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GLOBALISATION - ASEAN - REVIEW |
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ASEAN Michael Leifer Reviewed Arena,
87, 1989, pp. 166-70. “Does ASEAN
exists?” is a question provoked by Michael Leifer’s book. By way of
conclusion, Leifer calls for two cheers for ASEAN, though his evidence
suggests that one cheer might be enough. Even his two cheers are a long
way from the 1982 claim by the President of the Brookings Institution:
“ASEAN is regarded as the most important and promising effort at
economic integration since the creation of the European Community.” As a percentage of
their total trade, intra-ASEAN exchanges had reached 22% by 1983, a
figure kept as high as it is through bilateral trade between Indonesia
and Singapore, and Malaysia and Singapore. Indeed, were that entrepot
removed from the statistics, intra-ASEAN trade would be much less
impressive. The other major exchange is between Malaysia and its
contiguous neighbour, Thailand. These bilateral trades would continue
without a regional organisation. As ASEAN’s most industrialised
member, Singapore, is clamourous for freer trade, while Indonesia
resists it as a threat to its own development. As a free-trade zone,
the ASEAN grouping remains crippled. According to Leifer, meetings of
economic ministers are “restricted to tinkering with preferential
tariff arrangements. A proposed free-trade area was too controversial
for serious consideration.” At the beginning, ASEAN’s Preferential
Trading Arrangements were treated as a joke, with members offering to
reduce tariffs on goods they had never produced. A slightly more serious
approach followed with the introduction of across-the-board cuts.
Another friendly scholar admitted that this liberalisation was
“severely constrained” by allowing each country to determine which
goods would not be subject to the cuts. Rationalised investment
policies under an ASEAN Industrial Projects scheme have had no greater
success. The idea was to marshal scarce resources of capital and human
skills by building one or two factories of each kind to service all the
member nations; for example, there would be one iron-and-steel works
instead of five or six. By nominating a previously planned urea
fertilizer plant as its contribution, Indonesia completed its project by
1984. Others were abandoned, most replaced. Before Thailand was ready to
begin work on the Association’s soda-ash plant, Indonesia was
proposing its own facility. Singapore dropped its diesel-engine factory
because, once more, Indonesia was encouraging investment in a similar
undertaking. Michel T. Skully’s
1981 survey of merchant banking in ASEAN was a chapter of brave
beginnings, full of sentences starting with “Unfortunately”. The
1985 update of his list of merchant banks operating with ASEAN showed
little sign of intra-mural activity but rather catalogued the
preponderance of East Asian, European and US American conglomerates. A
survey in Asia Week (13
January 1989) spotlighted eight major investments involving an ASEAN
country, but only one of these was between fellow members; the others
were among ASEAN partners and outside Asian economies. Generally,
alliances with one or more of the Newly Industrialising Economies are
deemed more helpful than deals within ASEAN. If ASEAN were to be
positioned in terms of economic integration, it is nothing like an
embryonic EEC. As the cover of the Far
Eastern Economic Review (3 December 1987) headlined on ASEAN’s
twentieth birthday: “ASEAN Integration – Who Cares?” Instead of seeing ASEAN
as a would-be this or a lame that, it should be taken for what it has
been during the past 21 years, namely, an opportunity for managing
certain kinds of localised difficulties, principally those stemming from
its members’ fears about each other. Singapore, for instance, sees
ASEAN as a way to contain anti-Chinese sentiments. For Leifer, the
substance of ASEAN has been in joint diplomacy. Formed in 1967 as a way
of re-establishing relations in the region after the fall of Sukarno and
his confrontation with the UK over Greater Malaysia, ASEAN was kept
alive at first by the 1969 announcement of Nixon’s Guam Doctrine. No
one paid much attention to ASEAN, though, until after the 1975 Communist
victories in Indo-China. One linguistic benefit from ASEAN’s existence
for distinguishing non-communist countries in what had previously been
lumped together as South-East Asia. The first ASEAN heads-of-government
meeting did not take place until January 1976, and the third not until
after the fall of Marcos; no date has been set for a fourth. ASEAN’s diplomatic
significance after 1979, possibly its survival, depended on the
Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea. By the skin of its teeth, ASEAN
maintained a common approach to this conflict, although Indonesia has
never seen Vietnam as being as threatening as Thailand does. The 1981
New York Indochina Conference backed by ASEAN failed because the
Vietnamese stayed away. Before then, Indonesia had broken ranks by
opening negotiations with Vietnam which it favoured as a bulwark against
China. Ringmaster to this exercise was the United States which found in
ASEAN a stalking horse for denying the Vietnamese-backed regime in
Kampuchea a seat at the United Nations. Without a restraining hand from
Washington, Indonesia might have bolted completely. What will happen to
ASEAN should the sole point of its more or less united action dissolve
with a Vietnamese withdrawal from Kampuchea? If no obvious external
threat arises to keep the partners together, they could revert to
squabbling with each other. Tensions between the
six member nations are still strong enough for disputes to break out.
