Learning Diplomacy: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam Diplomats in ASEAN

Summary

For nearly two decades, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has served as a vehicle for the postsocialist states of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam (CLMV) to seek diplomatic recognition and enmesh their economies with the dominant discourses, structures, and visions of post-Cold War capitalist modernity. Notwithstanding the ambivalent consequences of CLMV membership for ASEAN, existing studies suggest that the benefits of membership for these newer and poorer states have been starkly apparent: from gaining entry to a panoply of ASEAN driven diplomatic arrangements spanning the Asia-Pacific, and securing leverage in managing their involvements with the Great Powers, to restructuring their regulatory and tariff regimes to accede to the WTO, and, cumulatively, consolidating the bases of regime security. In both scholarly and lay understandings of how CLMV states benefit from ASEAN, then, attention has been firmly on the political, security and economic outcomes of these processes, with diplomacy viewed as a passive instrument to pursue these ends. Such a static view of diplomacy, I argue, obscures a vital mechanism in and through which these broader macro-social changes are being sought and accomplished.

Diplomats and their foreign ministries are not the only actors in the gamut of CLMV-ASEAN involvements and nor are they the final arbiters of foreign policy decision-making. That said, it is instructive to foreground diplomats and diplomacy in the context of ASEAN-CLMV interactions on two counts. First, ASEAN has historically been a prerogative of diplomats and the foreign ministry — from its early beginnings as an exclusively foreign ministry-led process, to contemporary tussles in the age of expansive “community building” where an otherwise weaker foreign ministry wrestles with, if not asserts itself over, other powerful ministries (Defence, Finance) by keeping watch over the procedures and coordination of ASEAN activities.

Second, and more importantly, it is worth emphasizing the irreducibly diplomatic quality of the varied interactions through which official “ASEAN” is produced. Be they diplomats from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), trade representatives and officials from various other ministries, or leaders at Summits, individuals performing the state must be sited around a meeting table with table-top flags, room flags, and country place cards; must advance “national positions”; and must learn — if not cope — with a putatively “ASEAN Way” of negotiation and decision making.