Australia and the Asia-Pacific R. James Ferguson © 2005
Lecture 6:
ASEAN Plus?: The Drivers of Open Regionalism
Topics: -
1. Introduction: Avoiding External Interventions
2. Regionalism Founded on Economic Gains and Perceived Threats
3. The ASEAN Regional Forum: An Asia-Pacific Community or Dialogue Process?
4. Current Challenges for the ARF
5. ASEAN Concord II: Will It Fly?
6. Participatory Regionalism and a More Inclusive ASEAN?
7. Bibliography and Further Resources
1. Introduction: Avoiding External Interventions
One of the main trends in world affairs over the last several decades has been a certain shift towards regionalism. This regionalism may be based on military alliance (e.g. NATO), but more often in the post-1975 period has been based on the priority of economic and stability concerns. Groupings such as the EU, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), APEC and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) all have trade, tariff and economic cooperation agendas. In the current period, with the direct recognition of the significance of economic power and globalisation as drivers of international interactions, this emphasis on regionalism is a logical response to the changing environment and can act as a partial buffer (Kiuk 2005, p109). A partial return to transnational security concerns through 2001-2005 has added another strong motivation for regional cooperation in the 21st century. These trends have emerged gradually in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific, but have not yet created an inclusive strong regime as distinct several looser, overlapping organisations with diverse functions. Somewhat deeper integration in East Asia through 2003-2020 has been signalled as a real possibility by changes in ASEAN and its wider summit processes.
However, Supranationalism, that is, binding interstate relations which greatly reduce the sovereign decision-making powers of individual governments, has only strongly emerged in the European Union over the last two decades, and has not been accepted by great powers in the Asia-Pacific region. In Southeast Asia, regionalism has not travelled down the path of the ‘region state’, nor that of the unified bloc or closed alliance. Instead, each state has retained a high degree of sovereignty, but cooperated closely to create a period of high economic growth and diplomatic initiative in the 1980s and early 1990s. This has been done largely through the creation of a core association, ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN, founded in 1967, included Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, with Brunei joining in 1984, and then Vietnam in 1995. Through 1997 the organisation enlarged with the addition of Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Cambodia, to become the Southeast Asian Ten, an important organisation abutting China in the north, South Asia in the west, and Australia in the south, and straddling crucial trade lanes between the Indian ad Pacific Oceans.
ASEAN Members
(Courtesy ASEANWeb)
Yet ASEAN, in its early phase, was only moderately successful as a trade and tariff organisation, and was not even particularly successful in its anti-communist and regional stability quests. In the 1960s and 1970s this was largely due to the intervention of great foreign powers which were involved in regional wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After the end of the second Vietnam War in 1975, however, ASEAN found that it could once again be much more effective. It did so as Southeast Asian nations found shared vital interests in pursuing economic reform and economic growth, and in excluding or balancing large external powers such as the US, the USSR, and China.
This was done neither by creating strong binding institutional rules, nor by a strongly exclusive policy. Instead, ASEAN developed a consensual model of gradual agreement, dialogue and an expansion of roles, focusing in the 1990s on the idea of open regionalism. This is not done on the basis of any ‘pact alliance’, but within the long held principles of an ‘open multilateral trading system, non-discriminatory liberalisation and open regionalism’ (Tarrant 1996a). Thus, ASEAN did not seek common external barriers or tariffs, nor limited bilateral cooperation with external states. Involvement in the ASEAN process does not lock out other parallel processes, either within other organisations such as APEC, or in further negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation and the agreements of the recent Asia-Europe Meetings (ASEM), nor later bilateral free trade agreements. These different bodies have been brought into existence for different reasons, and operate in rather different ways. From late 2003, however, ASEAN has begun to frame a new phase of integration, called ASEAN Concord II, that through 2003-2020 will shape the region based on an ASEAN Economic Community, and ASEAN Security Community, and ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, with target dates for deeper integration through 2012-2020.
