9 - Whither Southeast Asia?

Summary

“Asean's Quest for an Identity Gains Urgency” — thus read the headline of a story in the Straits Times of Singapore on 5 December 2005. The story reported the results of a survey conducted among a thousand English-speaking urban residents in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam on, among other things, whether “people in ASEAN identified with one another”. Although the survey found doubts and scepticism about the pace of regional integration in ASEAN, it also revealed that six out of ten polled agreed that “people in ASEAN identified with one another”. Perhaps what is really important about this survey is not the numbers that did not agree with the question, but the numbers that did.

The year 2005 was the first in which the members of ASEAN celebrated “ASEAN Day” on 8 August. Three years later, in 2008, a different survey, this time of 2,170 students in all ten ASEAN countries (including both arts and social sciences as well as science and technology students), conducted by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, found that “over 75 per cent agreed that they felt themselves to be citizens of ASEAN. Nearly 90 per cent felt that membership in ASEAN was beneficial to their nation and nearly 70 per cent felt that it was beneficial to them personally.”

These surveys came at a time of increasing reference to the regional idea and identity in ASEAN official statements and the speeches of leaders of Southeast Asian countries. For example, ASEAN's 2020 vision, issued in 1997, aims at developing “an ASEAN community conscious of its ties of history, aware of its cultural heritage and bound by a common regional identity”. More eloquently, Singapore's then Foreign Minister George Yeo argued in 2005 that:

there is a coherence in Southeast Asia which we know exists and grows stronger by the day. … Because Southeast Asia was never united as one political entity, there is tolerance for diversity, a willingness to syncretize, a cosmopolitan spirit which welcomes foreigners in our midst and the mixing of blood, especially among members of the elite.