Abstract
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can be regarded as the key subregional grouping in Southeast Asia. It was founded in the city of Bangkok on 8 August 1967 by agreement between Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. They were joined on 8 January 1984 by Brunei and on 28 July 1995 by Vietnam, with the addition of Laos and Myanmar on 23 July 1997 almost completing the long-cherished aim of an ‘ASEAN-10’. Only the absence of Cambodia stands in the way of this goal but its membership, scheduled for the same day as Laos and Myanmar, was delayed following the coup led by the Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. The goal of the organization, enshrined in the Bangkok Declaration of 1967, was summarized and made explicit in 1983 by the then Prime Minister of Thailand, Prem Tinsulanonda, in his opening address to the 16th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting when he stated categorically that ASEAN ‘stands for peace and prosperity for Southeast Asia’.1 Two points of immediate interest may be drawn from this statement. First, it is clear that prosperity is understood as a mechanism through which to achieve peace and stability, both within individual ASEAN states and amongst members of the organization. Economic growth is apparently primary and central in this regard. Second, is a belief that what can be done within ASEAN can be achieved elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Intra-ASEAN economic cooperation is thus not concerned simply with wealth creation but has wider social and political goals. In combination, these two points lead us to surmise that ASEAN is to be understood not just as a structure, the institutional agglomeration of member state interests, but as a process redolent with meanings and aspirations. In this chapter we explore this notion of ASEAN as a process rather than as a static ensemble of states and state interests. Far too often, an understandable interest in the institution of ASEAN obscures rather than reveals the power relationships inherent within it. In this regard, the signal failure of Prem Tinsulanond to make any mention of, let alone connection between, prosperity and democracy is particularly marked. ASEAN has not only failed large sections of its collective population in economic terms but, so too, has it failed to promote the cause of democratic accountability. It may well, then, stand for peace and prosperity for Southeast Asia, but only for some.
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Notes
Cited in M. Antolik, ASEAN and the Diplomacy of Accommodation (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 6. The relevant documents are currently available at ASEAN’s official website at http://www.asean.or.id/.
M. Leifer, The ASEAN Regional Forum, Adelphi Paper 302 (London: Brassey’s for the IISS, 1996), p. 11.
D. SarDesai, Southeast Asia: Past and Present (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 4th edn; G. Segal, Rethinking the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
M. Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific (London: Routledge, 1996).
A. Acharya, A New Regional Order in South-East Asia: ASEAN in the Post-Cold War Era, Adelphi Paper 279 (London: Brassey’s for the IISS, 1993).
D. Emmerson, ‘Region and Recalcitrance: Rethinking Democracy through Southeast Asia’, The Pacific Review, 8, 2 (1995), pp. 223–48; J. Wanandi, ‘ASEAN’s Domestic Political Developments and their Impact on Foreign Policy’, The Pacific Review, 8, 3 (1993), pp. 440–58. R. Robison and D. Goodman (eds), The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, MacDonalds and Middle-Class Revolution (London: Routledge, 1996).
R. Higgott and R. Stubbs, ‘Competing Conceptions of Economic Regionalism: APEC versus EAEC in the Asia Pacific’, Review of International Political Economy, 2, 3 (1996), pp. 516–35. See also Chapter 10.
World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993).
We return to this below, but for more historical detail see Antolik, op. cit.
A. Acharya, ‘Ideas, Identity and Institution-building: from the “ASEAN Way” to the “Asia-Pacific Way”’, The Pacific Review, 10, 3 (1997), pp. 319–46 (pp. 328–33).
Hereafter we will employ only the term ‘ASEAN way’. Y. Funabashi, ‘The Asianization of Asia’, Foreign Affairs, 72, 5 (1993), pp. 75–85; Mahbubani Kishore, ‘The Pacific Way’, Foreign Affairs, 74, 1 (1995), pp. 100–11; and Chin Kin Wah, ‘ASEAN: Consolidation and Institutional Change’, The Pacific Review, 8, 3 (1995), pp. 424–39.
According to our taxonomy the ARF is also a meta-regional organization but, significantly, one formally proposed by ASEAN itself. For a theoretical discussion of the emergence of the ‘new’ regionalism, see A. Hurrell, ‘Explaining the Resurgence of Regionalism in World Politics’, Review of International Studies, 21, 4 (1995), pp. 331–58.
S. Yamakage, ‘Human Rights Issues in Southeast Asia’, Japan Review of International Affairs, 11, 2 (1997), pp. 118–37; D. Mauzy, ‘The Human Rights and “Asian Values” Debate in Southeast Asia: Trying to Clarify the Key Issues’, The Pacific Review, 10, 2 (1997), pp. 210–36.
For a similar attempt see M. Bernard, ‘Regions in the Global Political Economy: Beyond the Local-Global Divide in the Formation of the Eastern Asian Region’, New Political Economy, 1, 3 (1996), pp. 335–54.
