Saturday, 28 February 2009

ASEAN in search of relevance

Asia Times Online

Southeast Asia
Feb 28, 2009

Hard Choices edited by Donald K Emmerson

Reviewed by Michael Vatikiotis

In October 2008, I was sitting on a comfortable couch in the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, waiting to see Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda, when I received a call on my mobile phone from a politician friend in Bangkok.

"Thai and Cambodian troops are firing at each other along the border, what can we do?" There were other calls, including one from Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) secretary general Surin Pitsuwan, who swung into action with appeals for calm, and a flurry of contacts with ministerial colleagues around the region. For one brief moment, it seemed war was imminent.

Tragedy was averted, apart from the two Cambodian soldiers killed and seven Thai troops injured in the border skirmish. Within a matter of hours, local commanders saw sense and pulled back, agreeing to joint patrols of the contested land near the ancient Preah Vihear temple.

Like so many potential regional flashpoints, the instinctive avoidance of conflict, which is deep-rooted in the region's cultural DNA, helped to defuse a potential crisis without the need for high-level diplomacy or mediation. Yet the incident served to remind of two crucial items.

First, the security of Southeast Asia cannot be taken for granted. Even with the greater ease with which ASEAN leaders can and often do contact one another, there remain a host of unresolved and potentially volatile issues of contested sovereignty across the region. Second, there is no formal, high-level mechanism in place for resolving such disputes should they spiral out of control, hence the frantic scattershot of phone calls and ad hoc initiatives that ensue whenever crisis looms.

Southeast Asia is a dynamic region that has managed a dramatic transformation in recent decades from a loosely connected collection of rice-growing, fish-consuming and superstitious communities into a dynamic, creative and relatively prosperous collection of 10 nation states comprising more than half a billion people.

The frustration for many is that they are still only loosely connected. Sovereignty issues run deep in a part of the world where no capital city is more than three hours away from any other by plane. The quest for community, for shared values and a sense of common identity is one that lies at the heart of the contemporary debate of where Southeast Asia may be headed in the 21st century.

Sadly, there is neither intellectual accord nor an institutional framework to help predict with confidence where that destination may be. Is ASEAN, one of the world's more enduring regional organizations, evolving into a community? Or will it remain little more than a confidence-building mechanism that steers clear of initiatives and measures that might infringe on member states' sense of sovereignty?

The debate has intensified as some of the region's political systems, though certainly not all, have become more open and democratic. Academics ask whether a more democratic ASEAN will evolve into a grouping in which universal norms and values of peaceful co-existence, human rights and basic freedoms will be advocated, applied and, more controversially, universally enforced.

Asian specialist and American academic Don Emmerson's skillfully conceived compilation of essays attempts and reasonably succeeds at addressing these issues. The book is aptly titled, for there are hard choices ahead for Southeast Asian governments of all stripes. The volume tackles several critical political issues confronting ASEAN in a refreshing way, involving a lively discussion of the issues by noted experts. It ends with an argument between proponents of radical transformation on the one hand, and more prudent, gradual change of the association on the other.

Emmerson correctly identifies Myanmar as the most contentious challenge to Southeast Asian regionalism. ASEAN's capacity to influence significant political change in Myanmar is most frequently and adversely judged by the international community, which often brands the organization as a powerless talk shop. Yet Emmerson is right to identify ASEAN's groundbreaking role in paving the way for international aid to reach the victims of Cyclone Nargis in May 2008 as a tipping point for the grouping, one in which, as he puts it, "words led to deeds".

But apart from much deserved praise for the individual political skills of Surin, it is hard for any of the book's authors to see more than a minimal shift in ASEAN's bedrock principal of respect for sovereignty and non-interference in member states' internal affairs. "Southeast Asian regionalism in the evangelical service of liberal democracy," Emmerson argues, is "political science fiction".

Yet, even the small amount of liberal space created by the advance of political openness leaves significant room for change, as many of the authors suggest. The ASEAN charter is regarded as a vehicle for adapting rather than completely changing the twin ASEAN traditions of consultation and consensus.

Indonesian analyst Rizal Sukma argues that the long-held ASEAN principle of non-intervention "should be balanced with the fact of interdependence". Expatriate Burmese academic Kyaw Yin Hlaing suggests that a great deal more could be done for Myanmar in the practical mould of basic capacity-building in development, governance and human security.

However, more should have been said in this otherwise comprehensive collection of essays on the still glaring paucity of dispute-settlement mechanisms. Whilst it is no doubt interesting from an academic perspective to debate the role of democracy and security, and in this context consider the impact of modern notions of human security and the responsibility to protect, a lot of security issues actually require mundane and rather apolitical diplomacy.

Mediation is certainly provided for in the new ASEAN charter, but for the good offices of the ASEAN chair and secretary general to be deployed effectively, ASEAN's resource and institutional capacity needs strengthening. Is it really adequate that a regional organization comprising almost 600 million people is served by a secretariat with a mere 60 officers?

Mostly missing from the debate, with one singular exception, is the question of alternatives to the ASEAN regional framework. Michael Malley's interesting contribution on nuclear energy security points out how member states have bypassed ASEAN to find more effective ways to regulate their nuclear needs. But much more could have been said on the larger regional issue of ASEAN's still poorly developed ties with the United Nations, a topic nowhere considered in this volume.

Ultimately, this is a book for the times. For as ASEAN heads towards a half century of existence and with greater economic integration, the rigid rejection of intervention in the affairs of member states is becoming harder to justify. Pluralist politics has taken root in many countries and democracy is clearly not an alien import, as some once would have argued.

For when an Indonesian parliamentarian expresses concern about the detention of a Burmese colleague, it is about basic human values and decency. When human rights are abused in Thailand, it isn't any longer just the Western media but journalists in neighboring Indonesia and Malaysia who shine the spotlight and demand an official explanation.

As Surin writes in the book's foreword, "The days when domestic political controversies could not be discussed in regional settings are over." It is here, he writes, "in the cracks between sovereignties, the spaces between states," that hard ASEAN choices are already being made.

Hard Choices: Security, Democracy and Regionalism in Southeast Asia edited by Donald Emmerson. Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, June 2008. ISBN-13: 9781931368131. Price US$28.95, 320 pages.

Michael Vatikiotis is Asia Regional Director for the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.

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