ASEAN needs a new objective

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum held its sixth meeting in Singapore last week. Political analyst Jusuf Wanandi takes this opportunity to gauge the relevance of the organization's policies.

JAKARTA (JP): It is normal for institutions to have their ups and downs. ASEAN is no exception. This also has happened several times before to the European Union (EU). In the 1970s, for instance, there was a deep sense of malaise among EU members, known as the Eurosclerosis.

It was a period characterized by drift and even despair among its members. However, this was overcome because there were leaders, such as Jacques Delors, who were able to instill new and great ideas for the European enterprise. There was the move toward a single market, followed by the creation of a union with a single currency, the euro, as its showpiece.

ASEAN too needs such visions in order to overcome the crisis it is now in. It needs to muster the political will to get away from the traditional, step by step, incremental and pragmatic approach. Perhaps this time ASEAN has to be ready to leapfrog, because only by doing so can it develop the vision and the political will to bring it into a higher degree of cooperation among members and head toward regional integration.

Until today ASEAN operates primarily on state-to-state cooperation. This will no longer be sufficient in the future because the challenges it is facing are huge and fundamental. Those challenges can only be met by ASEAN if it becomes a stronger entity with much more than just state-to-state cooperation. It needs to make becoming an integrated entity its long-term objective. The group should begin to plan how this new objective will be achieved now.

The economic crisis has brought about new challenges that are fundamental to all the member countries, the region and the world as a whole. This is a watershed era. If ASEAN cannot rise up to jointly face those new challenges it will become irrelevant to the member countries and their peoples that the association has promised to serve.

This does not mean that ASEAN will have to produce a big bang. It will not be easy for ASEAN to do so at this juncture. Even today, there are strong tendencies for its members to go it alone in resolving problems, despite the rhetoric to the contrary. Efforts to revitalize ASEAN have thus far been mediocre at best.

The main problem is that state-to-state cooperation is no longer adequate to respond to the challenges faced by ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific region. The challenge of globalization has to be answered with a determination to integrate more fully among members, in the nature of the EU's response.

This means that ASEAN needs a new objective, new principles to be based upon, more rules and institutions, and greater commitment from its members. Only then can it cope with the problems of foreign exchange instability, more open and freer trade relations, increased competition from other regions in the world, prevention of the emergence of a two-tier membership, the greater impact from instabilities in Northeast Asia, as well as rivalries and tensions between the great powers in East Asia. In short, this is necessary to be able to further open their economies and even their societies to global forces and to play a significant role in the greater Asia-Pacific region.

It could be that this year is not the right time to expect a drastic change, because the region is still trying to cope with and overcome the economic crisis, despite the euphoria in the past two months about a recovery, which is not yet real.

However, if Indonesia begins to recover in the next one to two years, and becomes active again in working within ASEAN, its democratic impulses might invigorate the debate on the future of ASEAN.

The new thinking about ASEAN, as has been aired by Thailand's able and far-sighted foreign relations team, might get the full support of Indonesia's future leadership. ASEAN's civil society is another source of inspiration for change and it is going to be an important source to reckon with. It seems that civil society is already a few steps ahead of ASEAN officialdom.