ASEAN Enlargement
All in all, ASEAN - under the security umbrella of the US - succeeded in maintaining peace and stability in the region, hereby laying the foundations for the economic dynamism of the region in the eighties and nineties. For instance, at the beginning of the nineties, ASEAN had earned a great deal of credit for its role in resolving the Cambodian conflict and securing Vietnam's withdrawal from Cambodia. ASEAN directed the world's opposition to Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978. It provided the Cambodian guerrillas with material, sanctuary and diplomatic support. ASEAN headed the mediation efforts, after the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1989, which resulted in the Cambodian peace accord in 1991 and the UN peacekeeping operation in 1993, which organized the first multiparty election in Cambodia. After this diplomatic success, ASEAN was considered to be the most successful regional grouping outside Europe.
Drawing on this success, ASEAN appeared to rejuvenate.
It has established high-level relations with ten "dialogue partners": Australia, Canada, China, the EU, India, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States.
The organisation was enlarged by the admittance of the mainly ex-communist states of Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and Myanmar.
At the 3rd ASEAN Informal Summit in 1999, the ASEAN Heads of State agreed to the formation of an ASEAN Troika as an ad hoc body at the ministerial level. The purpose of the ASEAN Troika is to enable ASEAN to deal more effectively with and cooperate more closely on regional security issues.
A remarkable trend is as well that ASEAN is on the threshold of abandoning its longstanding policy of non-interference. The first allusion to let go of the non-interference policy came from Malaysia's then-deputy prime minister, Ibrahim Anwar. In an essay published in Newsweek on July 21, 1997 after the coup in Cambodia, he urged the ASEAN states to be more "proactive", and to intervene before simmering problems erupted into full-blown crises. It was Anwar, who introduced the idea of "constructive intervention" as a matter of a declared policy. However, the time was not yet ripe and his idea fell on deaf ears. The economic turmoil of the 1997-1998 financial crisis revived his proposal, his point that the ASEAN states had become so interdependent that a problem arising in one of them could easily become a regional problem was taken. Nowadays, Thailand and the Philippines are the most vocal defenders of a more interventionist and open ASEAN, but the opposition to this paradigm shift remains strong. Especially, the less free states of ASEAN are opposed to the idea of abandoning the non-interference policy. The redefining of the non-interference policy would leave the member states with fewer excuses to avoid involvement in political and security issues in their neighbour states. Besides, the non-interference guards them against others interfering in their own affairs. There are two sides to this issues, on the one hand the removal of the non-interference policy could strain the intra-ASEAN relations, but on the other hand it could not only strengthen the regional bloc itself, but as well its capacity to resist confrontations between the more powerful nations.
ASEAN formed as well the basis for the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).
|
