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Southeast Asians increasingly doubtful of regional response: ISEAS Survey
While China remains the most influential major power for Southeast Asians, respondents of the new State of Southeast Asia survey see Japan as more trustworthy.
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Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah (center) and ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi (right) walk while attending the ASEAN leaders' summit at the bloc's secretariat building in Jakarta on April 24, 2021. (Handout/Muchlis Jr/Indonesian Presidential Palace via REUTERS)
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outheast Asians are increasingly concerned that ASEAN is too “slow and ineffective” in responding to political and economic developments, a new survey has found, just as the region’s top diplomats convene over the Myanmar coup fallout and amid growing rivalry in the Indo-Pacific.
This year’s State of Southeast Asia study, conducted between November and December last year by the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, takes the pulse of a region shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising geopolitical tensions.
The growing frustration that has ensued is becoming more palpable among the survey’s 1,677 respondents, for whom a “people-centered ASEAN” rings largely hollow.
An overwhelming majority of respondents (70.1 percent) were most concerned about ASEAN’s inability to “cope with fluid political and economic developments”, overtaking last year’s top concern that the region was becoming “an arena of major power competition” and that ASEAN member states may become proxies to those forces.
Last year, the concern that ASEAN was becoming a geopolitical theater for major powers (70.8 percent) was greater than ASEAN’s own shortcomings (69.5 percent).
A further 49 percent of respondents this year believed that ASEAN was unable to overcome current pandemic challenges – the third biggest concern of the people – slightly lower than the results of the 2021 ISEAS survey (51.4 percent).
The regional grouping appeared to be more divided than before, which poses a significant challenge for ASEAN centrality. Member states are taking different positions within ASEAN depending on the issue, said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University.
