37 - ASEAN – A Post-Colonial Sisterhood

Summary

With Myanmar opening up faster than anyone ever expected the question how ASEAN is to develop as a community in the near future gets ever more interesting.

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” is of course a saying that holds especially true for an organisation with 10 disparate members and which is given to unanimous decision making.

Ever since Myanmar joined in 19997, it had been considered ASEAN's stepchild – going its own way, recalcitrant and disliked by neighbours near and far.

But ASEAN stay relatively loyal to its family member, mainly because it had no choice. But that patience seems to have paid off, and Myanmar has become the prodigal son returned to the fold.

How much humble pie it will eat is anyone's guess, but the recent election of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party into parliament bodes well for the country and ASEAN.

It also brings us to the critical issue of how ASEAN's viability and wellbeing are dependent on the state capacity of its members.

That is also another way of saying that ASEAN's progress as a community is dependent on the decolonizing cum nation-building process in each country syncing with each other.

ASEAN as a community has capacity to act only if its member-states are politically stable and economically developing. This basically means that each of them must reach a point where it feels confident enough to cooperate and compete regionally, not to mention globally.

To the extent they don't feel that confidence, their governments take measures to isolate, if not the country's whole political economy, then at least selected and strategic parts of it.

A case like Myanmar clearly had not felt it could handle foreign challenges when its own sense of unity and community was in question. All across ASEAN, we see that its members adopted different combinations of openness and protectiveness to facilitate its development and defend itself.

These combinations do change, as we have seen in the case of the Indochinese countries. Whether or not these comprehensive measures were or are beneficial, well-advised or outmoded, the issue is still about a fear of outside forces overwhelming weak internal forces. This fear belongs within the scenario of colonialism and its successor, globalisation. This fear is certainly not an invalid one.