Harmonizing Ideological Tension in the Development of the ASEAN Law

Abstract

There have been at least twenty Summits among the ASEAN countries. They adopted about twenty basic legal documents. All these are dedicated to realizing the ambitious dream of the ASEAN countries to be developed. However, the facts went opposite. ASEAN cooperation stays slow and reaches a very narrow target. Most ASEAN people feel bored and hopeless over the state of cooperation. The slow and narrow cooperation have disposed the cooperation into a downfall image such as a fiction, or even a utopian. The downfall image could make cooperation even slower or end it altogether, as it commonly drives the belief of the people from trust to distrust and believing into disbelieving. The gap between the ‘sollen’and the ‘sein’in the cooperation shows a strong influence of undetectable causes. This article applies a law and ideological approach in searching and analyzing the cause of slowness of performance of the cooperation.