Facetious suggestions that ASEAN should be reduced to a ‘League of South
China Sea Nations’ in the wake of the recent brouhaha over maritime territorial
disputes ignore Southeast Asia’s unique brand of multilateralism.
FOR ASEAN sceptics, the recently
concluded ASEAN-led Summits in Cambodia seemed to have signalled the twilight
of the ten-member organisation’s tenure as driver of regional security.
Arguably its predicament appeared like that of a beleaguered vessel driven
toward the treacherous shoals of the Spratly Islands. Only last week, one
editorial in the Wall Street Journal suggested facetiously that ASEAN should be
reduced to a League of South China Sea Nations.
Yet this is the kind of typically
blinkered assessment that ignores the advantages of practising Southeast Asia’s
unique brand of multilateralism. Some home truths bear repeating, and
especially to benefit those who forget why ASEAN’s members choose rationally
not to defect from it.
Hanging together or hanging separately
Theorising on multilateral
cooperation between sovereign states suggests that they do so to solve
collective action problems. The South China Sea dispute is one example, but it
is also linked to the integrity of wider cooperation between ASEAN members. States
cooperate to pool strengths in solving problems that concern them in common, or
manage issues that spill across more than one border.
The South China Sea spat is not a
straightforward dispute between China and several ASEAN claimants. It poses the
question of whether ASEAN’s other unresolved territorial disputes on land and
sea should be solved by its participants’ unstated ‘divide and conquer’
strategies. The answer is a resounding ‘no’.
ASEAN’s founding documents argue
for non-interference across borders and the pacific settlement of disputes, for
the simple reason that territorial disputes are an intractable legacy of a
shared colonial past. Historically layered indigenous claims on the Spratlys,
too, are skewed by that legacy of colonialism. Moreover, keeping a diplomatic
freeze on territorial disputes ASEAN-wide reduces transaction costs should
bilateral protagonists decide that third or fourth party observers are needed
as witnesses and mediators to guarantee the status quo of maintaining claims, while
agreeing to pursue peaceful cooperation in other dimensions of bilateral ties.
Finally, ASEAN members have grown
familiar with dealing with one another’s national ‘face’ behind closed doors.
There is no good reason why ASEAN should be disbanded when it has maintained
and mediated peace by sticking together. The costs of defection from a
venerable 45-year old regional neighbourhood association must surely include
leaving weak states to fend for themselves when dealing with an intrusive great
power.
Reciprocity
For the weak state, middle power
and great power alike, reciprocity remains an all-important binding principle
that dovetails conveniently with the purported national interests of each.
Reciprocity simply means what you do to me today can be done to you tomorrow. A
great power that gets its way now on one issue will suffer a backlash in future
from another crucial issue. Such factors inform the calculations of good
policymakers. The ‘bad’ currency of intimidation and arm-twisting will rebound negatively
on those who practise it too frequently or blatantly.
ASEAN was established precisely
to circulate the ‘benign’ currency of demonstrating mutual respect for
sovereignty and reciprocating neighbourliness, unresolved intramural
territorial disputes notwithstanding. There is every reason why the
Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei – the four ASEAN claimant states –
would need Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand alongside
in preserving a unified ASEAN position on the proposed South China Sea code of
conduct. The other six ASEAN non-claimant states should in turn expect
reciprocal support from the four claimant states on negotiations with China on
a wide range of economic cooperation and non-traditional security issues that increasingly
bind them together.
The same reciprocity principle
should apply when ASEAN negotiates with Japan, India and the United States on
other issues in their collective dialogues. If not, Southeast Asia would indeed
be reduced to a desolate place where the weak constantly live in fear of the
strong, and distracted governments cannot plan for their nations’ prosperity
under the shadow of the future.
Postcolonial vulnerabilities
Policymakers and pundits should
recall how Southeast Asia was once partitioned arbitrarily into various Western
colonial spheres and states, thus setting aside centuries of indigenous
tradition. The frontiers mapped and borders demarcated at imperial convenience
by rival great powers have now solidified into the boundaries of today’s
nation-states. Unsurprisingly, matters of sovereignty and jurisdiction continue
to be contested just as they were back then, and especially in the maritime
domain.
In that context, whether for
postcolonial national pride or regional peace and prosperity shared between
independent neighbours, it makes sense for ASEAN to continue its valuable role
as the ritualised agency for defusing contentious bilateral and multilateral
disputes flowing from accidents of history. Many commentators on the ASEAN Summits
seem to have missed the point by relegating the most important part of local
history.
Southeast Asia was once a region
that did not take boundaries seriously: commerce, religion and peoples flowed
freely across archipelagic societies, from Aceh through Melaka to Riau-Johor,
Maluku, Bali, Brunei and Sulu. The vast agrarian kingdoms of Java and Indochina
waxed and waned as charismatic rulers competed for loyal followers, while
artisans fashioned ornaments and representations of cosmo-religious glory. Only
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were uniform ideas of nation, state
and the ‘Law of the Sea’ superimposed under colonial conditions, thereby
displacing the indigenous regional order of informal, overlapping authorities.
The islands of the South China
Sea are in dispute because they are defined as such under the nomenclature of
the international Law of the Sea. Southeast Asians can, however, circumvent
some of the rigidity of modern sovereign mentalities by reprising flexible
communitarian habits drawn from their own premodern, precolonial past. In that
light, the ASEAN Spirit ought to be reaffirmed, not denigrated as a ship run
aground on the Spratlys.
Alan Chong and Emrys Chew
Written by RSIS
Alan Chong is Associate Professor of International Relations and Emrys
Chew is Assistant Professor of History at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. Both
contributors have published, respectively, an article and a book emphasising
the centrality of Asian maritime politics in international maritime affairs.
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