ASEAN at Forty: A Balance Sheet

Summary

In the year 2007, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) reached its fortieth year of existence. It had been founded on 8 August 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.

As ASEAN evolved over those forty years, it was praised as the most successful among the world's regional associations of developing countries. Many countries and groups of countries, including the world's leading powers, sought increasingly closer links with it. At the same time, ASEAN was criticized, even vili fied, for not living up to its promise and potential — at least, the promise and potential as the critics saw them.

As is true of many things in human affairs, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these two views. The beginning of the association's fifth decade is as good a time as any for locating where in the objective middle the truth about ASEAN is.

Peace, Stability, Regionalism, and Human Security

From the beginning, ASEAN set norms for relations between its member states. These basically were:

• the rejection of threat or use of force;

• the peaceful settlement of disputes; and

• non-interference in internal affairs.

ASEAN's founding members knew that their progress, security, and even survival depended on peace, stability, and development of the region as a whole. However, the relations between them had been embittered by acrimony and conflict. Their territorial and other disputes threatened to turn to violence. Southeast Asia's immense ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and historical diversity was both a blessing and a potential source of conflict. The countries of Southeast Asia were still struggling with the legacies of colonialism. The region was divided as well as threatened by the tensions and uncertainties of the global Cold War and by the related hot war in Indochina, with intervention in the affairs of the Southeast Asian nations a common instrument in the prosecution of those wars. China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a disruptive force for the region as it spilled over into Southeast Asia.