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ASEAN endorses Indonesian initiative on regional identity
Senior ASEAN officials agreed in a meeting on Wednesday to endorse Indonesia’s initiative concerning a narrative about the identity of the regional grouping to be delivered at a ministerial meeting slated for October
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span>Senior ASEAN officials agreed in a meeting on Wednesday to endorse Indonesia’s initiative concerning a narrative about the identity of the regional grouping to be delivered at a ministerial meeting slated for October.
The 15th ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting for Culture and Arts (SOMCA) was held in Yogyakarta as a follow-up to the ASEAN Ministers Responsible for Culture and Arts (AMCA) meeting conducted last year in the same city, which was named the 2018-2019 ASEAN City of Culture thanks to Indonesia’s being the chair of AMCA.
"With the agreement, hopefully the narrative on ASEAN identity will be finally adopted during the leaders' meeting in the 2020 summit," the Education and Culture Ministry’s director general for culture, Hilmar Farid, said after closing the two-day meeting on Wednesday.
The narrative was presented in the SOMCA in the form of an initial briefing paper that came out of consultations with relevant academics and experts from Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.
"With that now we are just waiting for the formal process for the adoption of the narrative by ASEAN leaders,” Hilmar said.
He said, however, some improvements would be made on the narrative before it was officially brought to the next meeting of AMCA, to be further endorsed for the 2020 ASEAN Summit for approval by the bloc leaders.
Indonesia, which, as a chair of the meeting on Wednesday, proposed that the narrative be endorsed, considered it important because although ASEAN was established 52 years ago, the bloc had yet to define ASEAN identity.
The phrase "ASEAN identity" first emerged in 2003 during Indonesia's chairmanship. In 2005, it was adopted as part of the ASEAN motto: One Vision, One Identity, One Community. The term has ever since been frequently used in numerous ASEAN's documents.
Riaz Saehu, the Foreign Ministry's director for ASEAN sociocultural affairs, said that to be able to define an ASEAN identity properly it was also important to highlight the relevance of ASEAN for the people.
ASEAN, he said, was established because of political interests to form a community to keep the region peaceful.
As a result, in the eyes of its people, ASEAN was an elite grouping that could only be understood by certain levels of the community, such as academics, universities and the media, but not by the grass roots.
“It's now our challenge to help people to also think about ASEAN issues, to think that we share Southeast Asian values, that we have shared the values since even before ASEAN was established," Riaz said.
Riaz cited as examples that all the member countries but Thailand were once colonized, none of them were free from India's or China's influence and all were tolerant of adapting to diversity and social changes.
"This is strength. This is what we will raise,” he said.
Once adopted, he added, the narrative would be taken by all the ASEAN pillars — politics, security, economics, social and culture — so that when interpreting ASEAN, people would understand that they shared the same values.
“Where in ASEAN do people not know the story of Ramayana? We all have one. This is one of our similarities,” said Riaz.
The ASEAN identity’s narrative, he added, would also be promoted to the grassroots through NGOs, universities, think tanks and centers of ASEAN studies. “This is important considering the limited public awareness of ASEAN,” he said.
Riaz underlined the importance of people experiencing the benefits of ASEAN and feeling pride to be a part of ASEAN. “This is what we want to achieve. We start with the narrative,” he said.
The SOMCA also agreed on a number of initiatives, including some collaborative cultural programs with three ASEAN partner countries — Japan, South Korea and China.
With Japan, ASEAN agreed to enhance the ASEAN cultural heritage digital archive program to be officially launched late this year involving Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, which have started the digitization in 2016. Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam are expected to join later on.
With South Korea, they agreed to enhance the ASEAN-South Korean traditional orchestra, presenting 11 different repertoire pieces performed collaboratively using traditional instruments from member countries.
