ASEAN summits devoid of sense of real community

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."