The 2nd ASEAN Reader

105. Region, Security and the Return of History

514 Anthony Milner By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville 105. REGION, SECURITY AND THE RETURN OF HISTORY ANTHONY MILNER Excerpted from Anthony Milner, Region, Security and the Return of History (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and Department of History, National University of Singapore, 2003), by permission of the author and the publishers. It is true that ASEAN faces important practical tasks today, and that the builders of ASEAN have given a lot of attention to the slow and complex process of establishing common norms, and a sense of community , in the Southeast Asian region. And in setting out to defend such processes as being of vital and current importance, I can almost sense one of my colleagues in Canberra in security studies tapping his foot with impatience. But the fact is that there are tough reasons for taking talk seriously in regional relations, especially security relations. THE CONVERGENCE ERA The first observation that can be made is that to use ‘talk-shop’ in a dismissive manner is in one sense anachronistic. It expresses an attitude that was more appropriate in an earlier era. Impatience with ASEAN and its culture-sensitive, dialogue processes was relatively understandable a decade ago. In retrospect, the early and mid-90s was an optimistic period for globalizers: think of the heady language then about the prospects for APEC’s open regionalism, with its commitment to tariff reduction and the implementation of international standards, international norms and international regimes.1 The mid-1990s was still the time of the miracle economies of Asia, and many commentators believed that such economic progress would necessarily be accompanied by liberal political change. Unlike Raffles, the former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten thought the link between trade and ideas did not need to be promoted by government. It was automatic, irresistible. You “cannot compartmentalize freedom,” he said. “You may build walls between economics and politics, but they are walls of sand.”2 According to Francis Fukuyama, history had come to an end: there was, he said, “no ideology with pretensions to universality”,3 not even ideology based on Islam, that could possibly challenge liberal democracy. In Australia, the respected Foreign Minister of the time, Gareth Evans, assured us that just as eco105 AR Ch 105 22/9/03, 1:03 PM 514 Region, Security and the Return of History 515 By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville nomies were being transformed so English was spreading as a lingua franca in the region, and a cultural convergence was being consolidated around such liberal principles as multiculturalism and democracy .4 From the perspective of such a convergence paradigm — for some a very optimistic vision — there were two prominent spoilers: Prime Minister Mahathir and the eminent American commentator, Samuel Huntington, who opposed the convergence vision with his own dark spectre of a ‘clash of civilisations’.5 In the convergence era it was easy to be neglectful of history. Even historians sensed the danger. In the 1994 edition of his popular history of Southeast Asia, Milton Osborne in fact found “so much evidence of modernity” that, as a professional historian, he felt obliged to warn that we could not necessarily conclude that the “countries and peoples” of the region had “lost their individual identities and succumbed to western and global norms”.6 With such a devaluing of history — such faith in the momentum of liberal convergence — it was understandable that many of the preoccupations of ASEAN were viewed with impatience. The very way in which ASEAN builders described their task would cause irritation. The repeated stress on the “patience, tolerance, non-aggressive attitudes” said to be necessary in order to create “common value systems”;7 the perceived need to identify cultural elements which are “congruent with some values of each of the member states”;8 the oftdeclared ambition to create a “true understanding and appreciation of each other’s cultures and each other’s interests”;9 the objective that all the “relevant actors” in ASEAN should “continuously be exposed to one another”;10 the declared desire to build more than a “mere organisation”, and to cater also for the “spiritual life”11 of the Southeast Asian community — these are the types of aspirations that frustrated the critics. The common value system itself, which the builders of ASEAN carefully assembled — the shared elements that the ideologues identified and reconstructed; the extensive talk about ‘Asian values’ — added to the...