ASEAN and Regional Order

Revisiting Security Community in Southeast Asia

Amitav Acharya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política asiática

Founded in 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has emerged as one of the most successful regional organizations in the world. This book discusses the future of ASEAN against a backdrop of a growing US–China rivalry and the security implications of COVID-19.

Chapters in this book move through a history of ASEAN and its multilateral institutions, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the East Asia Summit (EAS), featuring rare photographic material to contextualize both recent developments in regional security and projections for ASEAN's prospects. Key concepts and terms are unpacked throughout, with the chapters focusing on rapidly changing international and regional environments, economic insecurities such as trade conflicts, human rights, and ASEAN identity, and providing extensive analysis of the factors challenging the principle ASEAN Centrality and the Indo-Pacific security architecture. The concept of security community frames this book, despite being subject to change if intraregional discord and institutional stagnation take hold.

As a discussion of the role and future of ASEAN in a pivotal period of world history, ASEAN and Regional Order will prove vital to both students and scholars of international relations, regional organizations, and Asian studies more broadly.

1 ASEAN’s “Long peace”?

The “Long Peace” is the title of a much-cited essay of 1986 by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. In this essay, analyzing the state of war and peace during the Cold War period, Gaddis argued:

Given all the conceivable reasons for having had a major war in the past four decades-reasons that in any other age would have provided ample justification for such a war-it seems worthy of comment that there has not in fact been one; that despite the unjust and wholly artificial character of the post-World War II settlement, it has now persisted for the better part of half a century. That may not be grounds for celebration, but it is at least grounds for investigation: for trying to comprehend how this great power peace has managed to survive for so long in the face of so much provocation, and for thinking about what might be done to perpetuate that situation.¹

Gaddis explained the “long peace” as a function of bipolarity, nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence, and domestic constraints on war-making in major powers, among others. But as he was careful to point out, his idea of “long peace” and reasons behind it were specific to major powers; he did acknowledge that the world had seen “a whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars” and “an abundance of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, and civil violence.”

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) does not count among its members a single great power or a nuclear weapon state. Nor is it a community of democracies, which is often included as a “domestic constraint” on war-making and hence a force for peace. And ASEAN members have not been short of domestic strife and violence from ethnic, religious, and political divisions. Yet ASEAN has avoided, since its inception in 1967, being a victim of that “whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars” among its members that persisted through the great power “Long Peace.” By any reasonable criteria, this is a remarkable achievement, for five decades of existence is a “long” time in international relations.

Economically, ASEAN’s record has also been impressive. In the 25 years from 1970 to 1995, the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of ASEAN members grew at an average annual rate of 7.0%, while its overall trade during the same period jumped from US$10 billion in 1967 (the year of its creation) to US$650 billion in 1995.² As the consulting firm McKinsey noted in 2014, ASEAN had “dramatically outpaced the rest of the world on growth in GDP per capita.”³ While the Asian financial crisis of 1997 hit the region hard, ASEAN recovered robustly; its GDP more than quadrupled from US$577 billion in 1999 to US$2,551 billion in 2016.⁴ Before the COVID-19 pandemic, ASEAN as a group had emerged as the world’s third largest market after China and India, and the world’s third largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI).⁵ By 2018, the combined GDP of the ten ASEAN member states stood at US$3.0 trillion, making ASEAN as a group the fifth largest economy in the world.⁶

The relationship between regional security management and economic performance is never clear-cut. To be sure, the economic performance of ASEAN members cannot be credited only to the existence of ASEAN as a regional organization. It has had multiple reasons, including the overall world economic climate, the pace of globalization, and even the US-led international order in East Asia. Moreover, economic performance varied from member to member, with significant disparities between its wealthiest (Singapore and Brunei), middle income (e.g. Malaysia, Thailand) and the poorest countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam). But it is a fair question whether ASEAN’s economic record could have been achieved had inter-state conflicts among its members and limited wars (like the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation, or Konfrontasi of 1963–66, whose end paved the way for ASEAN), persisted, and the overall regional security climate brought about by ASEAN was absent.

The year 2021 marks the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN as the Problem of Regional Order. That book’s aim was to explain how ASEAN was able to achieve the state of a limited (“nascent”) but important “security community,” a grouping which despite inter-state disputes, political tensions, and armed preparedness by some members against others, has developed a habit of peaceful conduct, or a state whereby its members do not wish their conflicts to be resolved by going to outright war. Written with the inspiration and guidance of the late Professor Michael Leifer, the book has had impact, both as a research monograph and rather unexpectedly, as a teaching tool. Its third edition was in 2014, three years before ASEAN’s fiftieth anniversary. As of January 2021, the book has over 2000 citations in Google Scholar, surpassing books or articles on ASEAN, and possibly book on Southeast Asian or Asian security.

