Creating a democratic peace in the ASEAN region

Bantarto Bandoro Editor 'The Indonesian Quarterly' Centre For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Jakarta bandoro@csis.or.id

The 2003 Bali summit of ASEAN leaders saw the signing of the Bali Concord II, which according to President Megawati Soekarnoputri was a watershed in the history of ASEAN. ASEAN is determined to move forward to face more severe security and economic challenges ahead.

ASEAN's ten members, in the Bali Concord II, promised "to live in peace with each other and with the world at large, in a just, democratic and harmonious environment." The introduction of the notion of democratic peace sets the standard of political norms in the region. This would mean that ASEAN member states subscribe to the notion that the democratic process promotes regional cooperation and security. Democracy is something that members of ASEAN will aim for.

As the democratization process in the world is moving at a very rapid pace, ASEAN's understanding of democracy seems to have gone beyond the electoral aspects of democracy itself, such as regular elections and multiparty competition, etc. Democracy, as envisioned in the Bali Concord II, reflects the need for ASEAN to develop a kind of zone of non-violence, one that would guarantee a long-lasting security and durable regional peace. With the introduction of ASEAN's method of non-violence, ASEAN hopes to be able to gradually eliminate sources of turbulences and turmoil in the region.

This ASEAN proposition provides an important rationale for promoting democratization as a pillar of ASEAN's regional relations and policies. Ultimately, the best strategy to insure Southeast Asian regional security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy upon which a common stand on regional problems should be based.

It implies that war or other forms of violence as a means for conflict settlement are no longer part of the menu. The Bali Concord II clearly states that all members of ASEAN pledge to settle differences with each other peacefully.

Indonesia in particular sees it as away to cope with regional disputes in an ASEAN peace framework. But, understanding and focusing Kantian's thesis of democratic peace as an idea or fact that democracies do not (or virtually never) make war on each other, as one might call it the war version of democracy, is fundamentally misleading.

Democracies have not only not made war on each other, but they also have, by far, helped minimize, if not eliminate, the sources of domestic violence. That is, democracy can be a general cure for political or collective violence of any kind. It indeed is a method of nonviolence, and thus is truly a democratic peace.

The Bali Concord II has yet to prove its vitality and effectivity. But one should expect a decline in violence afterwards as a natural adjustment of the changed perception of the ASEAN leaders as well as regional and international system. The fact that ASEAN has signed a key pact supporting democracy means that it has united ASEAN, politically and strategically, to eliminate the scourge of new regional problems.

It is thus a sign of the movement the region has made toward a democratic peace.

A zone of non-violence in the Southeast Asia region is not an immediate, but a long-term projection, as ASEAN still has to reach the stage to which it would be ready, at any time and at all costs, to collectively compromise on certain regional issues and policies, given the fact that only six of its current members are democracies. It is to say that the appearance of a democratic "zone of peace" in Southeast Asia is highly dependent on a particular country's degree of "democraticness".

In the creation of a zone of non-violence, we will see that the most democratic countries of ASEAN members may be located at one end of a democraticness continuum as democracy; and at the other end is the less specific concept of "undemocracies", such as non-democratic, closed hegemonic and authoritarian countries, or to use a more generic term, autocracies.

Under such conditions, and though a zone of non-conflict is an ideal one, the future political landscape of Southeast Asia will therefore be in flux. The line between commitment to a democratic path and reverting to authoritarianism and tending towards chaos is very thin. Believing this to be a major tendency means that zone of non-violence based on the Bali Concord II is unlikely to appear, particularly if an "undemocratic" general election in Indonesia, and other members of ASEAN, next year is to produce long-term and perpetuated chaotic and instability in the region. Democracy and "nation" after all were inseparable, for democracy is only possible when the nation is ripe for it.

What we will see then is not a regional adherence to democratic peace, as expected by the Bali Concord II, but instead a long period of struggle and engagement and possibly disappointment and some setbacks along the way. Thus, the process of creating democratic peace upon which ASEAN regional relations as well as regional security and stability would have to be based on looks set to be a long process with its ups and downs. It all reflects the immense difficulties of transition toward building a democratic peace in the region of Southeast Asia.

Democracy is a force for peace as stated by Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy must thus be a product of a considerably high degree of awareness of the Southeast Asia countries of the importance of the democracy-peace linkage, the message carried by the Bali Concord II. Not only that, they should also support the proposition that only a carefully managed rather than freewheeling democracy is feasible in the region.

It is through an ASEAN adherence to democratic values and principles that the people in the region hope to witness the decreasing zone of violence and turmoil. However, given the fact, as stated above, that ASEAN is still in the process of searching for common ground rules for building democracy and has different views as to how the ASEAN community should proceed, the severity of enmity, if not violence, may still increase or remain the same.

Creating a democratic character of the region is indeed a tremendous task for ASEAN to do, meaning that ASEAN must agree on a kind of road map to become a community of democracies and act together in terms of their mutual interests. Only with the realization of such an objective can such democratic peace in the region truly develop. The democratically based ASEAN community must therefore aim to increase the zone of peace in the region. It will in turn, hopefully, lead to a decrease in violence and turmoil and its severity.