ASEAN, preventive diplomacy and bilateral conflict

P.L.E. Priatna, Jakarta | Sat, 10/29/2011 12:37 PM A | A | A |-Klipping The Jakarta Post

“We have shown the world that ASEAN can proactively facilitate and engage itself appropriately in creating conditions conducive to the peaceful settlement of disputes among its family members.”

(Marty Natalegawa, Foreign Minister, Jakarta, Aug. 5, 2011).

The ASEAN-EU High-Level Expert Workshop on Preventive Diplomacy and International Peace Mediation was held in Bali at the Nusa Dua Convention Center on Oct. 11, 2011.

This interesting ASEAN-EU workshop was intended to explore the new facts of ASEAN life, thus it was dubbed the “Regional Organizations as Vectors of Peace: Building ASEAN’s Capacities in Preventive Diplomacy and International Peace Mediation”. It is not only how the EU sees ASEAN as its internal mediation support, but also the EU’s engagement with ASEAN to play a bigger role in the region.

This workshop seems relevant to ASEAN as well, as recently the issue of border disputes between member states — for example, Indonesia and Malaysia — have been rolling around amid the ASEAN community-building effort. Although ASEAN has its own unique bilateral and historical problems, ASEAN has been recognized as a successful model of regional organization, as it provides nations the ability to minimize conflicts and solve long-standing and unexpected disagreements through sustainable peace in the region.

A culture of peace is urgently needed when, for example, we are faced with interlinked existing border issues among almost all the member states. If ASEAN wants be relevant, the ASEAN Secretariat and the Committee of Permanent Representatives, in turn, have the opportunity and basis for getting involved with designing mechanisms of public communication to avoid the negative public response to the bilateral and legal disputes between member states.

In the context of ASEAN’s community building, all of the actors and the stakeholders have their own respective roles to keep ASEAN credible, trusted and supported.

Negative and uncontrolled public responses to bilateral disputes will only create negative support for the ASEAN community-building process. ASEAN’s member states each must avoid unexpected misunderstandings between people or even hostility, social hatred and frontal disengagements.

On a regional scope, ASEAN has the potential to establish its mediation capacity to solve existing conflicts, but ASEAN still has its own limits as well, said Agus Wandi, Deputy Transition Coordinator of the UN Development Program. There are at least two contributing factors to the limits.

First, there is no mechanism to identify actors or internal institutions that are responsible for initiating and implementing preventive action or forestalling conflict. Second is ASEAN’s non-interference principle, according to Agus.

ASEAN’s people-centered orientation, in the end, has brought the bloc face to face with the new challenge of redefining approaches to the meaning of its non-interference principle, especially in gaining public support.

It would be much better to have a common platform to find the new operational meaning of it, particularly as part of entering the ASEAN Community 2015.

Indonesia’s peace-making role in the case of the Thai-Cambodia border conflict, factually, is a new ASEAN understanding to have new substantial meaning of a truly flexible mediation process and support mechanism.

It will build momentum, in turn, for ASEAN’s stakeholders to formulate a new and stronger and more workable framework for regional preventive diplomacy. Entering the ASEAN Community 2015, in terms of public diplomacy, it is a big
challenge to gain public justification, even in just simplifying the split between “bilateral and regional issues”.

The Joint Border Commission, for example, as a bilateral instrument to solve “legal-based border issues”, has nothing to do with ASEAN community-building. It will not satisfy domestic constituents or give people on the street the feeling that they are truly living in ASEAN solidarity, in the big house of the ASEAN Community.

The ASEAN Institute of Peace and Reconciliation will hopefully not only contribute to building a new formula to face that challenge, but also become a credible institution to find various workable solutions to the modern ASEAN as it faces member state’s bilateral disputes.

ASEAN member states should be aware — in the era of outspoken and active public participation — that the ability to wield an elegant preventive form of diplomacy in bilateral (legal) border disputes, for example, will have a strong correlation to the public’s support of ASEAN community building.

These bilateral, legal-based disputes should be well communicated to the public by both conflicting parties. Domestic “hypernationalistic elements”, with incomplete and misleading information, will unnecessary derail the spirit of ASEAN community building.

Social capital is essential to gaining public support. ASEAN should invest heavily to build public trust, as the strongest social capital that ASEAN has is the workable regional mechanism to make better lives for the people in the region. ASEAN, with its unique capabilities, can reduce political tensions which are caused by legal-based, bilateral boundary disputes.

That is why it is now urgently needed for, let say, the ASEAN Secretariat to work with the respective member states to provide communication strategies to the media in the case of bilateral, legal-based disputes. The ASEAN Secretariat joined with the Committee of Permanent Representatives to formulate a mechanism of public communications with the media so that ASEAN still has its public trust and support to bridge those public misunderstandings.

While ASEAN is being recognized internationally of having all the mediation capabilities to create workable preventive diplomacy and credible mediation instruments, regarding bilateral relations, member states fail to provide joint strategic management of public perception.

Bilateral elements of ASEAN’s member states are still being pictured as deeply dividing the society, in which people live together as strangers full of hatred and fearing that the other people pose a danger. This is not the ASEAN Community that we, the people of ASEAN, actually expect.

ASEAN’s preventive diplomacy should include not only a formula to find a workable solution to stop “people-to-people misunderstandings”, but, more than that, it should create the strongest social capital possible. Now is the time for ASEAN to engineer a creative strategic public communication management in the case of negative public response to the bilateral, legal-based disputes among member states.

The writer is a diplomat and a political scientist with degrees from the University of Indonesia and Monash University, Australia. The opinions expressed are his own.