3 - ASEAN Diplomacy and ASEAN Centrality

Summary

Insistence on ASEAN Centrality an Offshoot of Post-Colonialism and Cold-War Stigma

I believe that there is a historical explanation of why Member States which make up ASEAN have acquired an almost obsessive desire to insist on ASEAN Centrality in their dealings among themselves and their external partners. Wary of their past colonial experience of being dictated on in what they can and cannot do, say or think, and having become the arena on which major powers have flexed their military and political muscles in the not-so-distant past, ASEAN has used the principle of centrality as some kind of a mantra or antidote against repeating this bitter part of their colonial past. However, the awareness of insisting on ASEAN Centrality has not found itself in the 1967 Bangkok Declaration, except for a general reference to the avoidance of “external interference” in a preambular paragraph. It was only much later, after forty years, that it was spelled out and became preeminent in the ASEAN Charter which was adopted in 2007, particularly as a response to ASEAN Member States’ growing self-consciousness of weaning themselves away from foreign influence in the post-Cold War era. I can attribute this to the fact that in 1967 when ASEAN was established, the Cold War was still raging and the original ASEAN 5, although trying hard to remove the vestiges of the Cold War stigma that has divided them in earlier attempts at regionalism, have not yet totally weaned themselves from these predispositions. Still in the infancy of their regional experiment, they had not yet discovered their unique brand of multilateralism which, they would discover later on, could serve as an alternative to the push-and-pull pressure of their former colonial masters and the big powers that are raring to once again use this arena in flexing their political and military muscles. In recent times, with a long queue of external partners desiring to engage it, ASEAN has found its niche and has tried to shake off these vestiges of colonialism and Cold War by insisting on ASEAN Centrality as a foundational principle of its existence and a guaranty of its sustainability and relevance in the web of complex power-play in the region.