Beyond 40 years: reframing ASEAN in New Zealand's strategic outlook: Thitinan Pongsudhirak discusses the new challenges and opportunities in the relationship between New Zealand and South-east Asia.

• Author: Pongsudhirak, Thitinan
• Position: Essay

ASEAN is Asia's most durable regional organisation. In fact, it is the most successful unnatural regional organisation of large size in contemporary world history. ASEAN is attempting to do something no other regional organisation has done--to promote integration without supra-nationality. This is a monumental task, and the recent summit indicated that ASEAN is increasingly challenged in its efforts to bind into the ASEAN Community by the end of 2015. Mainland South-east Asia is where real integration will take place in the immediate future. ASEAN's dialogue partners, such as New Zealand, should reframe their focus to take account of this development.

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The mid-1970s were a momentous and tumultuous period for South-east Asia. Communist expansionism was at its zenith, claiming Cambodia, Laos and then-South Vietnam. With Indo-China states falling to communism like dominoes, Thailand resisted as the frontline bulwark against communism as a treaty ally of the United States. At that time, ASEAN with its five founding members--Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore--was still in its formative years. These five countries cohered mainly to put down an intra-regional conflict, with the aims of preserving regional autonomy and pursuing national development priorities. Partly to achieve these aims, ASEAN began to engage in dialogues with regional states outside its fold, giving rise to the ASEAN-New Zealand relationship. With South-east Asia divided between communist and non-communist states in the thick of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, ASEAN eventually weathered the storm of proxy conflicts and overcame the regional divide by incorporating the communist states over time, thereby realising one South-east Asia.

But as ASEAN turns 48, with the ASEAN-New Zealand axis at 40, the ten-member organisation is facing new challenges and opportunities that impinge on the bilateral relationship. ASEAN is now poised to come up with a three-pronged community by the end of 2015, while retaining its central role in the region's architecture-building efforts. Apart from the formal objectives of the ASEAN Community based on the ASEAN Charter, other dynamics of regional integration and co-operation are also in motion. This short essay discusses what might be expected of the ASEAN Community in the near term and what other modalities and frameworks might some or all of the ASEAN states come up with in their neighbourhood in principle and practice. The main thrust here is that the ASEAN Community objectives will be partially met but not nearly as much as envisaged and hyped up by the ASEAN governments. In other words, ASEAN will not become any sort of a common market anytime soon. However, the development and integration of mainland South-east Asia appears likely to surpass what the ASEAN Community has set out on paper.

Mainland South-east Asia's rise yields both attractive opportunities and daunting challenges for ASEAN itself and for ASEAN's relationships with dialogue partners, such as New Zealand. Let us start with the most recent ASEAN summit.

Elusive community

The aftermath of the 26th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur on 26-28 April indicated that ASEAN is increasingly challenged in its efforts to bind into the ASEAN Community by the end of 2015. Beset by domestic political tensions and pulled in different directions by geo-political forces in the face of ambitious objectives, ASEAN lacks thrust at a time when it requires momentum the most. Yet ASEAN is not going away; it just will not reach where it wants to be based on the ASEAN Community goals. Indeed, ASEAN is on course to fall short of its integration objectives laid out in the ASEAN Community with its three community pillars, namely political-security, economic and socio-cultural. Southeast Asia's regional grouping will need to regroup and map out post-2015 plans for a kind of economic integration and political collaboration that are consistent with its DNA. Its nurturing over 48 years has been phenomenal, but its natural attributes from history and geography to divergent...