discussion of regional political and security matters would not be effective without the participation of China, Russia or Vietnam, none of which was at that time an ASEAN member or Dialogue Partner. Without them, a forum on regional security would not be useful in the regionalsecurity environment that had developed after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, economic reforms in the centrally planned economies, the rise of Chinese power, and the settlement of the Cambodian problem. So, it was quickly decided to bring in ASEAN's “consultative partners” — China and Russia — and observers — at that time, Laos, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. Indeed, even before the May 1993 ASEAN PMC Senior Officials Meeting in Singapore, proposals had already been floated about the desirability of their participation in a new Asia-Pacific security forum. Barbara McDougall, Canada's Secretary of State for External Affairs, was quoted after the July 1991 ASEAN Post-ministerial Conferences as expressing the hope that China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia could join the proposed regional security consultations “at an appropriate time”.

The new forum, the ASEAN Regional Forum, would thus include ASEAN's members, Dialogue Partners, observers and consultative partners. Having been, as initially conceived, based on ASEAN's Dialogue system, the ARF had among its original number the European Community (to expand later into the European Union), the only non-state participant in the ARF.