On the Nature of Security in Southeast Asia

An interesting bit I did for the first Junior Paper required at Princeton. The second will be posted soon, within a month or so.

Abstract:

When the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was founded in 1967, few expected it to outlast its two short-lived predecessors, the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) and Maphilindo. Four decades later, a now thriving ASEAN has defied expectations and expanded to include all but one country in Southeast Asia. ASEAN’s survival and growth deserve special recognition; after all, Southeast Asia was one of the most unstable regions in the world during the Cold War. Whether ASEAN has been an effective security organization, however, is a more contentious debate. If one were to judge ASEAN on its ability to provide an informal medium for government elites to cooperate in security matters, then it would be fair to make such assertion. If one should, however, judge ASEAN on its ability to compel its members to respect the absolute interests of their citizens and the region as a whole, then ASEAN has been a failure. As Southeast Asia strives to achieve a common voice, ASEAN finds itself drifting precariously between these two ends of the spectrum. While ASEAN’s rhetoric has overwhelmingly suggested the imminent birth of a security community, its actions have been less consistent with that vision.

Scholars of International Relations (IR) have employed several theoretical frameworks to explain the nature of cooperation and competition among Southeast Asian nations. Neorealists claim that the discrepancy between rhetoric and practice is due to the selfish nature of member states. Constructivists disagree, arguing that norms and principles influence the way member states interact. Actions that might appear contradictory to rhetoric actually conform to ASEAN’s norms. This paper rejects the notion that strategic interests and norms are mutually exclusive and instead argue that they both play important roles in shaping the nature of ASEAN. ASEAN’s success depends on how well it frames controversial strategic interests in terms of over-arching ideological concepts that appeal to all member states. The ability to find an ideological consensus that transcends differences in interests has been a hallmark of ASEAN’s diplomatic culture.

The first section examines ASEAN within a security context and shows that ASEAN is indeed an implicit instrument of security. The second section analyzes the contending perspectives regarding the roles of strategic interests and norms. The next three sections examine the interplay of interests and norms in three significant historical events: the founding of ASEAN, the invasions of Cambodia and East Timor, and the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The last section evaluates the future prospect of ASEAN in light of the framework discussed in the paper.