This week Kavi
Chongkittavorn, with whom I have been honored to appear on several panels, writes
in the Nation that Malaysia as ASEAN Chair has been revisiting several old
ideas to promote the ASEAN Community. Among these ideas are the ASEAN business
travel card, ASEAN common curriculum and a single ASEAN time zone, known as “ASEAN
Common Time.”
I’ve
covered ASEAN visa-free
travel and regional
education efforts in this blog before, but when a reader asked about ASEAN
Common Time, I had to dig back a bit.
In
1995, it
was proposed that ASEAN follow a single time zone, to promote trade and
business links in the region. As the below map indicates, ASEAN currently has
four time zones:
Indonesia
has 3 time zones (UTC + 7, UTC + 8, and UTC+9).
Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines follow UTC + 8, while
Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos follow UTC + 7. Myanmar follows UTC + 6:30. These time differences contribute to
scheduling and planning difficulties. The idea behind ASEAN Common Time is that
aligning into a single time zone would eliminate such difficulties within
ASEAN.
ASEAN
Common Time, however, was shelved because ASEAN member states could not agree
on which time zone would become the standard.
Adopting UTC + 8 would align ASEAN with China and Western Australia.
However, it would mean that Indochina would have to move forward by 1 to 1:30
hours, and most of Indonesia would have to move both forward and backward. Adopting UTC + 7 would mean that half of
ASEAN would have to move back 1 hour, and the linkage to the China time zone
would be gone. Either way, there would
be the inevitable complaints about going to school in the dark or waking up
earlier in countries who have to shift time zones.
Hence
the
idea was shunted off for further study, only occasionally coming up since
then. Presumably these same arguments
raised in the 1990’s would be raised again if ASEAN Common Time were put back
on the agenda this year. We could also
expect the predictable argument that aligning ASEAN with UTC + 8 would be at
least a symbolic or prosaic sign that ASEAN is falling under dominance by
China. However, going by that reasoning,
Detroit would be dominated by Washington DC’s influence because both cities are
in the Eastern time zone of the US, outweighing any historical and cultural
ties to the rest of the Midwest. That’s
not the case.
In
any event, having a common time zone is helpful to the ASEAN Economic
Community, but not critical. After all,
the EU has three time zones and the NAFTA countries have eight time zones and
both regional blocs seem to operate just fine.
The
real value of ASEAN Common Time, as with most ASEAN initiatives, lies in the
process of the proposal rather than the end point. It is not necessary that ASEAN be covered by
a single time zone. Perhaps reducing the
four zones into two or three zones, with keeping the extreme western (e.g.,
Myanmar) and eastern (e.g., Indonesia and Timor Leste (one day)) areas of
Southeast Asia in their own time zones would achieve the same economic
benefits.
Rather,
the process of engaging ASEAN leaders and citizens in formulating ASEAN Common Time
or ASEAN Central Time would strengthen ASEAN identity as the ASEAN Community
develops after 2015. This would be useful for all three pillars of ASEAN, not
just the AEC, and particularly if done in conjunction with strengthening the
ASEAN institutions.
