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.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF WAR: Ursula von der Leyen said that Europe was in Kyiv because ‘it is not only the destiny of Ukraine that is at stake. It’s Europe’s destiny’ A dozen leaders from Europe and Canada yesterday visited Ukraine’s capital to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion in a show of support for Kyiv by some of its most important backers. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were among the visitors greeted at the railway station by Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha and the president’s chief of staff Andrii Yermak. Von der Leyen wrote on social media that Europe was in Kyiv “because Ukraine is in Europe.” “In this fight for survival, it is not only the destiny of Ukraine that is
RSS