Southeast Asia in 2021: A Year of Reckoning?

Summary

An eventful twelve months saw Southeast Asia beset by a number of familiar challenges. In some respects, the year began where the previous left off, with the COVID-19 pandemic threatening to take more lives and cause further damage to regional economies as new variants of the virus circulated. Not unlike the preceding year, the pandemic hampered hopes for a return to a more normal diplomatic schedule comprising in-person meetings, with many having to continue being conducted over sub-optimal virtual platforms. Indeed, this state of affairs was used to explain the delay in the completion of the much-awaited Code of Conduct on the South China Sea between China and ASEAN, which was originally targeted for 2021.

At the same time, the year also witnessed several new—in some cases, unexpected—developments that further complicated the conduct of regional affairs. The election of a new president in the United States was met with, in some sense, a sigh of relief from regional states as it signalled a return to a more predictable and familiar—but by no means straightforward—tone and tenor in relations with Washington. Nevertheless, American re-engagement in the Indo-Pacific has also occasioned the emergence of new Washington-led initiatives in the region that created ripples that Southeast Asian states have had to adjust to. Arguably the biggest test for ASEAN over the last year, however, must surely be developments in Myanmar; specifically, how to respond to the seizure of power by the military and creation of the State Administration Council (SAC) government, whose credibility and legitimacy were challenged both domestically and internationally. To be sure, the question of how to manage the fallout from the military coup in Myanmar exercised ASEAN tremendously as the international spotlight shone harshly on the organization.

The Persistent Cloud of COVID-19

For the governments of Southeast Asia, there is no gainsaying that COVID-19—and its impact on their respective economies and societies—persisted as a hangover from the previous year.

Despite initial success in containing the virus via prompt and strict social distancing measures in some Southeast Asian countries, the appearance of the more infectious Delta variant quickly placed the region back on the defensive as governments scrambled to reimpose lockdowns and movement controls.