Asean@50: Making sense of an unfamiliar order

As ASEAN chair on its 50th anniversary this year, the Philippines occupies a most unique perch from which to influence thinking and debates around the association’s future direction – and how it navigates the not-so-familiar world order shaping up around us.

Seen through ASEAN lenses, what does the landscape in the region and beyond look like? In just the last few years, unprecedented, major changes have unfolded in our regional neighborhood and in the global village as we know it.

Closer to home, ASEAN launched the ASEAN Community which aims for deeper integration among ASEAN’s 10 member states. But while it is supposed to be closing ranks and ASEAN leaders launched its Vision 2025 plan, questions do arise about how deep the roots of this community go. The most glaring question perhaps has to do with China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea dispute, which has laid out in the open China’s use of its political and economic clout to discourage ASEAN countries – and ASEAN as a group – from expressing concern about such behavior. Will individual ASEAN member states’ positions versus China split the regional community?

Beyond Southeast Asia, the multilateralism that has in the post-World War II era been the template that best serves peace and prosperity stands on very uncertain ground in the wake of trends such as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, and the rise of rightist populist politics in Europe and elsewhere.

What lessons does Brexit hold for ASEAN integration and the political investment in it?

Rising protectionism in different parts of world is of concern to ASEAN countries, given their dependence on exports as a foundation of economic growth and robustness even in times of global slowdowns, and its edge as an investment destination. As ASEAN likes to cite, if ASEAN countries were a single economy, it would be the world’s seventh largest economy.

Will Southeast Asia become an arena for rivalry between the US and China? How would the Trump government’s policies affect the relationships among different countries and middle powers in the region? Extremism is a main security concern for ASEAN governments, but how can they close ranks to address this?

Organized by the Carlos P Romulo Foundation for Peace and Development with the Indonesia-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and with Stratbase-ADR Institute as local co-organizer, the Aug. 3-4 conference will look into the challenge these pose to ASEAN and strive to identify ways forward. It provides unique opportunity for frank discussions beyond the confines of diplomatic niceties. 

For decades, ASEAN has prided itself on its centrality and its economic attractiveness – premised on multilateralism and a more open economy – so it needs to respond to the challenges in front of it in order to preserve these spaces it has carved out for itself as a fulcrum of regional peace and stability, as well as a global player that is the venue for major fora on security, politics and diplomacy and defense.

Meeting just before the Aug. 8 conference of ASEAN foreign ministers on ASEAN’s founding day, more than 30 speakers and discussants from ASEAN, its dialogue-partner countries and beyond the region will share their insights on how ASEAN can become a stronger, integrated organization as it looks to the next 50 years. Participants will include those from business, the academe, government and media.

We expect the discussions to lead to useful perspectives that can feed into and inform the ASEAN foreign ministers’ own discussions as they prepare for the next ASEAN Leaders’ Summit in Clark, Pampanga in November, and the subsequent discussions with the leaders of the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

The conference has two main themes– strategic challenges in the Asia-Pacific and the challenges arising from the changing global economic landscape.

There are four former ministers speaking:  Han Sung Joo of South Korea; Hassan Wirajuda of Indonesia; Gareth Evans of Australia and Surin Pitsuwan of Thailand (also former secretary general of ASEAN).

The main sessions will touch on ASEAN’s response to the changing international landscape, the shifts in the economic landscape, the challenges to peace, security and stability in the region, the management of emerging regional and global issues, a multi-stakeholders’ dialogue on ASEAN’s identity and sense of community, and perspectives from the non-ASEAN world. A roundtable discussion on ASEAN in the next 50 years, with senior panellists from various countries and backgrounds, will close the conference.