ASEAN Pursues EU-Style Regional Integration

If there is one Southeast Asian leader who knows the value of integration, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore. He succeeded, after all, in harmonizing the disparate cultures and races of his country, then later transforming the city-state into an economic powerhouse that serves as a model for many others in the region.

But last May, Lee threw cold water on the idea that Southeast Asia could be integrated enough to become like the European Union. That goal, he told business executives in Tokyo, would be difficult to achieve.

"To have one currency, a borderless community, I don't see that, not yet," Lee was quoted by The Straits Times, a Singapore newspaper, as saying. "Maybe after 50, 70, 80 years, we can look at the matter again."

Barely eight months after Lee said that, Southeast Asian leaders gathering in the central Philippine province of Cebu for the annual summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, may prove him wrong. They say that they are confident their dream of regional integration — to become the EU of this part of the world — may not be that difficult to attain.

At the meeting, leaders will be considering a plan for an Asean charter that many here hope will make the 40- year-old association more relevant.

Asean has created a body, the Eminent Persons Group, to draft the charter. The group is still in the initial stages of deliberating on what goes into the draft, although some of those involved, like former President Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, have said that they would like the charter to be legally binding, like the EU charter, and that it should allow Asean to impose sanctions on members who do not follow its rules and guidelines.

Much of what has been going on here since Thursday is centered on improving trade among members and on strengthening security and the war on terrorism in the region. But there is a growing acknowledgment — inside and outside of Asean — of the need for the group to reinvent itself in order to maintain its relevance in the region.

The core of Asean was formed in the 1960s, as a bulwark against Communism in the region. In recent years, Asean's concerns have become increasingly economic and the group has opened up to Communist countries like Vietnam and Laos.

"Asean appears to be weakening," said Benito Lim, a political scientist and expert on regional issues at Ateneo de Manila University. "Its relevance to Southeast Asians is no longer that strong."

Many officials and analysts say that only by adhering to the principles that make the EU what it is today, like openness and respect for human rights, can Asean hope to emulate its European counterpart.

"While we seek to build a more secure community," Alberto Romulo, the Philippine foreign minister, said in Cebu on Friday, "we are also intent on a community that will have a stronger understanding of its identity, a community that is ever-more determined to be bound by its rules and its commitments.

"We are determined to hasten the realization of our community."

One of the criticisms that have been directed against Asean is that its noninterference policy prevents the group from criticizing, let alone sanctioning, countries like Myanmar for human- rights abuses. This policy, analysts say, undermines Asean morally. As such, the criticism goes, the grouping is reduced to being a talking shop that accomplishes little.

Many officials hope that the charter will help to end the policy, although any moves to do so will likely be opposed vigorously by countries like Myanmar.

Lim said that Asean's drift toward obsolescence had to do with "the Asean way," an informal process that seeks the agreement of all its 10 members on issues that confront the group.

K.S. Nathan, an expert on Asean at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, described the Asean way as a "cumbersome process" that holds back effective decision making.

It has been ingrained in the organization since its founding 40 years ago.

The approach has prevented the group, for instance, from developing its own conflict-resolution mechanism, independent of bodies like the United Nations. The absence of such a mechanism was apparent, experts said, in Asean's failure to play a key role in resolving the Cambodian war in the late 1970s.

"Asean is getting to be about 40 years old and it's about time that they also get their act together in certain ways," Nathan told Radio Singapore International last month, "especially in terms of reviewing the Asean way.

"For the organization to move forward," Nathan said, "they need to find some other mechanism that will make the association much more effective and efficient in terms of delivering its decisions on key issues."

S. Jayakumar, the Singaporean deputy prime minister, was more frank in his assessment. "If it just continues to do more of the same, I think over a period of time, Asean will just become one of those organizations which will slowly fade into the sunset," he was reported as saying last week. Unless Asean changes, he said, it will atrophy and become marginalized.

To be sure, Asean is changing, albeit not at the pace many probably prefer. It has, for instance, become much firmer in its criticism of Myanmar, demanding the release of all political prisoners and a faster pace of democratization.

"While Myanmar needs more political room to manage its internal challenges," Romulo, the Philippine foreign minister, said in Cebu Friday, "it must make greater progress in its road map for national reconciliation and democracy."

A joint communiqué addressed to Myanmar by the other nine members of Asean expressed "concern on the pace of the national reconciliation process and hope to see tangible progress that would lead to peaceful transition to democracy in the near future."

The group has likewise taken a bolder stance on North Korea, with the Philippines agreeing to host the six- party negotiations that seek the denuclearization of North Korea in February.

Even the discussion of the charter, which was started years ago, is seen as a departure from the Asean way, given how difficult it is to get consensus from 10 countries on something as complicated as drawing up the group's core principles.

And as Asean expands and reaches out to such countries as Japan and China, which sees Southeast Asia as an economic and perhaps military battleground where it is pitted against the United States, many see the practical imperative of a stronger and more effective Asean. In the case of China, which has longstanding territorial disputes with several Southeast Asian countries, such a need becomes even more significant.

Asean needs to make "hard-nosed decisions," said Singapore's Jayakumar last week. "I think there's no choice."

In the end, while Asean may look at the EU as a model and as an inspiration in its search to achieve relevance, the effort is going to entail hard work, experts say.

"Europe and East Asia are different and always will be," Jorgen Orstrom Moller, the former Danish ambassador to Singapore, and Rodolfo Severino, the former secretary general of Asean, wrote in a commentary last year.

But, they said, "this does not mean that East Asia, or at least Asean, is not driven by similar political and economic imperatives of regional economic integration as Europe was, or that the EU process cannot be replicated to some significant extent in East Asia."