6 - Challenging Change: Nontraditional Security, Democracy, and Regionalism

Summary

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) turned forty in August 2007. To many scholars and other observers who closely followed the evolution of the organization, the celebration came with high expectations. ASEAN watchers especially looked forward to the unveiling of the much-awaited ASEAN Charter, which would set fresh directions for the Association. The Charter was expected to facilitate by 2020 the envisioned establishment of an ASEAN Community with three pillars: an ASEAN Security Community (ASC), an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and an ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. Observers also looked to the Charter to indicate how far ASEAN might be willing and able to move toward a less pragmatic and more normative framework for regionalism in Southeast Asia, including the possible transformation of the organization itself. Would ASEAN widen its traditional focus on interstate affairs to encompass a more people-centered agenda? What policies and actions would such an enlarged horizon imply?

Increasingly in the late 1990s, ASEAN was considered a sunset arrangement because of its perceived failure to avert the multiple repercussions of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. But the subsequent prospects of a Community and a Charter reinvigorated interest in the Association. Since 2001, the grouping has been actively engaged by the major powers—the United States, China, Japan, and India. A number of countries, including the European Union (EU), have also signed or are negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) with the Association. Prior to the dramatic and, for ASEAN, embarrassing crisis that struck one of its members, Myanmar, in September–October 2007, one could argue that ASEAN's reputation had recovered and was improving, as it sought to refresh and ready itself for the future.

Especially since the events in Myanmar in 2007, it is advisable to tread carefully, avoiding unrealistic expectations that the ASC is bound to succeed, but also not joining the camp of those who dismiss such a venture as wholly beyond ASEAN's ability to realize.