June 6th 2003
THE hoary subject of an Asean security alliance was given its due airing at the just concluded Asia Security Conference. Just as predictably, the conclusions offered up - such as the views of a group headed by Mr Douglas Hurd, a former British foreign secretary - were warmed-over porridge. Mr Hurd's workshop group observed that Asean's differing political priorities and the need for consensus meant that a group-wide mechanism, were it possible to develop one, would be less effective than bilateral or multilateral agreements in meeting a common danger. The threat being addressed was terrorism. But the usefulness of such alliances could just as well extend to monitoring North Korea's nuclear menace and impeding the narcotic trade pouring out of the Golden Triangle. Of the North Korea issue, an Asian ambassador serving here has told this newspaper in private that Asean's silence on a development that would affect member nations' security and growth prospects is unnerving.
Mr Robert O'Neill, former director of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, the conference organiser, weighed in with his group's view that 'bureaucratic inertia' also inhibited Asean. Asean governments, he reported, wanted to retain freedom of action 'according to their own lights'. His panellists included South-east Asian defence ministers and officials, which is nice to note as this means acknowledgement of an institutional weakness. Quite the meanest salvo was fired by the Indonesian commentator Jusuf Wanandi, a frequent contributor in our Comment/Analysis page. He thought 'sensitivities' were a fig-leaf for the lack of political will to act. Those who know the political terrain in these parts would say, hear-hear.
So, is there no chance that an Asean security web could ever emerge? The Asean Regional Forum (ARF) comes closest to the standard construct of a formal mechanism of the sort that has helped to stabilise Europe, say. This is of course a pale comparison. The ARF is a consultation group with a non-geographic membership that also includes North America, the European Union and Russia, not one geared for unified action backed by governmental mandate. It is not politically feasible to transform it into a treaty alliance as its north Asian members (China, Russia, Japan, South and North Korea) are wrapped up in geo-strategic problems of their own, quite different from South-east Asian concerns about terrorism. Governments which despair of a multilateral framework ever developing (the inertia over the Doha trade round is instructive) have given themselves protective margin with bilateral and limited multilateral arrangements. The trilateral pact signed last year between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines to check terrorism and people-smuggling is part of a trend.
But for the 21st century phenomenon of organised terror which is here to stay, South-east Asian governments could actually be blase about the recent history of failed multilateral security linkages. This region was once covered by a security outfit called the South-east Asia Treaty Organisation (Seato), part of an American network to defeat communism during the Cold War period. Seato was established in 1954 after the French withdrew from Indochina. But its main role grew into sanctioning the American military presence in Vietnam, which treaty signatories France and Pakistan opposed. Constrained by its rule of unanimity, Seato gradually slipped into irrelevance and was disbanded in 1977.
