Asia politics: ASEAN at 50: glass half-empty, or half-full?

August 8th 2017


On August 8th the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) celebrates its 50th anniversary. Born at the height of the Cold War in 1967, the ten-member association has since evolved into a key part of the political architecture of the Asia-Pacific region, and a prosperous economic bloc encompassing roughly 630m people. But as ASEAN celebrates its jubilee, significant achievements—including a long stretch of peace and economic development—have to be balanced against a series of challenges. These include rising sectarian tensions within ASEAN states and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea, all of which pose a threat to the bloc's future cohesion if it fails to adapt its principles to the changing global order.

At first glance, South-east Asia seems like an implausible candidate for regional co-operation. The bloc's ten members—Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines—collectively represent vast diversity. They encompass some of the globe's richest nations and some of its poorest; include democracies, a sultanate, a military dictatorship and one-party communist states; and comprise an array of cultures and histories, bisected by a mix of mutually unintelligible languages. When ASEAN was founded at the height of the Vietnam war, many observers expected that it would collapse after a few years. Given such diversity, it is an achievement that ASEAN exists in any cohesive way at all.

A peaceful and prosperous record, so far

Yet, as the bloc celebrates its 50th anniversary, the record remains mixed. The ASEAN era has coincided with a period of peace and prosperity in South-east Asia. Since Cambodia joined in 1999, the last time that ASEAN welcomed a new member, economic links between the ten member states have deepened, and economic growth has spread even to the poorest members of the bloc.

ASEAN's combined GDP has grown from under US$100bn in 1970 to over US$2.5trn today, and The Economist Intelligence Unit expects the region to grow at an average annual rate of around 4.5% over the coming years—an impressive rate in the context of a global economy that will struggle to muster 3% this year. This has been matched by increases in intra-ASEAN investment flows: ASEAN-origin foreign direct investment accounted for 25% of what the region received in total last year, up from 15% in 2010. The bloc therefore arguably stands as the second-most successful regional organisation after the EU, and has become a stable, dependable platform for geopolitical engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.

No room for complacency

Although ASEAN has been successful in giving a complex region a sense of identity, peace and prosperity over the past 50 years, it is arguably less well equipped for the challenges of the next 50. The principles that have allowed ASEAN to establish itself as a regional fixture—its consensus-based decision-making process and doctrine of mutual non-interference—also place limits on how effective it can be in addressing the geopolitical realities of the 21st century.

As a result of these founding principles, ASEAN has been notoriously unwilling, or unable, to take a unified stance on domestic issues with possible regional or global ramifications. These range from environmental degradation to issues like the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar—a problem that has already set off a refugee exodus that could worsen in the future, to say nothing of the human rights dimension of the predicament—and the rise of a transnational Islamist extremist movement anchored in the Malay archipelago.

The elephant in the room

This has been starkly demonstrated in the way that ASEAN has dealt, or failed to deal, with the emergence of China as a power in South-east Asia. In recent years especially, as China has advanced aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea, ASEAN has struggled to establish a common position on the disputes, which directly involve four member states: Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. The result has been a widening rift between these claimant member states and non-claimants (particularly Cambodia and Laos), which have been happy to accept offers of Chinese largesse in exchange for supporting China's position that the disputes should be handled bilaterally.

The problem for ASEAN is that this burgeoning rift is by no means artificial. Aside from rough geography, there is no obvious trait that binds the ten nations into a union of shared interests. This has given leaders in Cambodia and Laos a reasonable basis for believing that they have more to gain economically and politically from China than from sticking with ASEAN. Encouraging nations to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good requires that the bloc be anchored in a deeply rooted sense of shared identity and destiny—a process that has been stymied and even reversed by China's insistence on dealing with each of the ten ASEAN countries on bilateral terms.

All this has left ASEAN seeming, as some observers put it, like a dysfunctional family. Such tension could be seen at the ASEAN meetings this week in the Philippines (which is the chair this year), when foreign ministers from the member states issued a statement on the South China Sea disputes that was carefully worded in order to avoid angering China. According to reports from the gathering, Vietnam pushed for tougher language to be included in the communique, while Cambodian diplomats lobbied hard for China. This points the way towards a future in which ASEAN is more fragmented and divided than ever before.

A time to reassess

As the global order evolves, ASEAN needs to change along with it. Although the bloc's current rules and norms have taken it a long way, its way of operating may leave it vulnerable over the next 50 years. On its jubilee, ASEAN member states have an opportunity to reassess whether its founding principles are suitable in a rapidly changing world. If it fails to, ASEAN may find that its most difficult days lie ahead.

The Economist Intelligence Unit
Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit