05 July 2010 : The Diplomat
The Diplomat speaks with IISS-Asia head Tim Huxley about ASEAN’s successes, failures and prospects for a regional community by 2015.
ASEAN member nations have pledged closer integration, including forming an ASEAN trade community by 2015. How likely would you say they are to achieve this?
I think the problem with ASEAN is that for all its strength in some areas–and it has made some progress in terms of economic integration–that it’s still a grouping of states that have very diverse political systems, ranging from fairly successful experimentation with democracy in Indonesia’s case, through to a military authoritarian state in the case of Burma (Myanmar) or socialist authoritarian states in the case of Vietnam or Laos and absolute monarchy in the case of Brunei. So it spans the whole spectrum in political terms, and that means it’s actually hard to build co-operation that’s based on really far-reaching, common norms and ways of behaving in political and social policy.
So although ASEAN has set out various types of communities that it wants to establish by 2015, including a political security community and a socio-cultural community and an economic community, I think it’s going to be in the economic sphere that it does rather better and it’s not going to do so well in the other spheres. Given that the target is only six years away, it’s hard to see what sort of political community, in particular, it could establish. I think there are many people who are sceptical about this and there are some within ASEAN who have started to really raise questions in a direct manner about ASEAN’s ability to forge deep co-operation in the social, political and security spheres.
Closer security integration is often seen as lagging closer economic ties. What’s holding back closer security co-operation in ASEAN’s case?
I think the fundamental point is that these states have such diverse political systems that until you have some kind of common norms and values in your domestic social and political systems it makes it very hard to co-operate regionally and internationally in any profound way. You see the world in different ways, and your people are unable to relate from the basis of common understandings about how societies and political systems are organized. That’s the difference between Southeast Asia on the one hand and Europe on the other–in Europe we have that basis and we set certain requirements–fairly strict requirements–for potential members in terms of social and political systems. ASEAN, in contrast, has worked on the basis until now of states in that geographic area, whatever their domestic systems, being allowed in. So it’s a completely different set up.
A related question is that these states, at least in their modern forms, are fairly young in some cases and a number of ASEAN’s members including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos–basically all the members apart from Thailand–are post-colonial societies. And one inheritance from the colonial era has been disputes among them, particularly territorial disputes, which they have yet to work their way through. So the result of these various factors is that there’s considerable suspicion and sometimes animosity between ASEAN states. And I think a worrying thing we’ve seen over the last few years is that the role ASEAN seemed to play in its earlier years as an institution that helped mediate tensions among its members seems to have atrophied–the existence of ASEAN doesn’t seem to have imposed the same sort of restraints on its members behaviour as it did maybe 10, 15 or 20 years ago. So in recent years we’ve seen quite serious border disputes and other tensions between members, for example between Thailand and Burma, between Thailand and Cambodia, between Indonesia and Malaysia and sporadically between Malaysia and Singapore. So ASEAN doesn’t seem to be doing well at one of the key things it was set up to do in the first place.
Why do you think ASEAN is failing in this regard now?
I suppose one important factor is that with the end of the Cold War, the existence of an outside threat on which ASEAN governments could to a greater or lesser extent agree was removed. And where in the past that threat encouraged them to hang together or hang separately, that sense of outside threat, in the form of communism, no longer exists. And they haven’t coalesced around any new external threats. For example, China is not seen generally by ASEAN as an external threat that requires them to band together.
And at the same time there’s been an even further divergence in political terms since the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War allowed some states that were essentially authoritarian, communist states, to be brought in and also a military dictatorship in the form of Burma. So on the one hand you have non-democratic states being brought into ASEAN, while at the other end of the scale you have a process of democratisation taking hold just over a decade ago in Indonesia. So Southeast Asia’s largest–and by many measures most important–state, Indonesia, has become democratic. In fact I think it’s surprised many people the extent to which the democratic experiment has worked in Indonesia. Indonesia in the past was the low-key leader, but now it’s providing a different sort of leadership and actually it’s non-state groups and advocates of democracy and human rights who are prominent in Indonesia and are beginning to influence thinking about its role in the region. But you then have real tensions emerging in ASEAN between on the democratic impulse and the other regimes that wish to hang on to state power and repudiate any democratic impulse on the part of their own citizens.
One of the arguments behind having Burma as part of the club has been that ASEAN membership could help moderate its behaviour. Has ASEAN had any influence at all on this?
If anything I think you could point to that as ASEAN’s signal failure over the last 20 years. In the first place, to admit Burma to membership of ASEAN was perhaps a brave move. But you could also condemn it in retrospect as a rash move in that it brought into the group a regime that was clearly obdurate in the face of Western objections, and which has increasingly become subject to Western sanctions and increasingly become an embarrassment to ASEAN. ASEAN does not seem to have been able to influence the thinking of the regime to any significant effect. At the moment, of course, there’s a political process in Burma which is leading to elections next year. However, I don’t think there is any expectation that this is any more than a gesture to those that oppose the regime, both domestically and regionally. I don’t think many analysts really expect this to lead to democracy in Burma, except in the very long term.
In East Asia the US is seen by allies such as Japan and South Korea as a useful counterweight to China. You’ve said that broadly speaking, ASEAN doesn’t view China as a threat. How does it view the US in general?
It depends on the government in question. The United States does have two formal allies in Southeast Asia, Thailand and the Philippines who are treaty partners, but it also has an important security partner in Singapore, which is an ally in all but name. And also there are other states in the region that have various degrees of security relations with the United States, including Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Cambodia–they all conduct military exercises and exchanges with the United States. I think the point about their attitude to the United States is that virtually all Southeast Asian states see the United States as a useful regional balancer and that they would be alarmed if the United States were to cease its regional security role, which isn’t in prospect anyway. But by and large they all want to encourage the United States to stay involved in regional security. The region would look much more complicated from their point of view if the United States wasn’t there, and they would feel much more exposed to China’s power as she expands economically and becomes more confident diplomatically, and even militarily and strategically. So I think it’s really in most countries’ interests that the United States stays involved.
Tim Huxley is Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Asia in Singapore.
