Street vendor Ta Thi Huong has never heard of the “ASEAN Community” which Southeast Asian leaders spent two days last week trying to refine.
“ASEAN? I don’t know what it is,” said Huong, 40, who was wearing a traditional conical bamboo hat as she sold apricots on the streets of the Vietnamese capital Hanoi. “What community?”
Making ASEAN meaningful for the region’s 590 million citizens is one of the bloc’s challenges, but observers say the vision faces even more fundamental issues.
Analysts say it is weighed down by wide development gaps within the region, entrenched domestic interests and the perennial distraction of Myanmar’s failure to embrace democracy.
Focused on economic issues for most of its existence, ASEAN’s 10 members in 2008 adopted a charter committing them to tighter links.
The group aims to form a “community” based on free trade, common democratic ideals and shared social goals, including a common identity, by 2015.
Senior government officials admit that progress has been greatest in the economic sphere, while the political and social “pillars” of their community need strengthening.
“It’s easy to have a harmonization of interests on the economic sphere,” said Christopher Roberts, an expert in Asian politics and security at the University of Canberra, but he said that creating a cohesive community was a task better carried out over decades and that the 2015 goal was unrealistic.
Political, security and human rights issues are “the real point of contention” between the very diverse group of countries, Roberts said.
MEMBERSHIP
ASEAN’s membership ranges from communist Vietnam and Laos — one of Asia’s poorest nations — to the Westernized city-state of Singapore, the absolute monarchy of Brunei and the vibrant democracy of Indonesia.
Other members are Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia and military-ruled Myanmar.
An ASEAN summit in Hanoi that ended on Friday was again overshadowed by Myanmar and by protests in Bangkok that prevented Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva from attending.
Thailand’s long-running political drama is among the domestic issues within ASEAN nations that are distracting it from moving forward collectively, analysts say.
The group has been divided over how to respond to Myanmar, which is under US and EU sanctions, but on Friday it urged Myanmar to ensure that this year’s planned elections, which have been boycotted by the opposition, are fair and include all parties.
COMMONALITY
“You talk of a community, it means that there must be some degree of commonality within the region, but as you know ASEAN is made up of countries of varying nature,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said. “Economically less so, but certainly in the political area, we have different political systems working in our neighborhood.”
He said that should not be a problem as long as everyone is committed to the same universal principles, including human rights and democracy.
At their summit, foreign ministers fleshed out their vision of a rules-based regional community by signing a protocol to help member nations resolve conflicts.
Scarred by wars in the 1960s and 1970s, Southeast Asian nations have largely lived peacefully together for at least two decades, but smaller-scale conflicts and sovereignty disputes persist.
Cambodia and Thailand have been locked in nationalist tensions and a troop standoff over a disputed temple on their border since July 2008. Soldiers have died on both sides.
Although ASEAN has helped the region avoid war and has allowed its members to get to know each other better, it “has not been really effective” on bilateral issues, such as the Thai-Cambodia dispute, said Pavin Chachavalpongpun from the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
“It it comes down to national interest, some members, they are not willing to rely on ASEAN ... so at the end of the day, the term ‘community’ is rather superficial,” he said.
Ahead of the summit, ASEAN took another step toward building the social aspect of its community with the inauguration of a commission to address the rights of women and children.
Natalegawa, who says the ASEAN Community cannot be fairly compared to the much longer-established EU, said one of group’s challenges is how to make a difference in ordinary people’s lives.
If it can do that, Huong, the Hanoi apricot seller, would take notice.
“I will like it if it makes our country better,” she said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the