A socially transformed Asean needed

The conceptual idea and framework of a “shared regional area of essential commons” (SRAEC) for the Southeast Asian Sea is strategic yet achievable. Its central objective is to create a regional regime based on sharing vitally important natural resources in this vast waterway among the many countries bordering it. This principled thrust is aimed at ensuring and sustaining a longer-term cooperative peace for the social progress and development of Southeast Asia.

This SRAEC can be attained and further developed only through a regionally oriented collective process principally involving the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a fulcrum for shifting the regional balance of power in favor of the area’s social majority. In particular, Asean must become a regional community of states and societies guided by a highly progressive social-economic-political agenda. As such, Asean should clearly advance a truly people-centered, democratically progressive and socially just alternative to its current elitist attitude.

This means that Asean will have to be socially transformed into a radically new entity. Today’s Asean cannot effectively provide for the full development of a socially oriented regional community. The past 45 years of its existence have only shown how authoritarian, undemocratic and antipeople it has been since its launch in August 1967 as an anticommunist association of regional states. Because of its organizational history as a West-leaning suppressive instrument of the Cold War, Asean is prone to align its external policy stance with that of the United States on a wide range of global and regional questions. Indeed, by the time the Cold War ended with the liquidation of the then Soviet Union in December 1991, Asean had fully embraced the Washington Consensus and its neoliberal economic paradigm.

In transforming itself into a social-political instrument for regionwide change, Asean will inevitably have to replace its conservative values. It will also have to veer away from its reliance on the United States as the world’s sole superpower and on US prescriptions for global issues and concerns. If Asean can pursue a more regionally focused multilateral developmental track, it can yet become a strategic regional power center sufficiently forceful to create and sustain new dynamics for greater systemic change across and around the area surrounding the Southeast Asian Sea.

The building of a new Asean should be recognized as having a long-term perspective. Likewise, the SRAEC initiative has to be welcomed as a complementary component to such an innovative process. Thus, this strategic directional thrust can only further enhance a broader regionalist approach to resolving today’s national-chauvinist claims to certain zones of the Southeast Asian Sea, including between China and the Philippines.

This cooperative plan for one of the world’s principal maritime routes is meant to jointly develop and share all its essential commons among the littoral states. This scheme can fundamentally create the necessary space to build an atmosphere of confidence to help promote deeper solidarity and cooperation among the concerned states. It would have the effect of drastically diminishing neighboring suspicions and lowering regional tensions. At the minimum, it could help ease the current regional frictions that remain ripe for a potentially devastating military clash. Such a conflict involving claimant-states would surely draw in the United States as a global imperialist force that is always ready to strike others to advance its own regional interests.

Thus, in broad strokes, the radical creation of a “new Asean” will essentially require a concrete convergence and realization of at least three strategically mutual preconditions: a global environment open to systemic change; a collective leadership transformation of Asean; and Asean’s unified push for a genuinely independent external policy framework premised on the principles of internationalist solidarity for the progress of all peoples, and not merely its states.

The main precondition for the transformation of Asean can only arise through a radical structural change of its nature. In effect, this means that the oppressed social majority within each Asean country must eventually rise to power by taking control of their own state leaderships. In doing so, they should install a transitional government that politically advances a progressive people-centric policy for genuine systemic change. It is also this alternative policy framework that will centrally guide Asean’s external relations with its neighbors and the rest of the world.

Rasti Delizo is a foreign policy analyst. He used to do foreign policy-related work with various government offices and used to teach international politics and Philippine foreign policy.