Introduction
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN is a socially constructed reality. It started with a common vision among its founding four member countries, eventually shared by ten nations, seized by the private sector and the non-governmental stakeholders, made inroads into our collective regional consciousness and now aims to be a more integrated community. This has been a product of four decades of interactions, socialization and cooperation at various levels both within and outside of government circles.
The establishment of ASEAN and the process of community-building are political instruments needed to maintain and promote regional peace, security and order. With a stable regional order, ASEAN Member Countries should be able to pursue their social and economic development aspirations without their survival, independence and well-being being threatened by anyone in the neighborhood. Regional solidarity has also prevented any external power from wielding undue dominance or interference in domestic and regional affairs. At the same time, being part of the world state system, most ASEAN Member Countries have maintained their close relationship with some Major Powers which preceded the birth of ASEAN or their membership into ASEAN.
Although the founding document of ASEAN has expressed an aspiration to build a “partnership in order to strengthen the foundation for a prosperous and peaceful community of Southeast Asian Nations”1 , it has taken another four decades of interactions, socialization and cooperation, before the organization has gained sufficient confidence to aim for the establishment an ASEAN Community with capital C. This decision to move from common to proper noun has set into motion parallel efforts to formulate and carry out plans of actions towards constructing the security, economic, and socio-cultural pillars of the ASEAN Community. It has also led to the decision to have a legal and institutional framework that is supposed to meet the challenges of realising the ASEAN Community – the ASEAN Charter.
There are several reasons which could explain why ASEAN is deliberate in its policy decisions that concern the nature of the organization and inter-state relations in the region. First, foremost in the minds of the founding members of ASEAN was self preservation. This was the reason why the Bangkok Declaration had expressed the members’ determination “to ensure their stability and security from external interference in any form or manifestation in order to preserve their national identities in accordance with the ideals and aspirations of their peoples.” Their shared responsibility was for the preservation and survival of each individual member.
Second, for geopolitical causes, ASEAN’s aspiration of bringing all ten Southeast Asian countries into the organization proved to be a protracted process over its first three decades. The Indochina conflict divided Southeast Asia. It would seem insensitive if not provocative to talk about a Southeast Asian community where almost half of the countries concerned were outside of the organization. Finally, the organization needed time to help build mutual confidence, understanding, common views and regional consciousness. The lessening of tensions facilitated the shift towards greater regional dialogue and engagement. These processes accelerated with the significant increase in regional interactions following the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of economic globalization.
The philosophical basis of regional community building
Indeed, there is a school of thought in International Relations which considers the international system as a social construction2. This view of international relations assumes that (a) the structures of human association are determined primarily by shared ideas rather than material forces, and (b) the identities and interests of nations are constructed by these ideas rather than by nature. In other words, the deep structure of society, both national and international, is constituted by ideas and that social structures have the power to shape and represent collective identities and interests, help nations find common solutions to problems, prescribe expectations for behavior, and define common security threats.
Social constructivists believe that material forces are important in society only when they are constituted with particular meanings for nations. These material factors include (a) human nature, (b) natural resources, (c) geography, (d) forces of production, and (e) forces of destruction. In other words, power and strategic interests matter, but how they matter depends on whether nations are friends or foes, which is a function of shared ideas and social consciousness. For example, U.S. military power means one thing to Canada and another to Cuba, or China’s re-emergence means one thing to North Korea and another to Taiwan.
Thus, if states consider the international system basically as a strategic domain where they compete for power, influence and material gain, then war and arms race would be permanent features in global politics. On the other hand, “if anarchy is what states make of it” as argued by Alexander Wendt, then a system of state relations could be constructed where community building and the promotion of cooperative security could be its primary preoccupation, instead of the formation of strategic alliances in a competitive security system.
Within the context of this conceptual framework, community building in Southeast Asia is, therefore, a policy choice and not an imposition nor predetermined. It is a shared idea whose time has come. It is aimed at turning around the undersocialization of Southeast Asian states as a result of centuries of colonization and segregation by different foreign powers. It is also aimed at consolidating the peace dividend with the end of inter-state conflicts and proxy wars by giving form to the new found space for greater dialogue and cooperation. Community building in Southeast Asia is both a culmination and the birth of a new era. It brings to a higher level the regional discourse facilitated by ASEAN with a view towards greater integration and solidarity. In philosophical terms, community building represents the constitutive result of ideational relations.
