Reinventing ASEAN

14. ASEAN in 2030: The Long View

273 14 ASEAN IN 2030 The Long View Hadi Soesastro INTRODUCTION In 2030 ASEAN will be sixty-three years old. For human beings, this is near retirement age. Some will begin to slow down, others remain as vigorous as ever, if not more so. The official retirement age is being raised in many societies as aged persons continue to be productive. With age, a person is also supposed to become wiser. However, old age brings with it its own idiosyncrasies. A great deal has been written on the subject of aging. A booming industry has arisen in response to the growing demand by an everincreasing number of aged population worldwide for revitalization, physically and mentally, as the biological clock continues to tick. What about organizations, institutions, or regimes? Do they evolve along similar lifecycles as human beings do? There are views suggesting that after more than fifty years the so-called Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) need revitalization. The European Union has gone through continuous evolution, from initially being a sector-specific (coal and steel) arrangement to becoming a Common Market, and then a Community before it formed a single market and subsequently transforming itself into a full-fledged (economic and political) Union, eventually having a common currency for all its members. The ultimate objective of forming a ISEAS DOCUMENT DELIVERY SERVICE. No reproduction without permission of the publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, SINGAPORE 119614. FAX: (65)7756259; TEL: (65) 8702447; E-MAIL: publish@iseas.edu.sg© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore 274 Hadi Soesastro© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore political union was the vision for the organization at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. This chapter will not address the big question about how organizations evolve. To be able to draw conclusions about the life-cycle of organizations or institutions, one has to study a large number of organizations and their individual settings. The sole interest of this chapter is in regard to one particular organization, namely, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), that was established on 8 August 1967. This chapter has been inspired by a question posed by Jesus Estanislao, one of the co-editors of this book, about what is likely to happen to ASEAN in the year 2030. There was no particular reason for Estanislao to pick that year apart from the fact that by then ASEAN would have been around for twice as long as it has existed thus far. In a sense, it is perhaps based on an interest to speculate on how ASEAN might evolve in the second thirty years. This interesting question provided the impetus to examine ASEAN from the perspective of the “long view”. How useful is it to take such a long-term view? In fact, ASEAN officials have already produced a long-term vision for ASEAN in 2020. The vision is meant to give ASEAN a sense of direction in its further development. It was developed in response to the growing concern that ASEAN might have lost its direction. The vision is a comprehensive one, but it reads almost like a wish list. ASEAN officials have formulated a plan of action towards achieving the vision. The long view is not an exercise in producing visions. As proposed by Schwartz (1991), it is about making choices today with an understanding of how they might turn out. The long view does not prescribe a formal methodology. Rather, it offers a disciplined way of thinking. The “art of the long view”, thus, is an engagement in “convergent thinking about divergent futures”. Indeed, one can think of divergent futures for ASEAN. There are thirty years ahead of us to the year 2030. In the next thirty years, many things can happen to the organization as they have happened over the past thirty years. The exercise of looking into ASEAN’s next thirty years will have to take as a starting point the fact that, as an organization, ASEAN in 2000 appears to have been weakened rather than strengthened. There is less cohesion and weaker solidarity among the members. ASEAN seems to have lost its sense of purpose, diplomatic clout, and support of the people. Observers have regarded ASEAN today as being in disarray, if not in a crisis. Others have made a harsher judgement and concluded that ASEAN is a failure. The variety of perceptions regarding ASEAN today is discussed in...