For an introduction to this line of argument see R. Stubbs, ‘The Political Economy of the Asia-Pacific Region’, in R. Stubbs and G. Underhill (eds), Political Economy and the Changing Global Order (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 366–77.
J. Dower, ‘The Useful War’, in J. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Essays on History, Culture and Race (London: Fontana, 1996), pp. 9–32.
M. Bernard, ‘Post-Fordism, Transnational Production, and the Changing Global Political Economy’, in Stubbs and Underhill (eds), op. cit., pp. 216–29 (pp. 218–21); J. Moore, ‘Democracy and Capitalism in Postwar Japan’, in J. Moore (ed.), The Other Japan: Conflict, Compromise, and Resistance since 1945 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 353–93.
The literature is vast. For a selection of recent views see the following: J. Fallows, Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); W. Hatch and K. Yamamura, Asia in Japan’s Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and P. Katzenstein and T. Shiraishi (eds), Network Power: Japan and Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
M. Berger, ‘The Triumph of the East? The East Asian Miracle and post-Cold War Capitalism’, in M. Berger and D. Borer (eds), The Rise of East Asia: Critical Visions of the Pacific Century (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 260–87 (p. 268).
SarDesai, op. cit., p. 301.
Yuen Foong Khong, ‘ASEAN’s Post-Ministerial Conference and Regional Forum: A Convergence of Post-Cold War Security Strategies’, in P. Gourevitch et al. (eds), United States-Japan Relations and International Institutions after the Cold War (San Diego: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 37–58.
T. Akaha, ‘Japan’s Comprehensive Security Policy’, Asian Survey, 31, 4 (1991), pp. 324–40; S. Sudo, The Fukuda Doctrine and ASEAN: New Dimensions in Japanese Foreign Policy (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992).
F. Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1986), 2nd edn.
J. Zysman, ‘The Myth of a “Global Economy”: Enduring National Foundations and Emerging Regional Realities’, New Political Economy, 1, 2 (1996), pp. 157–84; J. Perraton et al., ‘The Globalisation of Economic Activity’, New Political Economy, 2, 2 (1997), pp. 257–77; S. Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 105–11.
R. Cox, ‘Global Perestroika’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds), The Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 1992), reprinted in R. Cox with T. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 296–313.
There is again some overlap since the discursive representation of AFTA as a form of ‘soft’ or ‘open’ regionalism does not simply or only fit in with the rhetorical commitment to free trade espoused by meta-regional organizations such as APEC, but does so in a way that draws attention to the comfort of that ‘fit’: the implication being that ASEAN regionalism in whatever form could never be exclusionary. For a discussion of the concept of ‘soft’ and/or ‘open’ regionalism as espoused by ASEAN see Acharya, ‘Ideas, Identity and Institution-building’, op. cit.
For details see Siow Yue Chia, ‘The Deepening and Widening of ASEAN’, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 1, 1 (1996), pp. 59–78 (pp. 60–65).
See P. Bowles and B. Maclean, ‘Understanding Trade Bloc Formation: The Case of the ASEAN Free Trade Area’, Review of International Political Economy, 3, 2 (1996), pp. 319–48.
For details on tariff harmonization, see Chia, ibid., pp 66–70; Tsao Yuan Lee, ‘The Asean Free Trade Area: The Search for a Common Prosperity’, in R Granaut and P. Drysdale (eds), Asia-Pacific Regionalism: Readings in International Economic Relations (Pymble, NSW: Harper Educational, 1994), pp. 319–26. By the year 2010 an Asian investment area is expected to be in place, and by 2020 the plan is to allow the free-flow of capital among member states.
The citation is from Chia, op. cit., p. 60
Leifer, op. cit., p. 10
For details see Acharya, ‘A New Regional Order in South-East Asia’, op. cit., pp. 27–30
Acharya, ibid., pp. 30–40; K. Calder, Asia’s Deadly Triangle: How Arms, Energy and Growth Threaten to Destabilize Asia Pacific (London: Nicholas Breley, 1996).
See the respective Chairman’s Statements issued following each meeting of the ARF (available at the website cited at note 1 above); see also Leifer, op. cit., for details of the first two meetings. Cambodia, India and Myanmar have joined in the interim, whilst applications from Britain and France for membership separate from the EU are believed to have triggered the debate over criteria for new admissions.
For a discussion see Yuen Foong Khoong, ‘Making Bricks without Straw in the Asia Pacific?’, The Pacific Review’, 10, 2 (1997), pp. 289–300.
This last point and much of the preceding detail is from Leifer, op. cit.
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Kelly, D. (1999). The Association of Southeast Asian Nations. In: Hook, G., Kearns, I. (eds) Subregionalism and World Order. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14650-5_8
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