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10. The "ASEAN Way"
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
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The “ASEAN Way” 45 By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville 10. THE “ASEAN WAY” DAVID CAPIE and PAUL EVANS Acentral characteristic of the “ASEAN way” has been its cautious attitude towards formal institutionalization.1 Singapore’s Foreign Minister S. Jayakumar has called this ASEAN’s predilection for “organizational minimalism”.2 Robert Scalapino has described it as a process of “soft regionalism” or “soft dialogue”3 while Alastair Iain Johnston uses the term “thin institutionalization”.4 In essence, all these labels suggest that ASEAN is a different regional institution from those that have appeared in Europe since World War II.5 Its member states do not seek to create a political union nor does the institution have any supranational authority. Rather, ASEAN is an example of “sovereignty-enhancing regionalism” where most decision-making powers continue to reside in the various national capitals. ASEAN’s institutional resources reflect its preference for informality. Compared with an entity such as the European Union (EU), ASEAN has only a modest bureaucratic apparatus, although its Jakarta-based Secretariat has expanded its role in recent years.6 Both the ARF and APEC have followed ASEAN’s example. The ARF has no permanent professional staff or Secretariat, and the APEC Secretariat in Singapore is small.7 The preference for informality is also reflected in the labels used to describe these institutions. Since the establishment of the ARF in 1994, ASEAN representatives have been careful to describe it as a “dialogue forum” rather than the apparently more formal-sounding “multilateral security mechanism”.8 A similar preference for less formal language has affected the ARF’s inter-sessional process. At the second ARF meeting in 1995, it was agreed to establish inter-sessional working groups. However, China objected to the use of the term working groups and opposed an openended timetable because “this smacked of thicker institutionalization”.9 The meeting eventually compromised and designated the groups as inter-sessional support groups (ISGs) and inter-sessional support meetings (ISMs). Many of the same arguments have taken place about institutionalization within APEC. APEC has been referred to as a Excerpted from David Capie and Paul Evans, The Asia-Pacific Security Lexicon (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), by permission of the authors and the publisher. 010 AR Ch 10 22/9/03, 12:39 PM 45 46 David Capie and Paul Evans By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville “consultative mechanism” to clearly distinguish it from an “economic community”, a term that has obvious European connotations . A 1993 Australian proposal to use “community” in the APEC context was met with consternation by APEC’s Asian members.10 In 1994, APEC’s advisory Eminent Persons Group (EPG) recommended “the progressive development of a community of Asia Pacific economies with free and open trade and investment”. According to the EPG, “community” was not meant to imply complete economic integration or even a customs union, but “simply to connote a like-minded group that aims to remove barriers to economic exchange among its members in the interests of all”.11 The preference of the “ASEAN way” for informality can also be seen in the Association’s use of consultative processes such as “habits of dialogue” and nonbinding commitments rather than legalistic formulae and codified rules.12 According to Khong Yuen Foong, “ASEAN officials have contrasted their approach to [those] that emphasize legal contracts, formal declarations , majoritarian rules, and confrontational negotiating tactics.”13 Likewise, neither APEC nor the ARF has adopted formal dispute settlement mechanisms. APEC proponents explicitly rejected calls for the establishment of a regional dispute settlement mechanism. They did not see a need for “highly legalistic” procedures such as those of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Instead APEC’s Bogor Declaration only calls for the creation of “a voluntary, consultative dispute mediation service”.14 Similarly, for the ARF, the objective of conflict resolution has had a mixed reception. The ASEAN Concept Paper, presented at the second ARF meeting in 1995, initially proposed a three-stage approach to future security co-operation: beginning with confidence-building, then preventive diplomacy, and finally conflict resolution. However, after some discussion the term conflict resolution was changed to “elaboration of approaches to conflicts”, apparently because China found conflict resolution “too formal a category” and opposed any such role for the ARF, at least in the immediate future.15 While this is a rather...