East Asia Summit: ASEAN’s centrality and the challenges ahead

Awidya Santikajaya, Washington, DC | Fri, 10/29/2010 10:36 AM | Opinion
A | A | A |- Klipping The Jakarta Post
Asia Pacific leaders are meeting this week at the fifth East Asia Summit (EAS) in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Together with ASEAN and APEC, the EAS is a key element of Asia Pacific regionalism. Current members of the EAS are ASEAN countries, Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. Countering claims that it is ineffective, the EAS has made meaningful concrete achievements, including cooperation on disaster management and the establishment of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA).
Further, the coming EAS is crucial because it will officially invite the US and Russia to join, after the previous East Asia Ministerial Meeting last August made this recommendation.
Since its establishment in 2005, the EAS was intended to be an ASEAN-led block, and has been linked to ASEAN Summits. An important issue ASEAN faces in the recent development of the EAS is whether it is can maintain its “centrality” in the grouping.
ASEAN has been regarded as one of the most stable regional groupings in the developing world. With a population of around 600 million, Southeast Asia is emerging politically, economically and strategically, attracting external powers.
Donald E. Weatherbee explained that ASEAN has become a stage where great power rivalries and competition for influence are being played out.
Among these external powers, the US and China are the two most important countries. China’s dilating economic and military capacities have boosted its diplomatic assertiveness over its neighbors, including Southeast Asia. Early this year, ASEAN and China began implementing the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA).
The US also now intends to regain its lost influence in the “forgotten region” to maintain its global domination.
The US orientation toward Southeast Asia could be seen when President Barack Obama missed the US-EU Summit in Madrid last May, but hosted the ASEAN-US Summit in September, and plans to attend the EAS in Indonesia next year.
In this development, the political gravitation of China and the US has seriously challenged “ASEAN’s Centrality”. Using the dependency theory, we may conclude that the relations between ASEAN, on the one hand, and the US and China on the other are unusual. Normally, the “center” is more powerful than the “periphery”, but in this case the US and China (peripheries) are far stronger than ASEAN (center).


“There is no need to dramatically transform the existing regional order since it is too soon to conclude what kind of sustainable Asia Pacific regional arrangement it will be.”
Recently, the accretion of rivalry between the US and China has been coloring Asia Pacific international relations. At the second ASEAN-US Summit, in New York last September, for instance, the US insistently espoused the peaceful settlement of territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
The US also expressed its willingness to help craft a legally binding “code of conduct” to prevent armed hostilities among countries with territorial claims. Responding to this issue, Chinese Foreign Minister Jiang Yu stated that China opposed any internationalization and expansion of the South China Sea dispute because it would only make the issue more complicated.
So far, the ASEAN’s main position toward external powers’ involvement is to exploit those powers’ interests for regional benefit. And it is gaining ground, at least for some countries. Vietnam, for example, has gained tremendous advantages from the aggressive approaches of America and China to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, besides of course both countries’ own economic and strategic interests.
China has already invested around $1.6 billion in a large bauxite mining and alumina refining project in Vietnam. On the other hand, last March Vietnam and the US, two former rivals during the Cold War, launched talks on nuclear cooperation, including the possibility of allowing Hanoi the right to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium.
ASEAN has consistently worked to mitigate balances of power by maintaining peace, security and prosperity as the main principles of EAS. The gavel is now obviously on the ASEAN’s side because all external powers already praise the concept of ASEAN plus in the EAS, “thanks to” the disappearance of Hatoyama’s East Asia Community and Kevin Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community ideas.
While ASEAN has already set the rules and time-keeping, it does not necessarily mean ASEAN has succeeded in leading all EAS members to follow the existing path designed by ASEAN. What made Asia Pacific countries let ASEAN drive the regionalization process was ASEAN’s integrity, neutrality and acceptability to all stakeholders.
However, ASEAN’s centrality to the EAS will be interrupted if ASEAN cannot address two important challenges: First, overcoming intra-ASEAN differences, and second, satisfying non-ASEAN countries’ needs to join the EAS.
Despite its success in minimizing inter-state conflicts and fostering economic cooperation, ASEAN’s precept of loose cooperation (the “ASEAN Way”) makes it difficult to have a truly integrated community.
ASEAN has already moved toward extraordinary achievements through the creation of the ASEAN Charter, ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and other instruments.
In spite of its sophisticated institutionalization, ASEAN often faces distrust from its members. In the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict mid this year, for example, there were diplomatic maneuvers by both countries in determining whether the dispute should be settled through a bilateral mechanism or by regional cooperation. ASEAN did not do much, except to suggest that both parties assuage the situation.
In this sense, if Cambodia and Thailand believed in ASEAN, why did not they agree to use ASEAN to host a dispute-settlement mechanism?
The next question is if its members do not fully trust ASEAN will that make ASEAN cumbersome as a default chairman of the EAS?
ASEAN’s chairmanship also should have the wits to think about providing more opportunities for non-ASEAN members to utilize the EAS.
There is no need to dramatically transform the existing regional order since it is too soon to conclude what kind of sustainable Asia Pacific regional arrangement will be.
While maintaining its flexibility, at least for the short-to-medium term, ASEAN should initiate the construction of EAS institutions, such as a secretariat, which is separate from, but located in ASEAN countries.
Non-ASEAN members also should become co-chairs of the EAS concurrently with the ASEAN chair, to put them into a more precise scheme.


The writer is a graduate of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC.