Multilateralism And Northeast Asian Security Cooperation

The practice of multilateralism has a long history, but not until 1970s had multilateralism come into people's perspective, and after the end of the cold war multilateralism gradually get full development. Multilateralism has laid much emphasis on the use of system to coordinate the international affairs among the members adhering to the common principles. Those practices strengthened mutual trust, mutual benefit, mitigated the negative part of anarchy in the world. Multilateralism since its birth has got great achievements, esp. in the fields of security. e.g. The United Nations since its inception has made significant contributions to regulating regional conflicts, safeguarding world peace. In the regional level, multilateralism security system also got tremendous development, e.g. NATO, ARF, CSCE. But the establishment of multilateralism security system requires certain conditions, not any region with any conditions can have effective, sustainable multilateral security cooperation mechanism.Several major powers and recently emerging countries amass in Northeast Asia. There are enormous gaps among the states in ideology, regime and development level. Although the hostility between the two blocs, after the end of the cold war, began to ease, there're no fundamental changes in the regional security structure and the peace in the area is still maintained by the bipolar alliances established during the cold war. The development of regional multilateral security cooperation is still being inhibited and enormous emergent events arise endlessly.This paper analyzed the development and changes of multilateralism theory, reviewed the development of regional security structure in Northeast Asia, gave points to the process of existing multilateral security system and predicted its prospect in the future.