Table 1.1 Basic indicators of ASEAN (2019)

	Land area (Sqkm)	Population (000)	GDP at current price (US$ million)	Population living below national poverty line (%)
Brunei Darussalam	5,765.0	442.4	13,557.2	NA
Cambodia	181,035.0	15,981.8	24,633.6	13.5
Indonesia	1,916,862.2	265,015.3	1,041,562.0	9.8
Lao PDR	236,800.0	6,887.1	18,095.7	23.4
Malaysia	331,388.0	32,385.0	358,411.7	0.4
Myanmar	676,576.0	53,625.0	77,263.6	24.8
Philippines	300,000.0	106,598.6	342,693.1	21.6
Singapore	719.9	5,638.7	364,075.7	NA
Thailand	513,139.5	67,831.6	505,059.7	7.9
Viet Nam	331,230.0	94,666.0	241,038.8	9.8

Source: “ASEAN Statistical Leaflet, 2019,” Jakarta, ASEAN Secretariat, 2019. https://www.aseanstats.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ASEAN_Stats_Leaflet_2019.pdf

When Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia was published, it was regarded by some as too optimistic, even wishful. Its critics, mainly Western, saw ASEAN’s deliberately slow-moving, comfort-creating pace as well as unforced errors induced by internal divisions, indecisiveness, and missteps, as a sign of a fundamental malaise or even impending collapse. My book took full notice of these limitations and challenges, so much as that Sorpong Peou, who has produced some of the most insightful and balanced scholarships on Southeast Asia, noted: Acharya “has often criticized ASEAN multilateralism in ways that make realists smile.”⁷ In reality, my purpose in that book and much of my writing on Southeast Asia has been to strike a balance between writings that are largely polemical and denounce ASEAN and Southeast Asian agency at every turn of events on the one hand, and those who would gloss over its limitations and would not tolerate even the slightest criticism of ASEAN. In short, while engaging with serious academic and policy literature and debates on ASEAN, I have neither encouraged nor taken a side in a debate between ASEAN optimists and ASEAN pessimists, because I believe most scholarship on ASEAN, including my own straddles both, and should account for ASEAN’s achievements and failures.⁸ Most cases of regional and international cooperation are not simply black and white. At the same time, I give ASEAN due recognition as one of the world’s most successful regional organizations; “success” being a relative term, when compared with similar groupings among developing nations in other parts of the world, from the moribund South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to the more active Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

More important, the book has become something of a non-official “book of record.” Its historical chapters, drawing upon more archival sources and primary documents than any other works on ASEAN, provide an authoritative look at ASEAN’s origin and evolution. Furthermore, the book has influenced policy debates and initiatives. As Indonesian scholar and diplomat Rizal Sukma wrote in a blub for the 2nd edition (2009), “The ASEAN Security Community (ASC), [finally named ASEAN Political-Security Community] first as a discourse, and subsequently as a policy adopted by ASEAN, has to a considerable degree been inspired by the arguments advanced in this book.”

The new book extends the analysis of the ASEAN story through its fiftieth anniversary and beyond. While the basic arguments of the book have stood the test of time, security in Southeast Asia or Asia and the world at large is rapidly changing, thus requiring us to rethink and update the information and conceptual arguments of the book. This book, intended as a companion to Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, updates the major thematic grounds identified in its previous editions and addresses new and unforeseen challenges facing ASEAN.

ASEAN and Southeast Asia are now experiencing new challenges, from both outside and within the region. The former includes geopolitics and great power interests; the latter concerns inter-state tensions, extremism, economic insecurity, domestic political strife, and non-traditional security challenges related to the region’s environmental, demographic make-up. These factors, which shape the role of ASEAN, and the principle ASEAN centrality, in sustaining and shaping Southeast Asia’s future, are the focus of this book.

This book takes up the ASEAN story from the third and last edition of Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, published in 2014. I provide brief background to the major issues facing ASEAN from the earlier periods, so that this book can be read on its own as a contribution to the literature on ASEAN. But here I do not cover all the areas of ASEAN regionalism covered in previous editions, but limit myself to some of the most important issues and challenges that would shape ASEAN’s future over the next decade and beyond.

The book is divided into five chapters.

Chapter 1, “ASEAN’s ‘Long Peace’?” offers a brief overview of the framework of the book. It first introduces the present political and economic context of ASEAN. It then discusses the framing concept of security community, its key elements such as norms, identity, and socialization, along with an analysis of the factors that might lead to change – either the maturing or decay of security communities, especially intra-regional discord, external power rivalry, and institutional atrophy or stagnation. It then briefly reviews the history of ASEAN, including its major milestones, achievements, failures, and challenges from inception to the present.

Chapter 2, “Stabilizing intra-regional relations,” analyzes developments in intra-ASEAN relations. A key yardstick of ASEAN’s claim to be a security community is the ability of its members to manage disputes and conflicts among them without resorting to war. This chapter reviews major security issues such as intra-ASEAN conflicts and arm races, non-traditional challenges including ecological security, demographics, and technology, economic insecurities such as trade conflicts and Middle Income Trap, domestic politics, ASEAN identity, human rights, and ASEAN community-building. It also discusses the recent impact of COVID-19 to the region.

Chapter 3, “Responding to great power rivalry,” looks at the most important development in ASEAN’s external strategic environment in the past decade: the escalating great power rivalry, especially between China and the US. On the one hand, ASEAN countries have responded differently to China, especially on South China Sea disputes and the Belt and Road Initiative. On the other hand, the US under Trump downgraded its engagement to ASEAN, causing its declining credibility in the reg...