Historical Context of Multilateral Security Cooperation in Asia

For more than two decades, the USSR promoted the idea of multilateral security cooperation in Asia. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, this was referred to as "a Helsinki process for Asia" or a "Conference on Security and Cooperation in Asia" (CSCA) to parallel Europe's CSCE.

Until the end of the 1980s, such an idea was frozen along the lines of the Cold War. East Asian governments dismissed the idea of a CSCA as Cold War propaganda or, at best, an untransferable European concept ill-suited to East Asia.