TODAY, Aug 8, is Asean Day but a safe bet would be that unless reminded, most of us will let it go like any other ordinary day. And for Asean, that can only mean big trouble.
For despite its existence in the decades of most of our adult lives, Asean does not quite register in the consciousness of ordinary people in the 10 member-nations of our most important regional organisation.
We do wake up in the morning realising we are citizens of our respective countries but unless one’s work actually has something to do with Asean, the chances are that Asean is not even at the back of our minds most times.
In a region that is largely at peace since the end of the Indo-china war in the mid-1970’s, it is, of course, not difficult for most of us to take this regional organisation for granted.
Asean, after all, was forged out of a collective fear by like-minded countries (the original five being Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) of a possible domino effect of the whole of South-east Asia turning Communist, given that at that time Communist insurgencies were raging all across the entire region.
It is a credit to the region — and Asean as an organisation can share it — that today, only two of its members (Vietnam and Laos) are Communist and even then, mostly in name only. For Asean as a whole has grown by leaps and bounds, enjoying the peace dividend and shaping its growing prosperity along the lines of market economies, without exception.
But Asean can be considered successful perhaps because it is not something “forced” upon individual members. Unlike the European Union (EU) with its strict accession rules and rather onerous conditions imposed on its members, Asean can seem like anything its member-nations individually may want it to be.
Many may deride an organisation where members enjoy admittedly few privileges with equally few rules but given the strains that the EU has come under lately from discord among its 27 member-countries, the “operating rules” governing Asean may be no bad thing.
It is precisely a distinct lack of grand ambitions (or a lack of any serious collective will to see any such ambitions realised) that is ironically the secret of Asean’s apparent success, perhaps.
Asean’s principal raison d’etre is necessarily and logically economic co-operation since only as a single economic entity encompassing a market of over half a billion people can it pose as a realistic economic counterweight to the growing strengths of regional giants China and India, each with over a billion people.
But the path to a single open Asean market is not a straightforward one and not even the much-heralded Asean Economic Community (AEC) that will kick in by the end of next year will change that fact.
Typically, there is enough wriggle room for individual Asean member-countries to ensure that AEC will likely be adhered to as much in the breach as not. The problem, as one of the foremost Asean corporate champions, CIMB Bank’s Datuk Seri Nazir Razak, likes to point out, is the sad reality that there is practically no one in government in any of the Asean countries specifically tasked to fight the Asean corner.
This will likely not change much unless there is some popular groundswell in each of the Asean countries to place collective Asean interests over and even above individual national interests. Left on its own, the prospect of that groundswell developing appears rather distant.
But that will change if each Asean member devotes time and effort towards creating just such a groundswell or at least the conditions favouring it.
In Asean’s formative years, our leaders came up with the idea of a common Asean industrial project in each of the original member-countries. Thus was the Asean Bintulu Fertiliser plant set up as Malaysia’s project. Although the plant is still going strong, the commendable idea that it will engender a virtuous cycle of Asean industrial complementation may not have been realised.
Perhaps Asean’s leaders today should dust off the idea of each member-nation championing a project or effort aimed towards galvanising an Asean consciousness among the people of Asean. There has been much talk of a people-centred Asean as the basis for a truly sustainable organisation, going forward. It is time we put real action into such talk.