ASEAN Faces Challenges in 2022

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

It’s probably the international organization most Canadians don’t know about. But they should. The 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), formed in 1967, play a significant role in global economic and political affairs.

The countries are large (Indonesia, Malaysia) and small (Singapore); rich (Brunei) and poor (Laos); closely affiliated with the United States (Thailand, the Philippines) or much more aligned with China or Russia (Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam). They span a wide range of religious, cultural, and economic characteristics.

At this year’s ASEAN summit, held in Cambodia Nov.10-13, Prime Minister Trudeau travelled to Phnom Penh and addressed regional and global challenges with his counterparts.

Canada is in trade negotiations with the economically booming association and ASEAN as a bloc already makes up Canada’s sixth largest trading partner. “I am announcing concrete investments that are part of our commitment to this relationship,” he said, before listing $333 million in new funding for various programs.

But ASEAN’s future is problematic, plagued by geopolitical divisions, economic woes, and accusations it has failed to deliver any meaningful solution to the ongoing Myanmar crisis, which continues to prove a challenge.

Even taking the relatively easy decision not to invite Myanmar’s military leader, Min Aung Hlaing, to the annual meeting this year proved an ordeal for the member states. In 2017 the military of the predominantly Buddhist country began a sweeping campaign against its Rohingya Muslim minority in northern Rakhine State. More than 730,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, while about 600,000 remain under oppressive rule in Myanmar.

ASEAN has urged Myanmar to implement a peace plan agreed to last year to halt a spiral of violence that has gripped the country since the military overthrew an elected government in February 2021. The plan includes engaging in constructive dialogue, and access for humanitarian aid and a special ASEAN envoy.

In October, the bloc said it remains committed to the so-called five-point peace consensus even as frustration grows among members over escalating violence in Myanmar.

Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, which is due to chair the regional bloc summit next year, asserted that the blame for a lack of progress lies with the junta.

Singapore and Malaysia, and at times Brunei, all with large Muslim populations, backed Indonesia’s calls for strengthening the measures against Myanmar. However, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, all Buddhist nations, have been pushing back against the Indonesian proposal.

So traditions of non-interference in another member’s domestic affairs and consensus decision-making have become hindrances, when they were once strengths, particularly amid rising American-Chinese tensions in the region.

“We are seeing the end of ASEAN as Southeast Asia has known its regional organization,” remarked Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University.

“While it won’t be disbanded and will still be around,” he added, “what’s left of ASEAN as a relevant and central regional organization needs a cold and hard realignment.”

ASEAN was formed by five anti-Communist countries in 1967 and doubled in size by the end of the 1990s, accepting lesser developed countries. Praised for maintaining peace and providing the infrastructure to help several Southeast Asian countries join the world’s fastest growing economies, ASEAN is said to badly need an update.

Vietnam and the Philippines have been locked in territorial disputes with Beijing over the South China Sea for decades, yet ASEAN has yet to agree on a promised “Code of Conduct” with the Chinese government.

Its biggest challenge is to manage escalating tensions between the United States and China, but this is complicated by the varying allegiances of its members. Thailand and the Philippines are treaty allies of the United States, while Vietnam informally counts Washington as a security guarantor. On the other hand, Cambodia and Laos are seen as Beijing’s closest partners.

ASEAN and China did release a joint statement agreeing to “build a meaningful, substantive and mutually beneficial ASEAN-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, for peace, security, prosperity, and sustainable development.” Hopefully these are not just empty words.

“The weight of current regional tensions, primarily the Myanmar crisis and the South China Sea dispute, has been way too great for ASEAN to grapple with in its current institutional design,” maintains Mabda Haerunnisa Fajrilla Sidiq, a researcher at the Habibie Center, an Indonesian think-tank.

An idea making the rounds is for the bloc to return to a more traditional “ASEAN-5” model, where the association’s founders -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand -- take on greater power. That would exclude newcomers who joined in the 1990s, such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

However, an “ASEAN-5” reform would also exclude Vietnam, the region’s surging economic powerhouse and the country most at the center of its geopolitical fault lines. Also, Beijing would resist any attempt to push out its closest partners, although the United States would likely welcome such a move.

Meanwhile, ASEAN finally agreed to grant accession to Timor-Leste, or East Timor, the former Portuguese colony occupying half the island of Timor, which applied for membership after gaining independence from Indonesia in 2002.

One of the poorest countries in the world, East Timor was initially granted observer status. The region’s most democratic state, it tends to be aloof on the U.S.-China rivalry and might alter regional discussions on political issues.