ASEAN in fact has generally skilfully managed its affairs within the heart of several other international organisations, timetabling its initiatives and interests in an effective display of proactive diplomacy. We might ask, then, whether there has been something distinctive about the way ASEAN states have conducted their affairs and foreign policy. There has been much discussion of a new ‘Asian way’, and of the impact of cultural systems (e.g. Confucianism), on current international relations. This model, though poorly quantified, has correlated with a generally more assertive phase of East Asian international politics and international relations over the last two decades. ASEAN has emphasised a distinctive ‘ASEAN way’ is operating diplomatically and in terms of foreign affairs policies, based on voluntary cooperation and the principle of non-interference (see further Dupont 1996). The ASEAN Way in spite of criticism has survived into the 21st century with the following methods of decision making: -
* the search for compromises acceptable to all (musyawarah),
* consensus principle (mufakat),
* private talks (empat mata),
* extensive unofficial exploratory talks with all parties involved before initiatives are formally launched (feeler technique),
* a sense of community spirit (gotong-royong),
* decent and modest behaviour (nobody leads principle), and
* the search for a general agreement, even if there is yet no common understanding concerning the specifics of its realization (agreeing first, details later). (Heler 2005, p128
At present, this ASEAN process has reached out to create a wider Asia-Pacific dialogue, and has intensely engaged other regional states such as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia, and more recently with India. Over the last decade this process has been formalised through the ASEAN-Plus-Three dialogue engaging East Asia, efforts at building free trade areas in the region, as well as via the security dialogues of the ASEAN Regional Forum (see further below).
2. Regionalism Founded on Economic Gains and Perceived Threats
ASEAN was first formed in 1967. At that time, three pressing problems may have helped the formation of the organisation: -
1) There was the awareness of the threat of communism posed by North Vietnam, an active Soviet presence in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, the power of the People’s Republic of China, and by communist insurgences in Malaysia, Thailand, and in the early 1960s the impact of the Communist Party in Indonesia. However, ASEAN was not formally an anti-communist alliance, but rather grew out of the need for regional stability.
2) Indonesia and Malaysia had through the early and md-1960s been engaged in a major confrontation over legitimacy and territorial disputes, and the new organisation helped bring these two countries together in a peaceful context.
3) The region needed peace in order to pursue economic objects of national development.
Furthermore, the ASEAN organisation (unlike the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, SEATO, which was a direct anti-communist alliance created in 1954 on US initiatives, dissolved in 1977), sought to reduce the interference of foreign great powers in so far as this was possible. Palmer and Reckford accurately describe the conditions of ASEAN’s formation: -
So from the historical viewpoint and also because of fortuitous political changes, the nations that formed ASEAN were at last intellectually and conceptually prepared to cooperate with each other. Although each nation was anti-Communist, ASEAN was not conceived to be merely another anti-communist construct. Rather, from the beginning ASEAN was self-consciously inward-looking and “regional” and devoted to individual and regional self-reliance and resilience (Palmer & Reckford 1987, p7)
It was in this context that the purpose of ASEAN in the Bangkok declaration of 8 August, 1967, was to ‘foster regional economic, social, and cultural cooperation and “to promote regional peace and stability”’ (Palmer & Reckford 1987, p5). This meeting was the culmination of a series of meetings between Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian foreign ministers which had begun the year before. The 1967 Bangkok meeting established the following purposes: -
· To accelerate the economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region through joint endeavours in the spirit of equality and partnership in order to strengthen the foundation for a prosperous and peaceful community of Southeast Asian nations;
· To promote regional peace and stability through abiding respect for justice and the rule of law in the relationship among countries of the region and adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter;
· To promote active collaboration and mutual assistance on matters of common interest in the economic, social cultural, technical, scientific, and administrative fields;
· To provide assistance to each other in the form of training and research facilities in the educational, professional, technical, and administrative spheres;
· To collaborate more effectively for the greater utilization of their agriculture and industries, the expansion of their trade, including the study of the problems of international commodity trade, the improvement of their transportation and communication facilities, and the raising of the living standards of their people;
· To promote Southeast Asian studies;
· To maintain close and beneficial cooperation with existing international and regional organizations with similar aims and purposes and explore all avenues for even closer cooperation among themselves. (Palmer & Reckford 1987, pp7-8)
The main institution to bring about this progress were annual meetings (ASEAN Ministerial Meetings), the creation of a standing committee in the host country where meetings are held, and the creation of a national secretariat in each member country (Palmer & Reckford 1987, pp8-9). This was followed by regular foreign ministerial meetings, as well as by special Post-Ministerial meetings. After this, special Dialogue relationships were set up with other countries, focusing on trading partners, as ‘external relations’, including ‘Australia, Japan, New Zealand . . . in 1976; the United States (US) in 1977; the European Union (EU) in 1980; Canada in 1981 and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1991’ (ASEAN Secretariat 1996a). These would form the basis of later, more comprehensive dialogues in the ASEAN Regional Forum (see below).
