If ASEAN didn’t exist, Asia would have to invent it. The organisation’s reinvention as the cornerstone of the multilateral diplomatic and security architecture in our region was an improbable but extremely valuable development that owed much to the foresight of Southeast Asian leaders in the 1990s who saw an opportunity for ASEAN to extend its influence.
The benign strategic and economic environment that marked ASEAN’s emergence as the de facto ‘steering committee’ of East Asian regionalism in the 1990s and 2000s is gone, replaced by a return of great power competition and a declining political commitment among strategically important extra-regional actors to the norms and institutions of globalisation that have been so instrumental in Southeast Asia’s economic development and political stability over the last five decades.
The diminishment of ASEAN’s relevance through attrition is an unacceptable outcome for the majority of the region’s states. There is great value in having the terms of East Asian regionalism set by the small and middle powers of Southeast Asia.
In this week’s lead article, from the new edition of theEast Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘The Centrality of ASEAN’, Rizal Sukma provides a balanced but critical assessment of the organisation that at once defends it from the often ahistorical criticism of its relevance mounted by outsiders, while agreeing with those who say the onus is now on ASEAN to defend and extend its centrality within the Asian multilateral architecture.
Sukma’s essay is one of a number in the new edition of theQuarterly, which elevates the voices of thinkers from Southeast Asia, as well as those beyond, who assess what the value of ASEAN centrality means for the region today and how to defend it in the future.
As Sukma stresses, ‘ASEAN’s main function ‘is — or was — regional reconciliation. Emerging out of the ashes of confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia, ASEAN was primarily meant as a collective effort to prevent conflicts and manage disputes among its original five founding members’, with this remarkably effective effort at security community-building being extended to Myanmar and the recently war-torn states of Indochina in the 1990s.
But while ‘ASEAN was founded as a process of conflict avoidance’ rooted in the lightly formalised, consensus-based mode of cooperation that its governments refer to as the ‘ASEAN way’, Sukma writes that ‘such rhetoric does not mean that ASEAN can evade the demands that it should do more and extend its role beyond Southeast Asia’, as US–China rivalry over dominance in the broader Asia Pacific plays out in Southeast Asia in ways that clash with ASEAN members’ preference for, and interest in, close economic ties with both China and the West.
It is imperative for ASEAN’s relevance going forward that it ‘starts more seriously spending the political capital that it has painstakingly accrued since the 1990s when it staked out a claim to centrality within the regional institutional architecture.’
This will require proactive action from ASEAN, and good faith and generous cooperation from its dialogue partners, to upgrade its institutions and demonstrate the value of ASEAN-based cooperation in building an economic and security order that defends the core interests of the region’s majority.
If the security crises in Myanmar and the South China Sea — not to mention the Taiwan Strait, or broader US–China rivalry — seem too intractable to deal with in the short term, asserting a bigger role for ASEAN in regional, and even global, economic governance through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a no-brainer in cementing ASEAN’s relevance in the decades ahead. As a number of the contributions to theQuarterlymake clear, in RCEP ASEAN has built a platform for cooperation to equalise the yawning development gap between members of the region, set new norms and rules to address emerging transnational policy challenges and articulate a common position in defence of the multilateral trading system on the global stage.
In their piece for theQuarterly, recentlyexcerpted online atEast Asia Forum, Mari Pangestu and Rania Teguh argue that the agreement is a fundamentally ‘political foundation for addressing emerging policy challenges, from digital trade to climate change, through multilateral cooperation’ — but that absent an infusion of political momentum via ASEAN’s leader-level processes, ‘the agreement risks being a locomotive stuck at the station’. In this new edition of theQuarterly, former Indonesian officials who were instrumental in the negotiation and finalisation of the RCEP agreement likewise highlight the risks to RCEP being able to fulfil its potential in this regard.
The upshot is that it falls to Malaysia, as chair of ASEAN in 2025, to supply some of the political leadership that is now required. With Indonesia’s new president having little in the way of multilateralist instincts, and other ASEAN chairs distracted by domestic dramas or extra-regional disputes, Putrajaya in this moment has the unique combination of credibility to get other member states in behind an action plan for ASEAN to more clearly articulate its vision for regional leadership and the ability to start building the institutions to make it real.
- About the author: The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
- Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum