ASEAN's long road to economic integration

ASEAN's long road to economic integration

Kamrul Idris, New Straits Times, Kuala Lumpur

"Consensual looseness" compared to the European Union, which
will be enlarged by 10 new members on May 1, ASEAN looks like a
regional community on life-support.

Europe has open borders, no customs or trade barriers, a
single currency and something close to an encompassing,
continent-wide identity -- all of which had begun as pipe dreams
amid the rubble of the World War II. The EU's total of 25 nations
is a magnificent jumble of cultures, languages, societies and
economies held together by a gigantic bureaucracy centered in
Brussels. Europeans are cracking their heads over a constitution,
no less, while ASEAN officials endlessly mull over the costs and
benefits of start-up co-operative agreements.

Like it or not, ever closer integration in the part of the
world that unleashed two of history's most devastating conflicts
has acted as a scold on ASEAN. It stands as an object lesson in
the art of the possible against the truism that Southeast Asia,
and Asia as a whole, is simply too disparate for tighter concord.
Diversity hasn't been a hindrance in Europe -- as much, or as
little, separates Singapore from Laos as Luxembourg from Latvia
or Europe's poorest country, Romania, which is on its way to
accession, probably in 2007.

A United States of Southeast Asia isn't a delusion. By any
reckoning, merging a population of half a billion people in 10
contiguous countries makes perfectly good economic sense.
Liberalization under the ASEAN Free Trade Area, even with its
concessions to laggard members and state sectors, caused regional
trade to jump by more than 25 percent per year.

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad tried to push the logic
of a common market by hitching up Japan and South Korea into an
East Asian economic group. But he was stymied at every turn by an
America suspicious of the formation of blocs outside its sphere
of influence.

So why is Southeast Asia stuck in limbo? There is something to
be said for Europe's hare and ASEAN's tortoise being quite
different political animals. Former ASEAN secretary-general
Rodolfo Severino, speaking at a conference in Fukuoka, Japan, on
April 7, said the grouping had been knit together by a consensual
"looseness".

This seeming contradiction in terms reflected the hard-headed
realities of the day. An Association of Southeast Asian Nations
was cobbled together in 1967 as a "non-binding, informal, non-
ideological, equal" club, resting above all on the notion that
good fences made good neighbors.

The confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia had ended
just a year before; the Philippines was piqued over Sabah; after
splitting off from Malaysia, island Singapore needed an anchor;
and the Vietnam War was in full blast on Thailand's doorstep. To
the five signatories of the Bangkok Declaration, Southeast Asian
nations had to hang together or hang separately.

Good fences took time and sensitivity to each other's
handicaps. Nearly a decade had to pass before ASEAN held its
first summit, in Bali in 1976. Unlike Europe, the newly
sovereign, post-colonial member countries wanted the liberty to
look inwards without interference, either from each other or
anyone else. ASEAN was getting wedded to the concept of the
nation-state, while Europe was tiring of it.

And looseness succeeded, perhaps too well. ASEAN suffers no
lack of vision, as Razak testified, but its members are so leery
of meddling in each other's domestic affairs that its relevance
as a multilateral institution has been questioned. The urge for
arms-length neutrality has lapsed since the end of the Cold War.

ASEAN's proponents, however, have never been embarrassed by
the label "talk shop"; the ASEAN Regional Forum, for example, is
a high-profile event in the international security calendar. As a
"debating chamber", the ASEAN format still offers a quick
mechanism to deal with intra-regional matters such as trans-
boundary haze, the SARS and bird flu outbreaks and the Asian
financial crisis of 1997.

But at the Fukuoka conference, organized by the European
Commission delegation in Japan and the Asia-Europe Foundation,
attention quickly shifted after Severino's keynote address. To
the journalists invited to contribute to the topic of "a new
Europe, a new Asia", ASEAN doesn't make news, except perhaps for
the controversy over Myanmar's membership. Its peoples haven't
been engaged enough to interest the media.

Of course, a direct comparison with the EU can be taken too
far. The European project is a one-off, and specific to a region
laid so low by internal rivalry that it was ready to compromise
on national sovereignty. ASEAN, said Severino, was an inter-
governmental concept. It was, and continues to be, driven by
elites, its deliberations confined to a closed circle of
ministers and bureaucrats.

Europe, on the other hand, is far more democratic. Its leaders
evangelized and the people converted to the faith -- by
referendums if necessary. That is probably the biggest difference
between the two: Without a popular mandate for concrete action,
the limits of the ASEAN informal model are plain to see. "ASEAN
has to be more legally binding for future credibility," said
Severino. "It is good at frameworks but backs away from difficult
political steps. As a result, many initiatives stagnate."

Last October's Declaration of ASEAN Concord II in Bali
established the "x+2" formula, which allows for a pioneer team of
members to move ahead, rather like France and Germany did for
Europe. Though even the most ardent Europhiles will admit that
the EU is not for copying, the ASEAN Vision 2020, a statement of
intent made at the 1997 Kuala Lumpur summit, clearly had
something like it in mind. But how far theory can diverge from
practice was acknowledged by Berhard Zepter, head of the EC
delegation in Japan. He said that there was more than one model
of democracy and cautioned that the depth of regional integration
depended on a willingness "to contribute to it as much as take
from it".

That calls for harder rules in place of the ASEAN habit of
soft observance. Rules require a supranational authority for
compliance and dispute settlement and, more importantly, a
sharper focus on what it means to be part of a shared endeavor.
ASEAN has to evolve from unbuttoned principles to what Severino
called "norms of behavior" -- something akin to Europe's
definition of itself as a "community of values". "Norms" and
"values", if they are ever to mean anything more than nice words
on paper, have to be enforced by political will and a budget to
match.

ASEAN's high ambition cannot yet afford anything like another
Brussels nor, to its shame, emergency help to members in crisis,
such as Indonesia's over East Timor. Until members' GDP levels
rise higher, Severino's offer that "perhaps it is time for a new
ASEAN" will remain tentative.