ASEAN 10 Creates New Community under Malaysia’s Chairmanship, Erects Wall against India, China

Southeast Asian leaders signed a declaration to formally establish an ASEAN community at a summit Sunday in Kuala Lumpur in a milestone for regional integration.

The ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) inked the 2015 Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the Establishment of the ASEAN Community which will see a community formed on 31 December 2015.

The move is a landmark development for ASEAN, which was originally formed in 1967 with just five members. It is a step towards realizing the idea of a three-pillared community to deepen regional integration first proposed in 2003 comprising of-

Ø ASEAN Political and Security Community;

Ø ASEAN Economic Community; and

Ø ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community.

Even within the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the most well-known pillar, the region is still far from creating a truly single market and production base with a free movement of goods and services. As of October 31, ASEAN had only completed 79.5 percent of a full AEC scorecard of over 600 measures.

In the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on ASEAN 2025 charting the way forward for the community for the next ten years. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who hosted the summit, noted that the ASEAN Community said that leaders had set the 2025 target to give them the necessary time and space for even deeper integration.

In addition to the ASEAN Community, the 27th ASEAN Summit also saw the adoption of a range of other measures, including a convention against trafficking, a joint statement on climate change, declarations on aging and higher education and regional plans of action on eliminating violence against women and children.

At the end of the meeting, Najib handed over the rotating chairmanship of ASEAN to his Laotian counterpart Thongsing Thammavong. Laos will chair the regional grouping from January 1.

The ASEAN Summit also saw several other related summits occur between ASEAN and its external partners which also produced some notable outcomes. For instance, at the U.S.-ASEAN Summit, the two sides upgraded their relationship to the level of a strategic partnership. Japan and India were the others with whom ASEAN had summit meets.

Asean’s declaration and the recent announcement of another gigantic regional trade agreement among some Pacific Rim countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), are of interest to India. The TPP too has kept China and India out. As of now, India has only multilateral WTO for global trade. However, WTO too is struggling to survive as the trade powers are looking RTAs after the floundering of WTO.

India’s challenges appear daunting when dealing with regional trade blocs, in an account of lack of competitiveness at home. Negotiators are forced to be defensive on account of this domestic concerns.

Concrete opportunities

The ASEAN community includes a political, security and sociocultural dimension in a region with governments ranging from communist in Vietnam and quasi-military in Myanmar, to the kingdom of Brunei and the democracy of the Philippines.

It is the economic community that offers the most concrete opportunities for integration in a region whose combined GDP would make it the world’s seventh-largest economy.

At the summit in Kuala Lumpur, Li Keqiang, China’s premier, called on the Southeast Asian nations to set aside their differences as tensions rise over the disputed South China Sea islands, the state news agency Xinhua said.

China, which claims almost the entire energy-rich South China Sea, has been transforming reefs into artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago and building airfields and other facilities on some of them.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also have territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Integrating ASEAN economies, intended to help the region compete with giants China and India, would create the world’s seventh-largest single market.

Compared to the European Union, the AEC is culturally and politically more diverse with various systems of government including communism (Laos and Vietnam), a military junta (Thailand), authoritarian (Cambodia), quasi-civilian (Myanmar) and a monarchy (Brunei).

Corruption

In a number of the ASEAN states corruption is considered endemic, a problem seen as hampering the economic integration process.

“I did raise (this) with Prime Minister Najib – as I have with many of the leaders here in Southeast Asia, but and also many of the leaders in Africa, in Latin American and everywhere we go” President Barack Obama told reporters in Kuala Lumpur Sunday.

A new ASEAN-U.S. Strategic Partnership announced during the summits in Malaysia outlines five priority areas of engagement including expanding economic cooperation.