Brunei finally joined so that Malaysia and Indonesia would be
embarrassed should either try to take it over while it was a guest of
their regional kampong. Singapore has held a similar attitude towards
Malaysia which, in turn, is worried about what might happened to Sabah
under a more assertive Filippino regime. Papua New Guinea’s
application to join carries some of the same self-defensive reasoning
towards Indonesia. No mechanism exists for
arbitrating or policing disagreements between members, let alone for
assisting in each other’s domestic difficulties. Apart from postponing
the third heads-of-government meeting due for Manila, ASEAN made no
contribution to the restoration of democratic forms in the Philippines
– a development which the five other regimes might well consider a
distasteful precedent. Some joint military
operations occur, but ASEAN is almost as far from being a military pact
as it is from becoming a free-trade zone. Links exist between
intelligence agencies, whose allegiances are to who knows whom. Matters
are no better at the administrative level since ASEAN’s peak
committees change chairmen and personnel every year. The national
secretariats provide the real operating machinery since the
General-Secretary is a secretary to the Secretariat, not to ASEAN
itself. If ASEAN is flimsy on
the economic, military, administrative and even diplomatic fronts, why
does it receive so much attention? One answer for Australia is that
ASEAN is the acceptable face of Indonesia. A 1982-83 survey of two
hundred Australian leaders from business, the bureaucracy, academe and
the community showed that 91% thought ASEAN would be helpful in solving
regional problems while only 57% held this opinion of Indonesia, which
is by far the most powerful member of ASEAN. This disparity of opinion
was possible, the survey argued, because “a romantic aura surrounded
the notion of ASEAN”. More popularly, ASEAN
has become a shorthand way of talking about South-East Asia, taking over
from the “Far East” and the “Near North” as a means of
expressing one’s uncertainty about where these places are on the map.
Not only Wal Murray (NSW Deputy Premier) can be trust to say ASEAN when
six individual names would be more than he could remember after dinner;
announcing pleasure at visiting ASEAN decreases the danger of expressing
delight at being in Malaysia while being entertained by the Suntan of
Brunei. Although ASEAN remains
barely more than a geographic expression, underlined by resort to the
phrase “ASEAN region”, it is the relationships with and between
those six countries that are crucial for Australia. As with the
so-called Pacific Rim, links with the individual ASEAN states are too
important to be obscured by catch-phrases masquerading as
political-economic entities. ASEAN’s individual
members will continue to invoke the collective needs of ASEAN as an
additional way of getting what they want for their own country, as
Thailand has been doing with Japan over exports. Indonesia will do the
same during difficulties with Australia over Papua-New Guinea border and
the Timor Sea oilfield. These surges of public unity should not
intimidate Australia into forgetting that the other five ASEAN members
are not anxious for Indonesia to establish further precedents for
expansion. Providing ASEAN is seen
in bilateral terms, its internal tensions can be better weighted to the
advantage of those left nervous by Indonesia’s pursuit of regional
leadership. Recognised as a contrivance of counterweights, ASEAN offers
diplomatic opportunities to Canberra that will be lost from sight by
concentrating on freer trade as the yellow brick road to regional
stability through economic integration. Australia cannot approach ASEAN
in the way that Vietnam has done by playing the middle against one end,
that is, Jakarta against Bangkok. Australia would be hard pressed to
find any ASEAN member willing or able to balance Indonesia which needs
ASEAN less than the Association needs Indonesia. |