ASEAN needs a new objective

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.