The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC)
The ASEAN Leaders have proclaimed that the ASEAN Community shall have three pillars: security, economic and socio-cultural. The rest of this article will focus on the socio-cultural pillar, which represents ASEAN’s social and human development agenda3. From the very beginning, the framers of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Plan of Action have believed that the ASCC is interrelated with the two other pillars. The Declaration of ASEAN Concord II recognizes that the three pillars of the ASEAN Community are “closely intertwined and mutually reinforcing” for the purpose of ensuring peace, stability and shared prosperity in the region. The ASCC Plan of Action specifically acknowledges that, “the ASCC is linked inextricably with the economic and security pillars of the ASEAN Community”. The ASCC would contribute to enhancing regional prosperity and stability. There is common understanding that prevalent human security provides a strong foundation for national stability and even regional harmony.
There are basically two ways in which the social component of community building contributes to regional peace and security. The first is at the domestic level where progressive social welfare, development and justice, contribute to building greater social harmony, contentment, and sense of belonging. The second is at the inter-state level where cooperation in social and cultural spheres creates positive mutual perceptions, make people identify with each other, and address potential irritants among neighboring states with adjacent borders and resources.
According to former ASEAN Secretary-General Rodolfo Severino, if one conceived of the socio-cultural community as a vehicle for developing a sense of Southeast Asian identity, building a regional awareness and fostering mutual understanding among the people of ASEAN, then it should be “the core” of the ASEAN Community4. He added that Southeast Asia cannot be an enduring security community, an effective economic community and an ASEAN Community “in its truest and deepest sense” without being a socio-cultural community. He believes that ultimately and on a broader scale, a sense of regional identity will not be possible unless it is based on some common values. Without the adoption of a common set of values, ASEAN could not hold its members to any standards of behaviour freely agreed upon and would find it impossible to promote a sense of community among ASEAN’s people.
In a major study examining ASEAN’s role in regional security order, Amitav Acharya found out that ASEAN’s founders were largely inspired by the goal of developing a regional social community rather than an institutionally integrated economic and military bloc, which could overcome the divisions and separations imposed by colonial rule and lead to peaceful relations among the newly independent states of the region. His study affirmed that ASEAN evolved as a sort of imagined community where the vision of community preceded rather than resulted from political, strategic and functional interactions and interdependence. At the same time this imagined community thrived through socialization, normative development and a conscious process of identity building5.
The Social Baselines
ASEAN Leaders know that the social construction of ASEAN could enhance its legitimacy if it makes positive impact on the lives of its constituency. Such process would entail addressing fundamental social issues that reinforce a sense of community building and regional solidarity. ASEAN has, therefore, embarked on a comprehensive agenda of functional cooperation in such fields as poverty eradication, social welfare and development, labour and employment, education, youth, environmental sustainability, disaster management, culture, information, and others. The thematic elements of the ASCC Plan of Action include poverty eradication, managing the social impact of economic integration, environmental sustainability, and promoting regional identity. These are supposed to represent the social agenda of ASEAN, which would complement the economic and political pillars.
ASEAN has placed poverty eradication and rural development on its agenda because of their substantive and symbolic value in projecting ASEAN as a caring and sharing community of nations. It is an issue that is very important for a significant proportion of the half a billion people in the least-developed and developing economies of Southeast Asia. In this regard, ASEAN has established a specific cooperation agenda and mechanism in the field of rural development and poverty eradication. Furthermore, “narrowing the development gap” among its members constitutes a major ASEAN agenda, particularly since the Vietnam-initiated Hanoi Declaration on Narrowing Development Gap for Closer ASEAN Integration of 2001.
Poverty eradication
A joint assessment by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the United Nations Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank, has reported that Asian and Pacific region as a whole is on its way to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 20156. Specifically, in the ASEAN region, impressive achievements in poverty reduction have been registered in Indonesia and Vietnam. The proportion of people living on less than $1 a day came down from 17.4 to 7.5 in Indonesia and from 14.6 to 2.2 in Vietnam between 1993 and 2002. Great strides have also been achieved by other countries in reducing poverty.
ASEAN has made rapid and competitive integration into regional and global markets for goods, services, and investment over the past several decades. While the ASEAN region has accounted for approximately 8.3 per cent of Asia’s total GDP in recent years, the region has generated around 22 per cent of Asia’s total exports, placing the region behind China, Asia’s largest exporter, but ahead of Japan. At the same time, ASEAN represents a vast consumer market, larger in terms of spending power than India’s, although ASEAN’s entire population is only half that of India.
In most ASEAN Member Countries, greater economic openness has fuelled growth and job creation, especially in export sectors. Economic openness also drives structural changes such as a shift away from employment with low productivity areas, such as agriculture, to those with higher productivity, such as industry and services. At the same time, greater economic openness has brought stronger competition and greater labour market pressures. The a
