Abstract
ASEAN is widely considered a security community based on commonly accepted norms and regional identity. From this mainstream social constructivist angle, the absence of major military conflict among member states is seen as proof for the group's decisive contribution to peace and stability in Southeast Asia. However, the effectiveness of security management is reflected by the ability of its members to avoid, manage and resolve conflicts based on institutions established for this purpose. Hence, the article assesses ASEAN's role as a security actor against the Association's own visions, objectives and targets which are enshrined in a growing number of co-operation instruments and agreements. The paper argues that ASEAN has seen impressive institutional development and evolution but most of the agreed mechanism still await implementation or application. A lack of trust in inter-member relations and insistence on the primacy of national sovereignty are customary cited as reasons or excuses for ASEAN's inability to employ its self-generated, well designed formal framework for security management. This was a valid point during ASEAN's younger years. However, at the age of 50, a regional organisation can be expected to be sufficiently mature and settled to deliver on existing agreements. Formal institutions matter regardless of how successful an organisation might have been in going down informal avenues of addressing problems of a regional dimension. ASEAN does not live up to its own rhetoric and it continues to circumvent formally agreed mechanisms and even waters down earlier self-imposed commitments. As a result, the grouping is inevitably losing credibility.
Highlights
To many outside observers and most of the non-Asian media, ASEAN is first and foremost known as the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) with much of the debate focusing on the question as to how far economic integration has advanced and if there will ever be a single market in Southeast Asia
In a recent balance sheet on ASEAN’s achievements over the past half-century, Frederick Kliem (2017a: 9) makes an interesting observation: ‘As in Europe, many ASEAN citizens fall victim to unrealistic cost-benefit analyses and raise the question: What are we getting for our money? What good is an association promising big and delivering little?’ Kliem recommends to ‘appreciate ASEAN for what it is: The single best chance for peace the region ever had
If one assesses the utility of an organisation, it helps to ask a minimalist question: What would be the consequences of the organisation’s absence? [...] desirable, ASEAN cannot be expected to be an effective problem solving actor of regional governance; it is and will remain a problem management mechanism’
Summary
To many outside observers and most of the non-Asian media, ASEAN is first and foremost known as the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) with much of the debate focusing on the question as to how far economic integration has advanced and if there will ever be a single market in Southeast Asia. War has never erupted between individual Southeast Asian states once they had become ASEAN members To make this argument one has to discount occasional skirmishes such as the spilling over of Burmese ethnic conflicts into Thai territory, which resulted in encounters between the troops of Thailand and Myanmar along their joint border in 2001. To quote one of the most recent studies on ASEAN’s security management, “[w]hile the regional body has undoubtedly contributed to conflict avoidance [...] ASEAN has so far failed to conduct conflict resolution effectively” (Emmers 2017: 76). Widely accepted, this assessment begs some important questions. It is common place and certainly justified to refer to ASEAN collectively as shorthand for the sum of the member states’ joint position and regional agreements
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