Half century of ASEAN is an unsung diplomatic win - The Centre for Independent Studies
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Half century of ASEAN is an unsung diplomatic win

 

If you didn’t notice that Tuesday was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Association of Southeast Nations, don’t worry: most Australians didn’t, either.

To be sure, ASEAN does not normally generate much public interest, even though Australia is one of its 10 dialogue partners. But this week’s milestone is an occasion to celebrate its many achievements.

ASEAN was born on August 8, 1967, amidst war, poverty and the threat of communism. Today, much of south-east Asia is at peace; living standards have grown at an astounding rate; and communism is a bad memory everywhere but Vietnam where its leaders follow economic policies that, it’s fair to say, would not meet the consent of Mao or Marx.

This is an impressive record, one that the distinguished Singapore intellectual Kishore Mahbubani believes merits a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s a stretch, given the widespread tendency to dismiss ASEAN as just a talk shop.

Nonetheless, Mahbubani’s new book The ASEAN Miracle, co-written with Thai-based writer Jeffery Sng, takes a dispassionate look at the facts and concludes ASEAN has brought not only peace but also prosperity.

ASEAN may only be the world’s seventh-biggest economy, but its GDP of US$2.5 trillion ($3.1 trillion) is almost double that of seven years ago, from $US1.3 trillion in 2010.

Sustainable growth

Never has so much wealth been generated across the region and China, its largest trade partner. Never has it been shared more evenly. According to Mahbubani, more than half of ASEAN’s 640 million people enjoy middle-class status with rising purchasing power and sustainable growth.

That prosperity is due not to the dictums of governments, but to the co-operations of millions of people – rich and poor – through free trade and foreign investment. As a result, health has improved and life expectancy has increased dramatically.

According to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, in just 30 years Vietnam has reduced extreme poverty from 50 per cent to roughly 3 per cent. Singapore, dirt poor in the 1960s, is today a financial powerhouse with a per capita income of about $US53,000 per annum (Australia’s GDP per capita is less than $US50,000). Indonesia, once a metaphor for permanent poverty, has one of the world’s most optimistic youthful communities. All this with a population growing at a rate that makes Malthusians shudder.

But it’s not just free trade and free markets that explain south-east Asia’s miracle. Mahbubani also credits the unparalleled cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity of the region.

That’s not how the experts saw things half a century ago. Sectarian strife, it was predicted, was likely to break out in what was called the “Balkans of Asia”.

In the mid 1960s, Indonesia had just ended a period of confrontation with Malaysia. Singapore had an acrimonious divorce with Malaysia, which also had a simmering territorial dispute with the Philippines.

Compounding these troubles were very deep cultural divisions among the five founding members (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand) and, later on, Brunei (1984), Vietnam (1995), Laos and Myanmar (1997) and Cambodia (1999).

Yet today 240 million Muslims, 150 million Buddhists, 120 million Christians and millions of others live together in peace. And in an era where many thinkers predict rising security competition, ASEAN regularly brings together all the world’s great powers.

Spirit of consultation

For Mahbubani, the development of an ASEAN spirit of consultation and consensus has gone a long way to ameliorate any tensions. True enough, but it misses a bigger point: America’s strategic pre-eminence has underpinned south-east Asia’s prosperity and relative peace for generations.

In 1967, the common fear was that communism would spread if it were left unchecked in Indochina. The “domino theory” was widely mocked later, especially by opponents of the Vietnam conflict, because the dominoes never fell. But those “dominoes” joined forces to create ASEAN; and as Lee Kuan Yew often argued, without that decision, the region might not be as stable and prosperous as it has been since.

In any case, the US continues to play an indispensable role in the region, especially in the face of a rising China in the South China Sea where several states have overlapping territorial claims.

Still, ASEAN’s 50th anniversary is worth celebrating. Its record provides a welcome corrective to the prevailing narrative that things are getting worse. We are fed a constant diet of doom – predicting anything from a tyranny of austerity to a clash of civilisations – and so it is no wonder that we tend to miss the bigger story, especially in our region.

Tom Switzer is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.