The second ASEAN meeting in Jakarta (August 1968) identified five priority areas for cooperation: ‘food production, communication, civil aviation, shipping, and tourism’, with permanent committees being set up in 1969 for ‘trade and tourism; industry, energy, and minerals; food, agriculture, and forestry; transportation and communication; finance and banking; science and technology; mass media and socio-cultural activities’ (Palmer & Reckford 1987, p9). This mood of cooperation was also increased by good personal relations between many of the ministers and politicians involved, including Thanat Khoman, Adam Malik, and Tun Abdul Razak (Palmer & Reckford 1987, p10).
However, at the regional level there were considerable areas of overlap in the separate national economies, both in agriculture and manufacturing, and most exports went outside of the region, to Europe, the US, and north-east Asia. Furthermore, there were considerable gaps in fiscal and economic development, e.g. between Singapore and Indonesia in the 1970s and even in the 1980s. Thus, in the 1980s only 18% of trade was intra-ASEAN, and ‘with the exception of Singapore, all the members export the same raw materials, largely agricultural, produced in tropical or semitropical climates’ (McIntosh 1987, p31). Through the 1990s some greater complementarity began to emerge, e.g. Singapore and Malaysia emerging as major service centres regionally, while greater flows of trade developed with North-east Asia and particularly China.
Efforts to create an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA, announced in the Singapore Summit of 1992) were designed to make the entire region more competitive globally. The aim was for ASEAN states to gradually reduce their tariffs, from 1993, down to 5% by the year 2007 (later revised to earlier dates). The benefit of this is that the regional timetable will be ahead of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group) voluntary deadlines of 2010 for developed nations, 2020 for developing countries. The AFTA agreement, then, was designed to help cushion the blow of wider drops in tariffs, and also allow the AFTA nations to work these agendas into the wider, global agreements of the World Trade Organisation agreements (WTO). This timetable was brought forward to allow an agreement for 0-5% tariffs by the 2003. By the year 2010, it is expected that an ASEAN Investment Area (AIA) would also have been established, along with the further development of the AFAS (ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services).
Singapore: Ancient and Modern in the Heart of ASEAN
Ó R. James Ferguson 1998
As ASEAN expanded (geographically and in terms of processes), serious debates emerged about its direction and functioning. In the July 1998 meeting of ASEAN in Manila, the problems of governance in Myanmar and Cambodia caused a review of the principle of non-interference, a central doctrine of the organisation. Surin Pitsuwan, then Thailand’s foreign minister, suggested that the concept of strict non-interference might be altered into a concept of ‘flexible engagement’, a view also supported by the Philippines. This led to fierce debate and opposition by most other countries, and even the watered-down version, ‘enhanced interaction’ was difficult for the organisation to fully adopt (Economist 1998). However, it is clear that some countries in the region recognise that the ten nations have to pull together economically, and that some commitment to a minimum code of shared behaviour would not only enhance regional political stability, but also raise the prestige of the organisation globally.