|
Article Excerpt
"ASEAN is concerned about the impact of this [Myanmar/Burma] issue ... on our credibility and standing, because the world seems to think that ASEAN should be the one tackling this issue and bringing about some positive outcome".
--Ong Keng Yong, ASEAN Secretary-General 2003-07 25 July 2006 (1)
"ASEAN must continue to be credible".
--Ong Keng Yong, ASEAN Secretary-General 2003-07 22 March 2007 (2)
"ASEAN is facing fierce competition and pressure from the outside world. It needs a lot of rethinking, retooling and readjusting ..."
--Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN Secretary-General-designate 2008-12 18 June 2007 (3)
"The ASEAN Foreign Ministers expressed their concern to Foreign Minister Nyan Win that the developments in Myanmar had a serious impact on the reputation and credibility of ASEAN. [They] expressed their revulsion to [him] over reports that the demonstrators in Myanmar are being suppressed by violent force and that there has been a number of fatalities.... They called upon Myanmar to resume its efforts at national reconciliation with all parties concerned, and work towards a peaceful transition to democracy. [They also] called for the release of all political detainees including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi".
--Statement by Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs George Yeo speaking as the ASEAN Chair, New York, 27 September 2007 (4)
Birthdays are good times not only for celebration, but for contemplation as well. Its 40th anniversary is thus an appropriate moment to think about "challenging ASEAN" in the double meaning of that phrase: to show how the Association simultaneously challenges the ability of analysts and policymakers respectively to understand and improve it, and deserves to be challenged regarding its assumptions, performance, and plans. Limited space and my own limited knowledge and imagination constrain what follows. In the course of it I hope, nevertheless, to illustrate how one might usefully consider "challenging ASEAN"--the complex body and the critical task.
Security and economy have been, and remain, the standard fare of ASEANology. Democracy has been an afterthought in this literature. But unless I am wrong, issues involving democracy will occupy more space on ASEAN's agenda in future than they have in the past. That is partly why I have chosen, in this article, to feature democracy to the relative neglect of security and economy. (My choice also conforms, I admit, to the stereotype of Americans as peculiarly obsessed with democracy--and with spreading it, like peanut butter on a slice of bread, around the world.)
I begin by drawing what I hope are some useful analytic distinctions between Southeast Asia as a region and ASEAN as an organization. Next I discuss the challenge of transforming Southeast Asia into something more than a collection of states--that is, a community. I then ask whether the Association can and should favour democracy in Southeast Asia on the one hand, and inside its own organization on the other. On the first of these two scores, I offer sobering evidence of the scarcity of democracy inside ASEAN's member states. In the second connection, I portray ASEAN as a "consociational" framework and develop a correspondingly "topological" view of regionalism in Southeast Asia. I sketch two axes along which democracy may be differently understood, and highlight the difficulty for ASEAN of "verticalizing" its traditionally horizontal democracy. I close by returning to my point of departure in the above epigraphs to discuss ASEAN's delayed response to the 2007 crisis in Myanmar in the context of democracy in the region and in the organization.
Region [not equal to] Organization
Southeast Asia the region and ASEAN the organization are not the same thing. This may seem too obvious to bother restating--until we call to mind, in the discourse of regionalist elites and foreign observers, the ubiquitous usage of "the ASEAN region", or even "ASEAN" alone, as synonymous with "Southeast Asia". All of the ten states normally thought to constitute Southeast Asia do, of course, belong to the Association. And I write "of course" to acknowledge just how conventionally Southeast Asia and the area encompassed by ASEAN are assumed to have the exact same internal members and external borders.
It is not quixotic, however, to question the isomorphism of ASEAN and Southeast Asia that the Association has so successfully cultivated for so long. (5) Two objections come to mind. One is spatial, one is social, both are political, and both are, in their own ways, "challenging ASEAN".
The spatial caveat entails this question: What happened on 20 May 2002, when the former Indonesian province of Timor-Leste was internationally recognized as an independent state that did not then, and in 2007 still had not, joined ASEAN? Did ASEAN shrink while Southeast Asia stayed the same? By that account, the region trumped regionalism, and from that date onward, ASEAN could no longer claim to represent all of Southeast Asia. Or had ASEAN's authority to determine cartography become by then so deeply entrenched and widely accepted that on that date the region itself also shrank, in order to remain geographically coterminous with the Association?
ASEAN's ten-member-state definition of Southeast Asia has been codified since 1998 in the Second Protocol Amending the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC), signed that year in Manila by these same ten states. By that explicit reckoning, which has not been superseded by any more recent ASEAN declaration, Timor-Leste is not a Southeast Asian country. When Timor-Leste itself acceded to the Treaty in January 2007, it did so as a state "outside Southeast Asia".
But the story is not over. Timor-Leste wants to join ASEAN, but ASEAN has been less than eager to let it in. That reluctance reflects four non-technical concerns: that Timor-Leste is either a failed or failing state whose membership could become a headache for the other members; that its abject poverty could burden them materially as well; that its foreign policies might be too heavily influenced by outsiders, notably Australia and Portugal; and that its leaders' public criticism of the junta in Myanmar for violating human rights could augur disloyalty to the speak-no-evil-of-a-fellow-member "ASEAN Way". (6)
The irony is that these thoroughly political concerns themselves undermine the explicitly non-political image of Southeast Asia that has been so central to that "ASEAN Way": the ruling out of political considerations as criteria for extending or refusing membership to an applicant state. According to that original principle, if you are in Southeast Asia, you belong in ASEAN, and if you are not, you do not. In practice, as the Association has come to define for itself "its" own region, it has traded the external consensus of geography for the internal control--but also the partisan controversy--that goes with deciding, on political and other substantive grounds, who should and should not belong.
The resulting slippage between a spatial Southeast Asia and a political ASEAN constitutes a major challenge to the Association. One could see it in Myanmar in August-September 2007, as protests escalated against the junta in that misgoverned country, and in the corresponding sense that ASEAN's more-than-month-long silence in the face of those events was basically a reflex--a matter of past habit more than present conviction.
To this two-dimensional exercise in place-name analysis, or toponymy, I wish now to add a third or vertical dimension, and thereby simulate a fully "topological" or eagle's-eye view of Southeast Asia in relation to ASEAN.
Timor-Leste comprises a very small half-island with an even smaller enclave and islets that are smaller still. Even if ASEAN and its Second Protocol are given the benefit of the doubt, and that half-island (plus enclave and islets) is excluded from Southeast Asia, what is left of the region as defined by ASEAN occupies an estimated 13 million square kilometers of the earth's surface. As of July 2007, an estimated 573,742,521 people were living on the region's 4.5 million [km.sup.2] of land; using (or not) its 8.5 million [km.sup.2] of sea; and conforming (or not) to the myriad laws and customs in its ten diverse countries. (7)
On any given day in July 2007...
|
