ASEAN celebrates its 45th anniversary this week but it comes in the
shadow of a possible return to the bad old days when the region was the stomping
ground of strategic rivalry by outside great powers.
Politics has never been Asean's
forte. The region is heterogeneous as are many of the nations that make up the
grouping. If nation-building is still a great challenge for such nations on
account of their heterogeneity, what more region-building?
It is for this very reason that
the grouping's founding fathers agreed in 1967 to focus on the economic rather
than the political although Asean has since grown to take in three tracks: the
economic, political/security and the social/cultural.
It is on all these three tracks
that Asean aspires towards being a genuine "community" by the
seemingly ambitious target date of 2015.
Testament to the enduring wisdom
of the grouping's founding fathers can be found in the fact that the economic
track looks to be the one that still holds out the brightest prospects for a
budding community in the making.
Build on what all Asean nations
can unite around seems to be the ageless advice from the grouping's founders.
And no nation within the grouping denies the imperative of economic progress
and development. As regional economic giants China and India carve out their
rightful shares of the regional and global economic pie, it behoves Asean
nations to hang together if they are not to be crowded out completely in the
new global economic and political architecture taking shape.
Rather oddly, if we are talking
about Asean economic integration, Malaysia stands out as clear leader. At a
recent gathering in Jakarta, it was revealed that the only two truly Asean
"brands" around originate in Malaysia: CIMB Bank and AirAsia. It is
instructive hearing what the head of one of these regional economic pioneers,
Datuk Nazir Razak of CIMB Bank, had to say. Sadly, he recounted of his difficulties
growing his bank into an Asean franchise: that as far as policymakers and
bureaucrats in Asean are concerned, there is only "national" or
"foreign" and nothing in-between in terms of rules. In the eyes of
officialdom all across Asean, therefore, anything originating from Asean might
as well be from outside the region since it will get the same
"foreign" treatment.
Asean may be one giant free trade
area but it is not a customs union and in any case, there is no free flow
across national boundaries of Asean people and, as Nazir observed, neither the
free flow of information.
It is particularly irksome from
the personal experience of this writer that he gets an automatic month-long
stay in Singapore, the only developed economy within Asean, while he gets three
weeks on each of his many visits to the Philippines.
A piece of unsolicited advice to
the Philippines and other Asean nations in the same boat wishing to see more
tourists on their shores: take a page out of Malaysia and junk the rule of
reciprocity on visas and other restrictive immigration rules. Americans do not
need visas coming into Malaysia even though Malaysians need them to get into
America.
Sometimes good economics just
require some plain good common sense from nations and their official gatekeepers.
But even Malaysia is not exactly
overflowing with economic common sense either. Notice how the decision of
AirAsia to base its Asean headquarters in Jakarta raised the hackles of even
some sober Malaysians.
There is obvious logic in the
decision to have Jakarta as the regional base of AirAsia, given that the city
is the capital of Asean's biggest nation and one where the airline hopes to
create an even bigger impact than the one it has already achieved.
That concession to Indonesia --
despite the flak AirAsia gets from some in Malaysia -- appears not entirely
sufficient for the airline not to meet headwinds as it seeks expansion within
Indonesia. AirAsia is discovering what CIMB Bank has apparently gone through:
that it is being regarded as a foreign airline trying to buy over an Indonesian
one even as AirAsia carries the branding as an "Asean" airline on
account of its genuine regional reach and not just the fact its major owners
are Malaysians.
So, Asean may proclaim in a
little more than two years that it has finally become a "community".
It probably will be just the beginning of a new road for Asean that holds
promise just so long as we all remain wise by building on what can unite us and
leaving for another day what may divide us.
John Teo
Business & Investment Opportunities
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