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Members of the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) agreed to disband this 'economic arm of NATO' as of March 1994. Despite the demise of COCOM, member states agreed to continue applying their existing export control policies and, in December 1995, replaced COCOM with the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. Such actions are in contrast to conventional views about a likely decline in co-operation among COCOM members with the end of the Soviet threat. After providing a brief history of COCOM operations, we derive six categories of multilateral co-operative behaviours and assess evidence for COCOM in each category for two five-year periods, 1985-89 and 1990-94. We find that multilateral co-operation in this security institution not only increased in most categories in the last years of the Cold War, but increased in every category after 1989. We then review the possible explanations for the increase in co-operation, and find that the emergence of a liberal community identity among COCOM members explains this outcome better than more conventional theoretical approaches.So soon, however, as ultimate victory seems assured, the consciousness of separate interests tends to overshadow the sense of common purpose … And the jealousies, rivalries and suspicions which in any protracted war arise between partners to an Alliance generate poisons which war-wearied arteries are too inelastic to eliminate.Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna 1 After more than forty years service as the Western economic bulwark against Soviet communism, the member states of the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) agreed to disband the arrangement with effect from 31 March 1994. 2 The member states of COCOM failed to agree on the creation of a new mechanism to co-ordinate their respective export control policies by this self-imposed deadline. The same officials, however, continued