2 - ASEAN and Regional Security

Summary

Of the ASEAN Declaration's seven “aims and purposes”, only one refers to regional peace and security. The rest have to do with economic, social, cultural, training, technical and scientific cooperation, and the promotion of Southeast Asian studies. The downplaying of political and security matters was deliberate. ASEAN's founders wished to avoid the impression that the new association would serve as a defence pact or military alliance or that it would favour one side or the other in the Cold War. They did not want ASEAN to be perceived as a threat to anyone or to continue being an arena — actual or potential — for the quarrels of the strong.

Yet, it is clear that, from the beginning, ASEAN's larger purposes had to do mainly with regional peace and security — although, emphatically, solely through the use of non-military means. In The ASEAN Reader (K. S. Sandhu et al, compilers, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), Thanat Khoman, who, as Thailand's foreign minister, was one of the signatories to the Declaration that established ASEAN, looked back to the association's founding and wrote:

But why did this region need an organization for cooperation?

The reasons were numerous. The most important of them was the fact that, with the withdrawal of the colonial powers, there would have been a power vacuum which could have attracted outsiders to step in for political gains. As the colonial masters had discouraged any form of intraregional contact, the idea of neighbors working together in a joint effort was thus to be encouraged.