After two summits, farther away from a community

29/10/2009
Source: Bangkokpost

Despite unsurprising official spins to the contrary, Thailand's chairmanship and hosting of Asean has fallen well short of expectations. On the one hand, it turned out to be a casualty of Thailand's domestic political crisis and confrontation. On the other, Asean's longstanding structural constraints, underpinned by internal shortcomings and external challenges, were underlined yet again.

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations will now have to regroup and reaffirm commitments to the Asean Charter over the months leading up to the 16th summit, hosted by Vietnam next year. Without persuasive results, the charter will be seen merely as a runaway vision trying to keep up with the outside world but constrained from within, a hollow entity driven by rhetoric and increasingly bypassed by the international community.

That all of the summitry proceedings actually transpired last weekend should spell relief for both Thailand and the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

To put Asean inner-workings on a calendar year, Thailand was handed the alphabetically rotating chairmanship not for the usual 12 but 18 months.

The unprecedented duration was seen as commensurate with Thailand's role as founding member and Asean's birthplace, and was premised on renowned Thai hospitality and proven ability to put on pomp and ceremony.

The 18-month stint was crucial for Asean as it rolled out its much-vaunted charter, a regional constitution of sorts that is supposed to chart the course for the regional organisation in the next decade and beyond.

But Thailand's chairmanship has not paid off. The two summits under its tenure were fraught with uncertainty and instability.

The first, or Asean's 14th, was supposed to take place in December 2008 in Bangkok. But it was rescheduled for Chiang Mai amid domestic political turmoil and then postponed altogether due to the Constitution Court's dissolution of the People Power Party and consequent collapse of the Somchai Wongsawat government.

The Abhisit government was able to convene the 14th Asean summit in Cha-am in February this year but not the normally back-to-back 4th East Asia Summit (EAS), which was delayed, moved to Pattaya and eventually greeted by the Songkran riots in April.

Putting off the EAS until last weekend has meant that its 4th summit has taken two years to convene.

Moreover, the 15th Asean summit got off on a slippery footing when four of the heads of state and government did not turn up at the official opening, apparently for reasons of poor communication and planning by the host rather than deliberate disregard by the guests.

The massive security blanket in and around the meeting areas, backed by the Internal Security Act, were not conducive to a summitry atmosphere.

Notwithstanding significant sideline agreements on functional cooperation and Asean-related summits with individual and a group of members of the EAS, the 15th Asean summit was highlighted by three key outcomes that reflected Thailand's problematic chairmanship and Asean's structural challenges.

The first took place near the outset when representatives of Asean's civil society organisations aborted their interface with the Asean leaders.

These CSO representatives were vetted and drawn from a wide-ranging Asean Peoples' Forum that preceded the summit. Five Asean governments objected to as many CSO representatives from their respective countries, and attempted to insert their own government choices among the CSO line-up.

Such a move betrayed the goodwill and early momentum generated at the previous interface between Asean CSOs and Asean heads in February, when two representatives from Burma and Cambodia gave up their places at the table to appease their governments in exchange for recognition and a separate meeting with PM Abhisit and Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya.

The understanding among CSOs then was to take a half step forward rather than to disengage in favour of a fuller step at the next interface.

In view of the five Asean governments' rejections, the remaining CSO representatives' walkout of the interface was understandable.

It was a brinkmanship that would have either undercut the Asean leaders' credibility or the Asean CSOs' resolve. In the end, the Asean leaders' credibility and the legitimacy of their so-called "people-centred" charter suffered conspicuously. It dampened the launch of the Asean Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, eight representatives of which will be government appointees. Only Thailand and Indonesia, with domestic human rights commissions, will be represented by autonomous, non-government members. Evidently, Asean is still much more about government preferences than peoples' concerns, undermining core tenets of its charter on civil liberties, fundamental freedoms and good governance.

The second takeaway from the summits was the Thai-Cambodian spat between Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Abhisit government. PM Hun Sen overstepped both legal and diplomatic boundaries by pledging not to extradite fugitive former premier Thaksin Shinawatra when extradition proceedings had not even begun. The Cambodian leader also blatantly took sides in Thailand's deeply divided body politic by backing Mr Thaksin, offering the latter sanctuary and an advisory position.

But PM Abhisit should also own up to his misjudgement in appointing a foreign minister who publicly resorted to name-calling the Cambodian PM. With a foreign minister who came with so much liability, it would have been naive to expect Thai-Cambodian relations to be smooth.

The Abhisit government also has done little to rein in right-wing groups from inflaming the Preah Vihear controversy by exploiting nationalism, chauvinism and xenophobia. And no doubt PM Hun Sen saw his verbal offensive as partial payback for Thailand's allowing Sam Rainsy, a Cambodian opposition leader, to launch a tirade against the government in Phnom Penh recently. Under the helpless gaze of other Asean governments, Thai-Cambodian relations will now be rocky indefinitely even after the dust of Thai politics settles.

Third, the lasting impact last weekend was the competing visions of East Asian regionalism going forward. Japan had a new plan but an old name for its regionalisation scheme. The idea of an East Asian community, both with a big "C" and a small "c," has been around for many years.

Tokyo will have to spell out and delineate it with corresponding divisions of labour from the EAS and the Asean Plus Three. Australia's proposal for an Asia-Pacific Community, with a big "C" and a hyphen, harks back to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation framework, plus India, and perhaps the US. How these schemes differ from the EAS and APT need to be defined.

Unsurprisingly, they have received lukewarm responses without much traction in the region.
These new regionalist endeavours, however, do portend a growing frustration with Asean. East Asian regionalism has not gone anywhere because Asean is stuck. Its insisted centrality in East Asia's regionalism has become a stumbling block.

With the outside powers generating new momentum, enthusiasm and direction for East Asia, Asean will be hard pressed to keep up in face of its own internal defects. Much repair work and retooling of the Asean charter are in order if the grouping is to remain relevant to the major powers in the region and the international community beyond.