Earlier this month, the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) marked its 40th birthday with a diplomatic blowout in Singapore. Although the grandees at the Singapore summit attempted to paper over their differences, it is clear that ASEAN is being pulled in opposite directions as its pursuit of regional integration conflicts with its long tradition of mutual non-interference. Given these competing trends, the organization appears due for a reckoning as its members’ contending views on regionalism come into ever greater contrast. 

The capstone to the recent summit was the announcement of an “ASEAN Charter” and an “Economic Community Blueprint” that aim to reshape the structure of ASEAN and harmonize the member state economies. The charter is comparable to the European Union’s 1957 Treaty of Rome, and it will give ASEAN the requisite legal personality to join such international organizations as the United Nations and accept foreign ambassadors at its headquarters in Jakarta. It also lays a permanent foundation for ASEAN, creating formal working committees and an ASEAN human rights body. 

The Economic Community Blueprint—an extension of the ASEAN Free Trade Area—is just as ambitious. It calls for the liberalization of the service sector and the abolition of non-tariff trade barriers by 2015. These goals are not modest: the region’s economies range from the highly developed to the autarkic and backwards, with Singapore enjoying a per capita national income that is some 59 times that of Laos. 

The stakes in this project are enormous. Surrounded by China, India, and Japan, the member states of ASEAN know that they must persist not only in the face of economic competition but also at the nexus of those three giants’ spheres of influence. Developing a common approach to their powerful neighbors will give ASEAN countries a powerful hedge against the risk of enhanced great power rivalry. 

ASEAN can be a loose association designed to prevent regional conflict or an organization that integrates and enhances common interests—but it will not long survive as an incoherent amalgamation that effectively serves neither purpose.

But while the ASEAN diplomats worked to finalize their agreements this fall, a crisis erupted in Burma when Buddhist clergy spearheaded protests against a corrupt military junta. The generals responded the only way they know how: by sending the army into the streets to arrest and beat protesters, and by gradually crushing Burma’s largest demonstrations in more than a decade. The death toll may have run into the hundreds. An incidental casualty of the violence was the ASEAN Charter’s declared adherence to democracy, good governance, and human rights. 

The Burma crisis presented the other nine members of ASEAN with a fundamental question: should the members of an organization founded upon the principle of non-interference criticize the internal affairs of another member state? Disappointingly, the ASEAN countries waffled. After issuing a pro forma criticism of the crackdown, they decided against sanctions and allowed the Burmese leadership to attend the summit in Singapore. This highlighted the fundamental problem with the organization’s traditional step-by-step approach to regionalism. 

Established in the wake of bloody territorial feuds among Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—and during an escalating Cold War conflict in Indochina—ASEAN has traditionally been guided by its founding principle of mutual non-interference. This view of regionalism as abstention runs counter to the European model of regionalism as integration. It also presents an embarrassingly modest goal that ASEAN’s founding members—Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines—have outgrown. 

In recent years, ASEAN has evolved into an integrationist organization with an agenda emphasizing harmonized economies and common standards for governance. While the ASEAN Charter represents the next natural step in this project, it also contradicts ASEAN’s other post-Cold War trend: the admission of such new members as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. 

These new members joined under somewhat antiquated terms. As ASEAN tackles new issues such as environmental standards and corruption, it will necessarily infringe on countries’ internal affairs. ASEAN can either serve as a loose association designed to prevent regional conflict or as an organization that integrates and enhances common interests—but it will not long survive as an incoherent amalgamation that effectively serves neither purpose. 

This contradiction is reflected in the newly adopted charter, which allows the leaders of ASEAN countries to reach fundamental policy decisions on behalf of the organization in the absence of consensus, a fundamental shift from ASEAN tradition. Meanwhile, the Burma crisis has eviscerated efforts to create an ASEAN human rights body. Indeed, it is difficult to identify the grounds for such a mechanism while a member state is actively perpetrating atrocities. 

Burma represents a great embarrassment for ASEAN’s more advanced members. If the organization is to emerge as an effective actor in Southeast Asia, it must embrace an agenda for governance, human rights, and economic development that integrates the capabilities of its leading states, even at the risk of offending—or overriding—its laggards. 

Christopher Griffin is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image credit: photo by Getty Images, 2007.