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View all search resultsASEAN’s survival depends on doing less
ASEAN is drowning in its own bureaucracy while the region’s nuclear stability begins to fracture. To survive, the bloc must abandon its "do everything" approach and reinvent itself as a lean, security-focused guardian of a nuclear-free Southeast Asia.
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President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo (second left, front), seated between Cook Islander Prime Minister Mark Brown (left) and Bangladeshi President Mohammad Shahabuddin, attends the 18th East Asia Summit on Sept. 7, 2023, during the 43rd ASEAN Summit in Jakarta. (AFP/Pool/Yasuyoshi Chiba )
In my previous opinion articles, I usually took a “tough love” approach toward ASEAN.
On the one hand, as a believer in the power of regional cooperation and integration, I am convinced that the bloc has a crucially important role to play in promoting security in the Asia-Pacific and enabling inclusive prosperity for the people of Southeast Asia. On the other hand, I have grown increasingly disillusioned about ASEAN’s prospects for implementing these two overarching goals.
Too remote, too detached from people’s lives and too divided by disparate political systems and opposing values, this community of nations is at risk of irrelevance. This reality could jeopardize the future of one of the most promising regions in the world.
That is why I have become convinced that efforts to protect so-called ASEAN centrality for its own sake, pursuing a narrative that was exceptionally well-crafted over the years but is now waning, are simply misplaced and no longer worth pursuing.
But ASEAN’s destiny is not completely doomed. Rather, ASEAN’s raison d'être should be to ensure that Southeast Asia remains not only central but also an indispensable player on the world stage, even if this means shedding some of its layers.
ASEAN can still play a role by doing less, specifically by getting rid of its many redundant instruments of cooperation. It is not that the aims of these tools are unimportant, quite the contrary: Promoting cooperation in science, education and climate policy remains a paramount task. The problem is the bloc’s internal mechanisms simply cannot do the job.
One can still hope for bold reforms and a different type of leadership, and I find myself torn on this issue.
