Earlier this month, Derek Grossman published an opinion piece in Nikkei Asia (“ASEAN falls short again,” May 7) that relitigated the many failings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Grossman’s example was Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs.” Malaysia, the current ASEAN chair, sought a collective response to Washington’s trade threats, but individual member states opted instead to pursue bilateral trade negotiations to protect their own interests.
On paper, maybe ASEAN could have done a little more collectively, but it’s hard to see how. After all, Washington’s tariffs were targeted against individual ASEAN states, each with different tariff percentages and each for different reasons. Trade-dependent Vietnam and Cambodia are naturally much more concerned than, say, the Philippines. Moreover, ASEAN couldn’t tell Hanoi to buy more U.S. goods any more than it could instruct Cambodia to drop its tariffs on U.S. imports. Frankly, I’m not sure how ASEAN could have offered a collective response other than to say to Trump, “we’re collectively worth $4 trillion and we’re not going to play your game.” That said, playing chicken with Trump might have been the best policy, as Beijing has now shown.
2021 was actually the year that one should have abandoned all faith in ASEAN progression. First was the Myanmar coup, the biggest internal crisis the bloc has faced since its expansion in the 1990s. Adopting the Five-Point Consensus, a vapid list of ideals, took three months. By the end of 2021, it was apparent that ASEAN wasn’t going to do anything of significance to intervene in the Myanmar civil war. Second was a COVID-19 vaccine program. Unlike the U.S. tariffs or the Myanmar coup, COVID-19 vaccines affected each Southeast Asian country in the same way, and each probably would have done better had they cooperated.
Essentially, there were vaccines somewhere in the world (the U.S., U.K., China, and Russia, mainly), and there were 700 million Southeast Asians who needed them. The question was logistics. ASEAN could have pooled its resources and influence to import vaccines at a discounted rate. This was what the European Union did. Instead, it was a free-for-all, with massive differences between countries in access and use of vaccines. Frankly, after this, any hope of an ASEAN federal experiment should have been over.
I’ve argued for more than a decade that ASEAN is essentially a gentleman’s club for discussing business and world politics. That’s it. Importantly, it does what it does better than most regional organizations – the African Union, for instance. However, it won’t resolve regional crises. Any notion that it could become something like a European Union, where national sovereignty is sacrificed for the collective greater good, is the result of Southeast Asian hubris and other world leaders patronizing the region for their own gain.
What do Cambodia and Brunei have in common, historically and in the present day, except the happenstance of geography? However much people continue to think that by saying it, it will be so, Southeast Asianess isn’t a concept that makes sense for the majority of Southeast Asians. There’s no notion that, say, an Indonesian should suffer a little so that a Malaysian benefits. How’s there going to be an ASEAN-led response to the South China Sea when, quite frankly, the likes of Laos or Myanmar don’t really care about the outcome? Will Vientiane or Phnom Penh voluntarily relinquish billions of dollars of Chinese investment in an act of solidarity with Manila? Maybe some Singaporean politicians might prefer a democratic Myanmar, but the ongoing civil war and barbarism haven’t stopped Singaporean companies from being among the biggest investors in Myanmar since 2021. How goes Islamic solidarity when it comes to China and the Uyghurs?
By comparison, not only is Europe is far more homogeneous, especially ideationally, the whole of Europe also has a shared story of self-sacrifice for the mutual good: the defeat of Nazism. For the victors of the Second World War, blood was spilled on behalf of neighbors. For the defeated, especially Germany, the lesson was that only through tempering national sovereignty could they stop themselves from again committing such an atrocity. It’s impossible to exaggerate just how much the Second World War reshaped European thinking. The historian Tom Holland has argued, quite reasonably, that Adolf Hitler has replaced the Devil in secular Europe’s imagination of evil. Whenever Europeans find themselves asking “what’s morally good,” their navigational answer is, “that which is as far away from Auschwitz as possible.”
In Southeast Asia, there is no unifying story of sacrifice for a neighbor nor a shared, ethical idea of what leads to barbarism. (It used to be anti-communism, but that was dropped in the 1990s.) The only constant is anti-colonization, but the lesson from that is to prioritize national sovereignty above all else. To put it another way, the European story is that excessive nationalism leads to tyranny; the Southeast Asian story is that insufficient nationalism leads to tyranny. And you’re not going to create a federal-like ASEAN that can effectively respond to regional crises if the only unifying credo is that any undermining of national sovereignty equates to chaos.
That’s a potted history, and, of course, things are more complicated. However, frankly, Southeast Asia lacks the ethical or ideational substructure on which to build an organization that might resolve a crisis that compels member states to make a sacrifice for the greater good. Many Southeast Asian states, like Singapore, tell themselves that they’re Confucian communitarians, but it’s rank individualism on the world stage. Grossman concluded that “in moments that directly challenge ASEAN to resolve intraregional differences, it has consistently fallen short. This cannot stand…Southeast Asia – and the world – needs an effective ASEAN now more than ever.”
My conclusion would be that after 2021, we should have stopped asking when ASEAN is going to finally get its boots on and, instead, started focusing on possible alternatives. Leave ASEAN to what it does well and create new, separate institutions composed of cooperative member states that have shared interests in certain problems. Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s also watching someone do the same thing over and over and expecting them to do something different eventually.