India's Foreign Policy

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INDIA AND EAST ASIAN MULTILATERALISM

G.V.C. Naidu

Regional multilateralism in East Asia is primarily a post-Cold War phenomenon though the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) had been around since the late 1960s as a sub-regional organization. ASEAN’s salience grew not so much because of the economic cooperation it sought to promote but the political role it played, especially since the outbreak of the Cambodian issue in the late 1970s. However, ASEAN became the rallying point of East Asian regional multilateralism that started taking shape as part of an effort to search for viable alternatives to deal with post-Cold War political uncertainties on the one hand, and on the issue of how best to take advantage of buoyant economic ...