A crucial test for ASEAN

By RODOLFO C. SEVERINO  

July 19, 2012

GMA News, Philippines

 

The failure of the ASEAN foreign ministers to issue a joint communiquè at their meeting in Phnom Penh last week was definitely a significant setback for the regional association. It was the first time in the association’s 45-year existence that the foreign ministers had failed to issue a joint communiquè at the end of their regular annual meeting.

Such joint communiquès are important. They record what the foreign ministers discussed – or at least what they wanted the public to think they discussed – and the issues on which they reached common positions. Now, because of this failure, we, the public, have no way of knowing these things, so that the foreign ministers will have to start all over again at their meeting in 2013 under Brunei’s chairmanship, with the circumstances at the time in mind and still, at present, unknown. At the same time, this year, the disagreements within ASEAN –and, contrary to popular perception, the South China Sea was not the only contentious issue – have been exposed to public view in all their unseemly glory.

Now, the immediate question is this: How will ASEAN treat the South China Sea disputes and the other issues at the ASEAN, the ASEAN+3, the three ASEAN+1, the ASEAN-India, the ASEAN-US, the ASEAN-UN, and the eighteen-country East Asia Summits in November 2012 under Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s chairmanship?

In any case, sooner or later, ASEAN may work out formulations on the South China Sea disputes and other issues that are acceptable to everyone, as it has done in the past. ASEAN has faced contentious issues before; indeed, it has been able to negotiate and reach compromises on many such issues –Vietnam’s incursion into and military occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s, the political settlement of the Vietnam-Cambodia issue in 1991, the problem of Indochinese asylum-seekers, the 1993 statement on human rights, the internal political issues in Cambodia in July 1997, the problem of Myanmar, the nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.

Now, the question is: Is the South China Sea and other contemporary issues more or less difficult and complex than those of the past?

The important thing is to allow ASEAN the autonomy, independence and capacity that it needs to arrive at common positions that are in the interest of the individual ASEAN members, of Southeast Asia, and of the Asia-Pacific as a whole. This ability was the aim of ASEAN’s founding in the first place.

Such joint communiquès are important. They record what was discussed. -- GMA News 

RODOLFO C. SEVERINO was former Secretary General of Asean before Surin Pitsuwan took over.