T

o avoid premature disintegration ASEAN should learn from the EU that nationalism is not dead, a government advisor argues.

The EU faces some of the toughest challenges to its integration process, with various incidents like last year’s influx of refugees and the surprising Brexit vote in June exposing rifts among EU member states, as they struggle to define the future of the European bloc.

Thus ASEAN would do well not to “unnaturally speed up the process of integration”, said Andrzej J. Zybertowicz, Polish scholar and advisor to Poland’s President, Andrzej Sebastian Duda on Friday.

Speaking in Jakarta at the invitation of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI), Zybertowicz said it was important for the Southeast Asian grouping to provide a thorough understanding of the regional integration process, cutting across all layers of society.

Zybertowicz, a professor of sociology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, argued that the people in the regions and those among the poor should be able to understand the process, and not just politicians, scholars and experts.

Taking the result of the British referendum to leave the EU into consideration, he said, “recent research on why the majority of British citizens voted for Brexit has proven that in fact they didn’t vote out of a common Europe; they were voting [against] an ill-governed common Europe.”

“The percentage of people voting for ‘leave’ were in regions that were socially neglected; regions where the public welfare funds were not delivered properly — they didn’t feel like beneficiaries of the European community,” Zybertowicz said, speaking in a personal capacity.

For him, the Brexit was a problem of internal policy, and it was up to politicians to listen to the people without forgetting that the majority “cannot fully express what bothers us.”

Especially in a democratic system, imposing a sped-up process of integration that forewent the opinions of the common people would eventually fail, the Polish National Security Bureau advisor argued.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently cast the Brexit vote as a “quiet revolution” that exposes the failings of modern Britain in a way that can no longer be ignored.

“This is a turning point for our country. A once-in-a-generation chance to change the direction of our nation for good,” May told members of her ruling Conservative Party.

“Millions of our fellow citizens stood up and said they were not prepared to be ignored anymore,” she said of the June 23 referendum, as quoted by Reuters.

Meanwhile, Dewi Fortuna Anwar, a co-founder of the FPCI and a foreign policy advisor for Vice President Jusuf Kalla, argued that the promise of a supranational entity like the EU might be a fallacy, which might be ASEAN’s saving grace.

“The fact that there’s been so much resistance for a more integrated Europe, [...] clearly it has given us a real understanding that the EU project will not predeterminedly be moving in one direction,” she told reporters after Zybertowicz’s public lecture.

“The lessons for ASEAN were that there were never any pretensions that Southeast Asian countries wanted to have a supranational entity,” said Dewi, who also advised former president BJ Habibie on foreign policy.

However, ASEAN could still learn from the EU model, Dewi continued, saying that ASEAN lacks an overarching regional enforcement instrument compared to the EU.

ASEAN is currently moving slowly toward regional integration among others through its ASEAN Economic Community, which came into force since the end of last year.