ASEAN: Where Process Has Priority

[ 202 ] asia policy ASEAN: Where Process Has Priority Donald E. Weatherbee A review of Alice D. Ba (Re)Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 u 344 pp. In July 2009, arriving in Bangkok for her first dialogue with her Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) counterparts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exultingly declared, “We’re back!” What she meant was that in relations with Asia, the United States would give higher priority to Southeast Asia and ASEAN, the region’s multilateral framework for intraregional and international cooperation. It is not, however, as if the United States ever left. Since 2005, the framework for ASEAN-U.S. cooperation has been the “Joint Vision Statement on the ASEAN-U.S. Enhanced Partnership” and the 2006 Plan of Action, which produced the U.S. Comprehensive Development Assistance Program for ASEAN in 2008. These programs have had a low level of political visibility. Secretary Clinton’s Bangkok exclamation was less an issue of what the United States was doing than of the growing perception by regional elites that the United States was not doing enough. The concern was that Washington had neglected the broader array of U.S. national interests in the region as the rise of China threatened the balance of power. The region has welcomed what have been up to now the Obama administration’s largely symbolic actions to demonstrate a higher level and greater intensity of U.S. engagement with ASEAN. The most important of these has been the August 2009 U.S. accession to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) in Southeast Asia. The decision to sign on to the TAC added a significant plank to the U.S. regional platform; until then, the United States had been the only major ASEAN dialogue partner that had not accepted the region’s normative framework for peaceful relations. Secretary Clinton promised to upgrade the U.S. diplomatic presence in ASEAN by appointing a resident ambassador. President Barack Obama’s meeting en bloc with his ASEAN counterparts was another key step toward a closer ASEAN-U.S. donalde.weatherbeeis the Donald S. Russell Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina and author of International Relations in Southeast Asia: The Struggle for Autonomy (2005). He can be reached at . [ 203 ] book reviews relationship. Obama’s November 2009 meeting during the Singapore APEC session included all ten ASEAN heads of government. It is expected that summitry will become an ongoing element of the official ASEAN-U.S. partnership. The willingness of the U.S. president to sit down in an ASEAN setting with Myanmar’s prime minister underlined another change in the new administration’s approach to the region. The U.S. relationship with ASEAN will no longer be held hostage by Myanmar (still Burma in U.S. governmentspeak ). This was applauded in Southeast Asia as proof of the decoupling of Myanmar from Washington’s appreciation of ASEAN. Although U.S. economic sanctions remain in place, an emerging strategy of seeking dialogue and engagement with, not just isolation of, Myanmar is convergent with ASEAN’s approach to the Myanmar regime. Even as the Obama administration seems willing to deepen U.S. involvement with ASEAN, questions can be raised about the grouping’s institutional relevance and future cohesion. Under its new charter there is no real change in ASEAN’s modus operandi, which rests on absolute sovereignty and collective non-interference in a member’s domestic affairs. Decisionmaking remains that of consensus. Tough political issues are not brought to ASEAN’s table. Although ASEAN has pledged to build an ASEAN Community by 2015, this requires leadership that does not exist. The annual transfer of the ASEAN chair to member countries on an alphabetic rotation means that the drive and thrust for community-building is at the mercy of the will and politics of the year’s ASEAN head. We are now at the intersection of two political dynamics: the Obama administration’s declared interest in a deeper engagement with an ASEAN that seems to be flailing about for political relevance. Alice D. Ba’s book on ASEAN and its place...