ASEAN summits devoid of sense of real community

Endy M. Bayuni, The Jakarta Post, Kuala Lumpur

While community-building has become very much part of the ASEAN vocabulary, the annual summit taking place in Kuala Lumpur this week is anything but communal. Instead, the gathering remains as elitist as it has ever been, if not more so.

The meetings of the leaders of 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and seven other countries invited here have been held within the confines of the tightly guarded Kuala Lumpur Convention Center. And with the threat of a terrorist attack in the back of the mind of the host nation, they are not taking any chances and impose security checks on roads leading to the venue and provide heavily guarded motorcades in shuttling leaders between their hotels and the meeting venues.

The lavish banquets, the chauffeur-driven limousines for the leaders, the heavily air-conditioned meeting rooms -- in contrast to the humid and wet climate outside -- combine to give a strong air of elitism that has characterized all ASEAN summits. Even reporters, many of whom are veterans of ASEAN summits, dressed the part: Suit and tie for men.

This has not stopped ASEAN leaders from talking about turning the region of 530 million people into a community, possibly styled on the European Union. And if that is not sufficient, some ASEAN members are already looking at a larger East Asian community involving China, Japan and Korea, whose leaders are also present here this week. Others are even going beyond geography into geopolitics to involve India, Australia and New Zealand in this imagined community.

All these proposals are on the table here in Kuala Lumpur, which by the end of this gathering on Wednesday, will have seen at least nine different summits on top of the bilateral meetings that 17 leaders held on the sidelines.

Community building, at least as far as these leaders are concerned, is certainly the way to go. How to get there, and how soon they can turn this into reality are some of the things they still have to work out at their summits this year and in the coming years.

"We have a very, I mean very, long way to go," says Makmur Keliat of the University of Indonesia and a close watcher of the evolution of the East Asia community.

Makmur, here for a meeting of the Network of East Asian Think Tanks (NEAT), notes the huge gap between what leaders are envisioning for the people in the region, and the reality of the people themselves.

"ASEAN is really a playground for diplomats," is how he describes the regional organization. While appreciating the hard work his friends in the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have done, he senses ASEAN leaders and the diplomats are somewhat disconnected from their own people.

Most countries in this region are still concerned more about their respective nation building, he said. "A community building process at the regional level, as far as they are concerned, is not a priority."

ASEAN leaders and their diplomats beg to differ and believe that community-building, whether at the Southeast Asia level or East Asia level, is inevitable in light of closer integration elsewhere in the world, particularly Europe and North America.

The ASEAN Vision 2020 sees the region turning into a "concert of nations, outward looking, living in peace, stability and prosperity, bonded together in partnership in dynamic development and in a community of caring societies."

In their summit in 2003 in Bali, the ASEAN leaders agreed to establish the ASEAN community. Here in Kuala Lumpur this week, they commissioned their governments to work toward an ASEAN Charter. The gap between ASEAN leaders and their own people is not lost on Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who called for more earnest efforts to bring ASEAN to the people instead of being a forum for diplomats, ministers and heads of government.

"For ASEAN to have a truly strong cohesion, it must involve people at all levels," he said in an interview with Malaysian media on the eve of the ASEAN summit on Sunday. "We need to engage the views from all strata of society ... from civil societies, because ASEAN belongs to them, so that they are more concerned about the grouping in the future." Malaysia has made an effort to that end by organizing an ASEAN civil society summit. The summit's recommendation was presented to ASEAN leaders on Monday and became part of the official summit's document.

As with the European Union, the move to turn ASEAN into a community began with the launching of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) but how soon, if at all, this will lead to a borderless ASEAN, or even borderless East Asia, remains uncertain. It is not even clear whether this is a desired objective among ASEAN leaders.

Makmur said that for civil society to play a larger role in the community-building process, the state must necessarily reduce its role.

"That could only happen if we all live in a democratic society," he said, noting that some ASEAN people still live under authoritarian regimes.

He said some initiatives on the ground could begin to get this process of community building moving. The establishment of a region-wide television channel or newspaper, for example, would go a long way in helping to build awareness.

The Indonesian government could do its part in small ways if it was serious about community building in the region. "The government should abolish the fiscal (exit) tax imposed on Indonesians traveling abroad, and thus encourage more Indonesians to visit other ASEAN countries."