The Bali summit: Start of ASEAN's collective leadership?

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

Indonesia will host ASEAN's summit meeting in Bali early next month, while the country is doing its utmost to regain strategic centrality in Southeast Asia and the region faces great challenges concerning international terrorism. Indonesia itself should use the Bali summit to gain strength in its regional diplomacy.

Fundamental policy transformations and the attitude of Indonesia toward regional issues have been quite evident during the past two or three years, in which the region was seized by a number of contentious issues, such as people smuggling, the illicit trafficking of arms, and terrorism.

In particular, the image of the region has changed, from stable and conflict-free into a region that breeds terrorism. Indonesia's regional and international policies are consequently framed against such an image. But Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and even Thailand, gained U.S. and regional respect for stern action against alleged terrorist organizations operating on their own soil.

The participants themselves should prevent the summit from being dominated by the issue of terrorism. Nevertheless, countries in the region have been brought to the point where their governments can no longer act independently in their fight against terrorism and other contentious issues.

The essence of the summit will be that of enhancing regional capabilities in confronting acute political and security problems. It is perhaps against such a background that the idea of ASEAN as a security community was proposed.

The theme of the Bali summit is "Towards ASEAN economic and security community". Such a theme has largely occupied the agenda of recent ASEAN regional meetings. Rapid development in technology, the economy and security, were perhaps among the factors that prompted ASEAN to adopt such an ambitious theme.

Yet skepticism remains over whether Indonesia's leadership can achieve such objectives, given the country's host of other problems and its perceived waning leadership.

The world will judge the impact of ASEAN's ninth summit on making Southeast Asia more attractive for foreign investment and its contribution to the stability and security of the region. The notion of an ASEAN economic and security community -- which has not gained much support within the region itself -- was launched in anticipation of future political and economic turbulence (deriving from inside or outside the region).

The idea behind the ASEAN security community (ASC) is to reformulate relations within ASEAN and more importantly to reinvigorate the ASEAN organization. Given problems arising since the economic crisis in 1997, a wide array of different and more complex intra-security problems have emerged.

Thus, Jakarta is keen to develop a coordinated mechanism to deal with various non-traditional security threats (such as trafficking and epidemics). The perception that ASEAN needs to be rejuvenated is in line with Indonesia's own perspective of its position in the regional equation. Thus, through the summit, Indonesia hopes to put forward a proposal that allows it to reemphasize its strategic centrality. But even without Indonesia -- and as Malaysia's leader Mahathir Mohamad is soon to leave the ASEAN scene -- leadership certainly remains a strategic problem for ASEAN.

However ambitious the new regional program of action is, goals will be ineffective and unachievable unless managed under a strong leadership. Although the security community was Indonesia's initiative, such an idea -- and other ASEAN programs -- would have to be executed under the body's collective leadership. Given rapid and fundamental changes in ASEAN's international environment and the wide array of acute regional problems, leadership by individual countries would be ineffective.

Thus the summit and its possible outcome -- of a spectacular and convincing plan of action -- might reflect the end of Indonesia's regional leadership, or the beginning of ASEAN's new collective leadership.

ASEAN has and will continue to experience turbulence leading to heightened alert over regional political and security issues. Challenges of collective leadership will not only stem from the way it manages new regional problems, but also the extent to which several flashpoints of actual and potential conflict -- such as the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula and sovereignty disputes -- affect the region's stability and security.

In Bali, ASEAN is setting out to deal more effectively with forces threatening its solidarity and cohesion. The issue of leadership implies that ASEAN must initiate fresh approaches to potential regional problems.

It is also through the Bali summit that ASEAN must allow itself to wield its already considerable weight in the world. With its new plan of action, hopefully it will be able to avoid the problem of other regional associations -- burdened by the dominance and influence of their largest member.

Indonesia, at least at this juncture, should take the credit for efforts enhancing the regional body's institutional capacity. However, there are still many obstacles to be overcome, many new complex questions to be evaluated and many more ideas to be fleshed out and tested. This indeed is the real diplomatic challenge of ASEAN's collective leadership.