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ASEAN post-2025: Political and security perspective
While ASEAN has legitimate concerns about many global issues, its primary interests should be peace, stability and security in Southeast Asia.
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Choppy waters: Journalists aboard Philippine Coast Guard ship Melchora Aquino look on as a Philippine civilian ship (left), loaded with provisions for Filipino fishermen and troops, changed course after aborting its trip in disputed waters of the South China Sea on Dec. 10, 2023. (AFP/Ted Aljibe )
T
he year 2025 will be essential for ASEAN as Malaysia will act as the chair of the regional grouping. It will mark the end of the ASEAN Vision 2025 and its blueprints and the beginning of the new ASEAN Vision 2045 and its accompanying strategic plans. A high-level task force has been established to draft this new vision and plans, which will be adopted in 2025.
The post-2025 period will present ASEAN with a more challenging global and regional environment than in the decades since the end of the Cold War. ASEAN faces two main internal political and security challenges within Southeast Asia.
First is the prevention and management inter-state conflicts between ASEAN members. This was the main objective of the establishment of ASEAN in 1967 and will remain so indefinitely. ASEAN has an excellent track record and robust instruments and mechanisms for this challenge.
Since its establishment in 1967, there have been no armed conflicts between members, aside from the low-level skirmishes on the Thai-Cambodia border in 2011. Even then, the Thai-Cambodia conflict reflected ASEAN’s ability to mediate and pressure both members to restrain and pursue dialogues to contain the situation.
The second type of internal challenge is political instability of one or more of its members. ASEAN, however, was not designed to deal with the internal domestic issues of member states. Since adopting the ASEAN Political and Security Community in late 2003 and the ASEAN Charter in 2007, progress has been made to brief, inform and discuss some internal challenges that members face.
However, no specific instruments have been set up by ASEAN to assist member states in dealing with internal instability. In other words, ASEAN has limited capacity to help address the internal instability of its members, as demonstrated in the ongoing challenges in Myanmar.
In this regard, an essential prerequisite for ASEAN to make a breakthrough in developing its capacity to deal with this kind of challenges is a strong commitment from ASEAN members to adopt and adhere, in practice, to the protection of fundamental human rights – particularly the political and economic rights – of its citizens.
