ASEAN-Russia Relations

6. Southeast Asian Security Challenges: A View from Russia

Southeast Asian Security Challenges 43 6 Southeast Asian Security Challenges: A View from Russia Victor Sumsky THE BURDENS OF STUDYING ASEAN In a sense, the mere diligent registration of ASEAN-related events and schemes, not to mention academic analysis, has never been such a difficult task as it is now. By the standards of the association’s recent past, the number of statements, programmes and plans generated after the outbreak of the Asian crisis is stunning. Summits deemed historical are often separated from each other by just a few months. New political, economic and cultural initiatives — some of subregional character, others of intercontinental scope — are announced while implementation of those produced and publicized before them have barely started. One way to realize the magnitude of this process is to look at the list of official ASEAN acronyms on the association’s website. Consisting of fourteen pages in small font, it contains, along with catchy, comprehensible and easy-to-pronounce formulas like VAP (Vientiane Action Programme), not a few clumsy abbreviations (for instance, FOCPF standing for the Future Oriented Cooperation Projects Fund) plus such pearls of bureaucratic creativity as IDEA (The Initiative for the Development of East Asia) and ACCORD (ASEAN-China Cooperative Operations in Response to Dangerous Drugs).1 What is this — a sign of vibrancy or a reflection of vulnerability in a quickly changing world? One unfortunate 06 ASEAN-RussiaRelations Ch 6 23/1/06, 4:53 PM 43 44 Victor Sumsky historical parallel that comes to mind is Sukarno’s Guided Democracy — an era when a seemingly powerful regime was inventing acronyms by the dozen trying to dress reality up to its tastes and slipping in the meantime into a deadly crisis. WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THE NEW SECURITY THREATS? Be it as it may, it must be acknowledged that some issues arousing concern in the ASEAN capitals are called in the association’s documents by their names. These are terrorism, sea piracy, human smuggling, drug trafficking and new diseases, known together in the official parlance as the New Security Threats. Obviously, all and each of them represent a serious problem. But are they so terribly new? For instance, is drug-trafficking so novel to Southeast Asia? To find an answer, just think about what the name of Golden Triangle stands for. As for sea piracy, Spanish Manila was less than five years old when a legendary Chinese corsair Limahong nearly destroyed it. And anyone seeking information on new diseases should go back to the experience of those GIs who were bringing home exotic venereal infections from Indochina wars. Thus, the New Security Threats are not so new in themselves. What is really new here is the post-Cold War transnational environment in which occurrences once considered purely local display a capacity to acquire regional and global meanings in a wink of an eye. Isn’t it worthwhile, therefore, to pay more attention than officials would normally pay to the impact of that environment on ASEAN, its self-perceptions and prospects? THE ASEAN MODEL OF MODERNIZATION AND ITS FATE Summarizing the present state of regional affairs, an outside observer may conclude that some Southeast Asian economies have recovered from the shock of the Asian crisis, but ASEAN as a political entity has not. Why? An often mentioned reason is the heavy damage suffered by Indonesia — until the fall of Suharto the undisputed political leader of the group. Latent tensions between several member states have also been sharpened in the heat of the crisis. On top of that, the latter broke out precisely at the moment of ASEAN’s enlargement, making it more difficult than ever to give multilateral responses to internal and external trials. Along with these well-known factors at least one more, not often talked about, might be mentioned: Among the crisis victims — and, in a wider sense, the victims of globalization — is nothing less than the ASEAN model of modernization (or AMM for short — the author’s humble addition to the panoply of ASEAN’s acronyms). As something shared by the original ASEAN five and helping to boost their 06 ASEAN-RussiaRelations Ch 6 23/1/06, 4:53 PM 44 Southeast Asian Security Challenges 45 growth during the Cold War years, AMM may be reduced to the following three features: First, a rightist authoritarian regime as an ultimate guardian of political stability; second, a system of mixed economy combining market elements with...