I

magine this community: Half a billion people spread across 4.4 million square kilometers, so diverse that it encompasses every major ethnicity, sect, cult and disposition possible. Sundry political systems - from a full-blown republic to a military junta, absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy - and economic distinctions from a per capita GDP of more than US$48,000 to less than $500.

Belying skeptics, immersed in celebratory gimmicks, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its 10 member state - Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam - marches toward its fifth decade today.

Proudly retaining hope despite the inured hisses of ASEAN's agnostics and disgruntled scholars noshed on ASEAN's embellished alphabet soup - AEC, AFTA, AMM, ARF, ASEAN+3, CLMV, GMS, PMC, SEANWFZ, TAC and ZOPFAN, to name a few.

When the founders conjured the ASEAN dream in 1967, they did so to dispel the nightmare of conflict. A realization on the linkages between security and economics.

Inter-state conflicts hence avoided, tensions abated, albeit not resolved.

Stability and harmony in the name of economic prosperity. Crusted proof to the ASEAN pudding.

No wonder Indonesia ingrained the now 10-member grouping as a cornerstone of Indonesian foreign policy.

It was the milieu that allowed this nation to achieve its most advanced rate of economic development.

The great scholar Benedict Anderson once defined "imagined communities" as those where "members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".

The region is inching its way toward such feats. An ASEAN populace gelled by borderless interests and the marvels of modern transport that allows breakfast in Jakarta, lunch in Kuala Lumpur and an evening snack in Bangkok without too much bureaucratic hassle.

Nevertheless, after no less than five official declarations, two concords, a treaty, a charter, dozens of protocols and countless statements, why does ASEAN still fail to be a creature of constituency appeal to the citizenry that matters most?

Perhaps the answer is not simply in the lack of effort. The numerous meetings are testimony to that - in July alone there were more scheduled ASEAN meetings than there were days in the month.

Somewhere in its evolution, ASEAN arguably oversold itself.

It became more than what it was, but fell short of what it could now be.

When it was first born, there were few if any lofty expectations. Four decades later, the expectations are too lofty for its own good.

ASEAN forgot that communities are not forged by proximity, legality or economic convergence.

Neighbors may share a complex, but without inherent values they will remain strangers physically attached but morally detached.

This divergence of values has led to a growing dissension, where some member states of the grouping no longer see ASEAN as the brightest star in each other's constellation.

One can argue that Indonesia's push for a more politically liberal and forward-looking ASEAN serves its own political enlightened self-interest.

Which is true, but contours of common interests can form when there are shared values.

Longtime regional watcher Donald K. Emmerson of Stanford University recently wrote that "if regionalism is ever to play a democratizing role in the region, it will have to operate in some fashion through security".

"The kind of security best suited to inducing a linkage of regionalism to democracy is human security - not the realpolitik business of protecting the state, but the moralpolitik challenge to protect society, ultimately including the protection of society from the state itself."

Democrats and dictators together seek economic growth and stability, but that does not mean they share common values.

ASEAN may be out of its element when it talks about the concept of "community".

A "community" - whether of 50 people or 500 million - is rallied together simply out of sheer tangible objectives alone.

It is a sense of shared values, not economic interests, which drives a community together.

Because of varying political circumstances, there is no identifiable rallying point to morally unite this supposed community.