ASEAN Regionalism: Cooperation, Values, and Institutionalization by Christopher B. Roberts (review)

How do you organize a regional grouping in the most diverse region of the world? This question has bedeviled Southeast Asian leaders since the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was established in 1967.

It has often been said that regionalism requires shared values to facilitate cooperation and to reduce the misunderstandings that frequently arise from cultural and political differences. Unlike Europe, which shares a common Christian foundation of sorts, Southeast Asia has had no similar sense of common bonding. It was understood not as a region but a crossroads for Indian, Chinese, Muslim and Western civilizations. The idea of Southeast Asia as a region is of recent origin and its general acceptance was a product of regionalism, ASEAN and its predecessor, the Association of Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, despite the lack of cultural and political commonalities, ASEAN not only managed to survive but to expand, both in terms of membership and function, to the point where it became a model for similar enterprises in other regions. ASEAN has succeeded because of the common bonds that were created between the political elites of member states, and in particular their foreign ministries. Leaders would work together in the “ASEAN way” according to which decisions were made by consensus avoiding any interference in each other’s domestic affairs. They played golf to get to know each other and sang karaoke in carefully managed events to promote personal ties. They demonstrated that regionalism in Southeast Asia could work in a culturally dissimilar context, unlike Europe.

Constructivists would claim that norms of cooperation were established between the political elites, strengthening regional cooperation and overcoming the barriers created by political and cultural diversity. Constructivists understand ASEAN as a grand norm building project in which declarations are made by the leaders which stimulate cooperative behaviour and promote the region’s steady integration. Realists, however, cringe at what they regard as ASEAN rhetoric and critically examine the empirical record to assess its success or otherwise. Christopher Roberts’ detailed study of ASEAN is the latest in a long line of works on the topic that include Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl (1982), Michael Leifer (1989) and Shaun Narine (2002).

In the first part of the book Roberts strongly reflects the exuberance of the Constructivists and their buoyant enthusiasm for the ASEAN norm building project. In the second part Roberts takes on the role of a Realist as he identifies the great gap between declaration and performance. Roberts utilizes two related concepts to trace ASEAN’s recent development and to assess its performance. One is Karl Deutsch’s idea of a “security community” which emerges as a major theme in his work. The notion was adopted by Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry when it proposed an ASEAN “security community” and was incorporated in the Bali Concorde II Declaration of 2003. This declaration set the goal of an “ASEAN community” which would be composed of economic, socio-cultural and security communities. The deadline was 2020, but later it was brought forward to 2015 in the hope that a shortened timeframe would stimulate greater efforts. According to Roberts, a security community is created when political, economic and security cooperation reaches a very high level where there are “dependable expectations of peaceful change” (p. 32). The second concept is “complex integration” which is understood as a high level of political, economic and cultural integration. The two concepts are interchangeable as one can be understood in terms of the other; complex integration is achieved when a security community is created.

After this Constructivist/Liberal Institutionalist beginning, Roberts examines ASEAN’s performance utilizing the results of extensive fieldwork — he conducted 150 interviews and two surveys with 919 respondents. When Roberts tests ASEAN in this way he finds it “high in ambition and low in performance” (p. 101). One major problem with ASEAN, as explained in chapter five, is the authoritarian-democratic divide in ASEAN which widened with the democratization of Indonesia after 1998. Democracies such as Indonesia and the Philippines lined up against authoritarian members...