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95. The Evolving Regional Role of ASEAN
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
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478 Michael Leifer By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville 95. THE EVOLVING REGIONAL ROLE OF ASEAN MICHAEL LEIFER Excerpted from Michael Leifer, “The Evolving Regional Role of ASEAN”, unpublished paper submitted to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1997. PROSPECT During the three decades which have passed since its formation, both ASEAN and its regional context have changed. In that period, the Association has demonstrated a facility for adaptation. The decisive point of adaptation occurred with the entry of Vietnam which marked a qualitative change in composition. Further enlargement will sustain that trend but, with membership beset by a much greater diversity in political identities, a working consensus will become more difficult to attain as well as making convergence in targets for economic cooperation more problematic. The Cambodian coup has also pointed up the difficulty of completely separating domestic from regional agendas. More intractable also will be the problem of addressing the most fundamental challenge to regional order arising from China’s rising power and extensive irredentist agenda.1 There remain a host of bilateral tensions among ASEAN states which have the potential to disturb working relationships. But they would not seem to be of the order of casus belli, including contending claims in the Spratly Islands. Moreover, any limited changes in the territorial and maritime status quo among individual ASEAN states would not necessarily have a radical effect on the regional environment. China’s claims fall into a different category, however, because of their far more extensive scope and also because their full realisation would be truly revolutionary in geopolitical terms. China has maintained a steely rectitude in asserting its claims to sovereign jurisdiction which the ASEAN states have not been able to persuade Beijing to address with a view to any compromise, so far. Within an enlarging ASEAN, however, a greater mixture of interests exist in addressing the problem of a rising China. The government in Bangkok, for example, appears comfortable in its current relationship with that in Beijing which it has no interest in prejudicing over 095 AR Ch 95 22/9/03, 1:01 PM 478 The Evolving Regional Role of ASEAN 479 By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville the South China Sea. The same may be said for Myanmar and Laos as newest members of the Association as well as for Cambodia whose government, in power through a violent coup, has looked to China to endorse its legitimacy. Although the defence of limited island holdings is within the military competence of some individual member states, ASEAN is not organized to defend the regional territorial and maritime status quo in the South China Sea; nor can it expect much support from the ARF despite the diplomatic centrality enjoyed by the Association . The ARF is based on ASEAN’s security model, while China exercises an effective veto on its security agenda. Moreover , it was left to individual governments to protest to Beijing when in May 1996, following ratification of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention, it employed the archipelago principle in drawing baselines around the Paracel Islands which are claimed also by Vietnam. China reserved its right to declare base-lines for the more contested Spratly Islands with the implication that it would also employ the archipelago principle for that group which, under International Law, is valid for mid-ocean archipelago states only. In the case of the South China Sea, ASEAN has been able to adopt a collective position only on the question of modalities as expressed in its Declaration of July 1992. Its inability to move effectively beyond that position is indicative of its corporate limitations. That said, ASEAN has shown itself to be a factor of a kind in China’s calculations in the context of its differences with the United States and Japan and in the light of its interest in promoting multipolarity within Asia-Pacific in its own interest. For example, in March/April 1997, a dispute between Vietnam and China over the right of one of the latter’s oil exploration rigs to operate at the margins of coastal waters in the South China Sea was defused after Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry called in heads of resident ASEAN missions in Hanoi for a briefing. All in all, however, ASEAN has not been able to do any more than secure a measure of accommodation of China’s part in its persistent...