The
astute-as-usual Kavi Chongvittakorn writes in today’s Nation about the continuing
impasse resulting from last month’s ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting in
Cambodia. Khun Kavi writes that ASEAN is
trying to issue a joint declaration that would substitute for the inchoate
joint communiqué; he feels that ASEAN must issue this joint declaration by Wednesday,
ASEAN Day, or risk a major embarrassment for the regional grouping.
I
would agree with this, but the real task will be what happens at the ASEAN
Summit in November. Even a delayed joint
statement will not be as important as what happens in Cambodia later this year
when the national leaders meet.
Khun
Kavi does report on a possible silver lining from the entire impasse:
There have been some
informal discussions among officials and academics about the need to come up
with the rule of procedure to guide a rotating chair in the future. At the
moment, there are no clear rules concerning the Asean chair and its relations
with other Asean organs and how the Asean Secretary General and its staff can
be of assistance. The Asean foreign ministers took things for granted that they
would be able to form a consensus on any issue, albeit disagreements, as in the
past four decades. But the Phnom Penh incident changed all that.
I
think establishing such rules would be a natural progression of the formalization
process established by the signing of the ASEAN Charter in 2007. If the relationship between the ASEAN
institutions, including the ASEAN Chair, ASEAN Summit, ASEAN Secretary General
and ASEAN Secretariat, can be formalized, this will benefit the administration
of the ASEAN Economic Community, which already has several major agreements and
subsidiary agreements covering its implementation.
The
other shoe to drop, of course, would be how such rules would be administered
and enforced? For example, should there
be a repeat of the Cambodia ministerial meeting, who would resolve the
dispute? The ASEAN Charter states that
the ultimate authority in ASEAN is the ASEAN Summit of leaders. Hence the
current impasse can be resolved by the ASEAN Summit, and its resolution is following
this path. In all likelihood it will
require the personal intervention of the ASEAN leaders in Cambodia to resolve
the dispute.
Clearly,
however, such an approach is not good for ASEAN. Waiting more than 3 months for the ASEAN leaders
to resolve a dispute with the ASEAN Chair will subject the regional grouping to
more diplomacy-by-press-release and criticisms via the media. This is not good for ASEAN’s relatively weak
institutions.
Khun
Kavi points out that next year, ASEAN will review the ASEAN Charter. I agree that this would be a good time to
discuss putting rules into place to govern intra-ASEAN relationships. By then, Brunei will have taken over as ASEAN
Chair. In my view, Cambodia’s reluctance
to raise the South China Sea issue will be less pronounced after its term as
ASEAN Chair ends, because ultimately Hun Sen will act to form and rebalance its
current pro-China tilt. Hun Sen didn’t
become the longest-serving ASEAN leader without some survival skills, so I
don’t think he will either pursue a completely obstructionist approach at the
ASEAN Summit or after Cambodia’s ASEAN Chair term ends. But while Cambodia is
ASEAN Chair this year, Cambodia looks likely to keep whatever diplomatic commitments
it has made to China.
In
any event, the silver lining in the impasse may be recognization of the need to
strengthen the ASEAN institutions and their relationships within and without
ASEAN. Let’s hope that the informal discussion can go beyond the relatively
small circle of academics and officials who study ASEAN and reach into the
ASEAN leadership.
