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Asean’s ‘centrality’ faces growing threat

The debacle last week when the Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean) foreign ministers retracted a joint statement following their meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is yet another testament to the challenges facing the 10-member group’s “centrality” in building Asia’s regional order.

The debacle last week when the Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean) foreign ministers retracted a joint statement following their meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is yet another testament to the challenges facing the 10-member group’s “centrality” in building Asia’s regional order.

That China has been calling in its chips with smaller pliant Asean states and effectively driving a wedge through the organisation over the South China Sea will exacerbate regional tensions and lead to security dilemmas and a dangerous tit-for-tat guessing game in this neighbourhood.

To avoid future conflict, a rules-based region under mutual accommodation is the only way forward.

Asean’s centrality has a long and illustrious history. In the late 1980s and 1990s after the Cold War, Asean became instrumental in establishing a string of regional vehicles to promote order and prosperity, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec)in 1989 and the Asean Regional Forum (ARF) in 1994.

With Asean as anchor, the advent of both Apec and ARF was seen at the time as crucial regionalisation in the Asia-Pacific on both economic and security pillars.

This period also saw further institutionalisation of Asean through a free-trade area in 1992. It was bolstered by a handful of sub-regional economic cooperation vehicles.

Stellar economic performance in South-east Asia was such that the World Bank commissioned a study, titled “The East Asian Miracle”, which instilled the regional economies with a growing sense of confidence.

But the economic exuberance was short-lived and rudely halted by a region-wide economic crisis in 1997-98, starting in Thailand but with contagion effects afflicting Indonesia and other regional economies.

The economic crisis dealt a debilitating setback to the region. The silver lining from the crisis was that Asean responded with the Asean Plus Three (APT) framework for the Asean 10 members together with China, Japan and South Korea.

The APT, in turn, spawned the Chiang Mai Initiative, a South-east Asia/North-east Asia financial cooperation vehicle based on swap agreements to counter speculative foreign capital.

Just as South-east Asia recovered from the crisis, the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 put the region and the world at large in a tailspin.

America’s launch of the war on terror that began with the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and Iraq 18 months later placed Asean’s region-building in limbo, superseded by the United States’ foreign and security policy objectives.

Even Apec at the time was turned into a security forum. Only when the war on terror lost momentum and legitimacy in the later years of the George W Bush administration did South-east Asian countries begin to think anew and renew efforts to promote regionalism again.

By December 2005, building on the APT, Asean initiated an inaugural East Asia Summit (EAS).

The EAS has become the leading strategic dialogue platform in the region, an annual and rare opportunity for top leaders of South Asia (that is, India), North-east Asia and South-east Asia to meet.

The APT also inspired the Trilateral Summit in 2008 among China, Japan and South Korea but it has lost momentum since 2012.

The EAS leaders’ dialogue, however, has grown from strength to strength, later expanding to include the US and Russia.

Within this confluence of regional bodies, the Asean Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM-Plus) was established in 2010 as a security platform and functional cooperation scheme among the defence establishments of Asean and its dialogue partners.

Amid this architecture building, Asean launched its Asean Charter towards establishing an Asean Community with much fanfare in 2008, comprising three pillars known as the Asean Political-Security Community, Asean Economic Community, and Asean Socio-Cultural Community.

Asean’s centrality around that time was not in doubt. It was the centre of action for Asian regionalism. The ascendancy of President Barack Obama in January 2009 reinforced Asean centrality.

In his first year of office, Mr Obama proclaimed his tenure as the first-ever Pacific president of the US. Not long after, America’s turn towards the Asia-Pacific under Mr Obama’s watch was operationalised into a strategic outlook known as the “pivot to Asia”, later called the “rebalance”, in reference to an intended, relative shift of focus, commitment and resources from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

 

THE CHINA FACTOR

 

Despite Mr Obama’s paradigm shift towards Asia — or because of it, if China’s assertiveness over the past several years is significantly motivated by the Obama rebalance — Asean’s “driver’s seat” role in the second Obama term has become more problematic.

Front and centre of the challenge to Asean centrality and cohesion is China’s alteration of the status quo in the South China Sea based on its controversial “nine-dash line” claim over much of the area, as evident in the fiasco over the conflicting degrees of the joint statement last week.

Maritime Asean states, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, have locked horns with China.

In fact, China’s hardball manoeuvre against Asean in Yunnan last week is attributable to a pending United Nations arbitration tribunal decision over the Philippines’ contestation of China’s territorial claims, including its construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea.

In view of heightened tensions, Manila has leaned more on its treaty alliance with Washington. The latter has been accommodating almost outright antagonism towards Beijing.

The souring atmosphere in South-east Asia is difficult to pinpoint. It appears to have degenerated at an alarming rate during Mr Obama’s second term, during which China has faced growth constraints and rising nationalist sentiment at home in a more contentious neighbourhood where Beijing cannot swing its weight around unchallenged.

For America, Asean’s role generally ought to be a bridge-builder and broker of stability and prosperity, based on the post-World War II global order Washington engineered long ago.

But how things worked in Asean’s past will no longer work in its future. An Asean-China accommodation is imperative.

Asean has to make unmistakable references to alarming changes in the South China Sea status quo while convincing the Philippines to back off enough for China to be interested in negotiating a rules-based arrangement, such as the dormant “Code of Conduct” for South China Sea parties.

The absence of agreeable rules among concerned parties will only lead us to more tension and probably conflict. BANGKOK POST

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