1 - Critical Terms: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia

Summary

Security, democracy, regionalism, and Southeast Asia are critical terms in many ways. There is a critical lack of knowledge about how they interact, yet the topics they denote are critically important. The concepts themselves invite critical—discerning—analysis of the kind represented in this book. As an instance of regionalism, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been criticized for its inability to alleviate the insecurity and lack of democracy suffered by citizens of its most brutally ruled member state, Myanmar (or Burma). Events in 2007–08 underscored the critical—urgent—need for reform and relief in that misgoverned country. In 2007, ASEAN's effort to reform itself by drafting and signing a new Charter to orient its actions in the twenty-first century elicited critiques from inside and outside the region. In 2008, scathing criticism was leveled at the Association for failing to criticize the Myanmar junta's malign neglect of the surviving but homeless and hungry victims of Cyclone Nargis.

The egregious case of Myanmar evokes a wider range of issues, ideas, and interactions involving security, democracy, and regionalism that are fostering hard choices for Southeast Asia3 in the twenty-first century. These matters form the subject of this book. Following this introduction, Jörn Dosch and Termsak Chalermpalanupap offer, respectively, a scholar's and a practitioner's assessment of ASEAN as it faces the challenges of ensuring security, advancing democracy, and reforming regionalism itself.

Five key issues are then taken up by as many authors. Rizal Sukma asks whether ASEAN can augment its concern for security with an agenda for democracy. Kyaw Yin Hlaing reviews the resilience of autocracy and the suppression of democracy in Myanmar, and asks what if anything ASEAN can do about its most reviled member. Mely Caballero-Anthony examines ASEAN's nontraditional security agenda—coping with nonmilitary threats that ignore national borders—and asks whether human rights and democracy could become a new regional policy frontier. Simon SC Tay chronicles regional efforts to quell one of these nontraditional threats, the damaging smoke from fires in Indonesia, and asks whether that country's democracy could be part of the problem.