When former President Fidel V. Ramos visited my university as guest lecturer last Thursday, I took the opportunity to ask what he thinks the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) must do to be more relevant in the coming years.

President Ramos has a deep appreciation of the ASEAN. His father, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs Narciso Ramos, was a signatory to the Bangkok Declaration that gave birth to the organization. As President, he was able to restrain China’s provocative action in the Spratlys by rallying the ASEAN against Beijing. More recently, as a member of the ASEAN’s eminent persons group (EPG), he was instrumental in expediting the drafting of the ASEAN’s Charter, which was finally promulgated last December.

The former president revealed that, as the Philippines’ representative to the EPG, among his many recommendations were for the ASEAN to strive towards becoming an EU-like union and for it to do away with consensus-based decision-making. He said that if the European Union, which has more than twenty members, could do it; the ASEAN, with just ten members, can do it as well.

Personally, of course, I have serious doubts about ASEAN becoming an EU-like union. This is due to at least three reasons. First, unlike the members of the EU, the ASEAN members do not share common culture and traditions. Some of the member-states are Buddhist, some are Muslims and one is Christian. Some are dictatorships, some are democratic and some are communist. Second, unlike the members of the EU, conflicts still arise from time to time among ASEAN members: between Cambodia and Thailand over a Buddhist temple, between the Philippines and Malaysia over North Borneo, and between four ASEAN members over the Spratlys. Third, nationalism remains strong among ASEAN peoples, and it is highly unlikely that this nationalism will give way to regionalism. Even in the Philippines, for example, allowing Singaporeans or Thais to practice medicine or teaching or other professions remains emotionally unpopular.

Indeed, even the ASEAN itself thinks that political integration won’t happen anytime soon. The Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuan of Thailand, said: “The European Union has been and remains an inspiration, but not our model. Not yet anyway.”

What ASEAN is working for now instead is closer economic union. By 2015, or six years from now, the bloc’s markets will integrate into a single free trade area. Although many believe that even this is doubtful given the protectionist tendencies of the bloc’s members, moving towards an economic integration is more doable than towards an EU-like political union. This is because focusing on economic integration is a convenient way to go for the ASEAN. This way, there would be less friction among member-states.

This does not, however, guarantee the future of the organization. If ASEAN is to remain relevant, it must move beyond economics. I don’t say it must, as Ramos believes, forge a closer political union. But at least the ASEAN must be more than merely a “talk shop” where procedure matters more than the outcome.

In fact, this is exactly the purpose of the ASEAN Charter. The Charter, aside from bestowing upon the bloc juridical status, should have made the ASEAN more responsive to the needs of the peoples of Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the bloc’s member-governments were not strong enough to withstand pressure from the pariahs among their ranks. The Charter is way weaker than needed.

Human rights issues, for instance, remain unaddressed. True, the Charter called for the Summit in Thailand last week to form a mechanism that will address human rights issues. But the governments of Myanmar and Cambodia are currently watering down the effort to form such a mechanism. Civil society groups from both countries, for instance, were excluded from the meeting. Indeed, come October when the mechanism is supposed to be promulgated, it would most likely be toothless and ineffective.

More importantly, there must be a concrete mechanism as well for the settlement of disputes between ASEAN members. The Charter calls for utilization of pacific means of settling disputes while the ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint, signed last week in Thailand, calls for the creation of an “early warning system” that would “prevent the escalation conflict.” But the ASEAN members still were not ready to set the details of the measures. How would the ASEAN, for instance, act if a member resorts to aggressive actions? This must be determined because some of the member-states have governments that are either politically unstable or susceptible to a considerably powerful rightist/conservative lobby that seems to have little regard for regional integration.

If these things are left unaddressed by the ASEAN, then there would be failures in two levels: first, the ASEAN won’t be able to close the economic development gap between the better off and the worst off, hence complicating full economic integration; and, second, the ASEAN would lose its credibility as a major player in the regional balance of power game in the Far East.

As the Philippines’ experience in the Mischief Reef incident in the 1990s points out, the ASEAN has a big potential in maintaining regional instability. The bloc, with a population of 570 million and a combined GDP of $1.1 trillion, is a force to reckon.

In fact, to some extent, the ASEAN’s leadership position in the Far East has been acknowledged in the past by the big countries of Northeast Asia. The East Asia Summit, for instance, has been held under the auspices of the ASEAN. China, Japan and Korea has followed ASEAN’s leadership in the Chaing Main Initiative that gave birth to a region-wide currency swap agreement that aims to maintain economic stability in this part of the world. In short, the ASEAN has given its members an added leverage in Asian regional geopolitics.

But the ASEAN’s leadership position and its leverage, which rests on its members’ solidarity, are in danger. Last December, the leaders of South Korea, Japan and China, the three largest powers of the region, in their meeting in Fukuoka, agreed to set aside their petty political bickering in an effort to forge a beneficial tripartite economic cooperation. They agreed to make their tripartite summit an annual event, which led some to speculate that Northeast Asian political cooperation is also underway.

Given historical and territorial conflicts hounding the Big Three of Northeast Asia, it is unlikely for them to forge political solidarity. But we’ll never know, really. Their relations might improve, especially if the China-chaired six-party talks succeeds in resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis. And the influence of a politically-united Northeast Asia far outweighs that of the ASEAN.

Therefore, if members of the ASEAN fail to get their acts together and make difficult decisions, then it would surely be on its way to geopolitical irrelevance. The sad part is this might happen even before the ASEAN gets to maximize its full potentials.

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