These
issues will be on full display at the annual leaders' summit of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations next week in Jakarta and may well intensify as the
group's rotating chairmanship passes afterward from Indonesia to Laos, the
bloc's smallest and poorest member.
Civil society and the international community have long
looked to ASEAN, which has reliably preserved regional peace for decades, to
deal with major challenges.
But the bloc is now deeply divided. On Myanmar, for example,
mainland states have put a premium on state integrity and security over
political change and reform while more democratic maritime states, led by
Indonesia, regard military rule as intolerable.
In an alarming public display of regional dissonance,
Thailand recently directly engaged with Myanmar's military junta without
informing Indonesia. By playing on such divisions, the junta has avoided
complete ostracization.
The
region is also divided over the extent to which China poses a threat and
whether it should be contained by the United States and its allies.
Laos, Thailand and Cambodia have close ties with Beijing,
reflecting proximity or long-standing political alignment. Vietnam views China
with deep historical enmity but maintains a dual-track relationship sustained
by ties between the two nations' ruling communist parties. Even so, Hanoi has
drawn closer to the US.
The Philippines has effectively checked out of ASEAN because
officials in Manila believe the group has done nothing to defend the country's
maritime claims against Chinese intrusions, noting its failure to support the
2016 arbitral ruling by a court in The Hague affirming Philippine sovereignty
over contested areas.
"We might as well be allied with Taiwan, Japan and
South Korea," said a former official after the recent confrontation
between a Chinese coast guard ship and Philippine vessels attempting
to resupply troops on Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed Spratly Islands.
Manila has indeed moved closer to the US since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became
president last year.
Compounding such rifts over external issues is a distinct
political divide. The rise of democratic reform movements in Indonesia,
Malaysia and even Thailand over the last 30 years has led to more frequent
changes in national leadership.
As a result, the personal relationships that held ASEAN
nations together under more authoritarian regimes have frayed. Some democratic
leaders have begun to wonder why they need to spend so much time with tedious
ASEAN meetings when their domestic constituents are more interested in social
equality and food security than strengthening regional identity.
All this has made Southeast Asia more fragile and isolated
than it appears. Great power leaders who once routinely attended regional summits
now often skip them. The US and China prefer bilateral engagements during which
they can press for alignment. While he will skip this month's ASEAN summit, US
President Joe Biden will visit Vietnam right afterward, reportedly to sign a
bilateral strategic partnership agreement.
ASEAN has lost its much-touted centrality and is frankly on
life support as an autonomous multilateral platform, reflecting to some degree
the decline of multilateralism globally.
What can be done to revive effective multilateral
cooperation and rescue the region from fracture by competing great powers and
division by political dispute?
Civil society has traditionally helped in quiet ways to
build and sustain the sinews of connectivity in the region. Networks of
academics and think tanks helped promote connections and address sensitivities
among governments and offered regional policy ideas.
Many of those veteran scholars are now retired or deceased.
The younger generation has not filled the void, in part because the rivalry of
the great powers has polarized much of their ranks.
A possible new approach would be to launch a recovery process
to help reconnect the 10 ASEAN states. This would involve identifying common
challenges rather than relying on outdated institutionalized processes or weak
mechanisms to manage conflicts and protect human rights.
There is clearly a need for cross-bloc dialogue about what
can be done. A bottom-up approach could offer innovative ideas and help ease
the acrimony that has built up over the past few years. Post-pandemic, there is
an urgent need for more contact and understanding in a region vastly more challenged
than it was even five years ago.
The US
and China are locked in an epic, dangerous rivalry that treats Southeast Asia
as a battleground, so they will not be of help. But midsized powers and
traditional partners such as Australia, the EU and UK could support regional
cohesion if they spent less time pushing Western values and seeding animosity
toward China, which even if justified, generates further division.
Southeast Asian governments and their leaders could help by
speaking with one voice on critical issues and maintaining traditional
balancing approaches to great power competition. As things stand today, there
is a real chance that the Philippines and China will come to blows over the
Second Thomas Shoal.
That would bring the United States and China
dangerously close to war. Will ASEAN leaders be able to combine and collaborate
to prevent any crisis from escalating? Right now, that looks doubtful.