‘Writing’ and sustaining Asian regionalism: interpreting the official discourse of ASEAN

ABSTRACT

This article considers ASEAN from the perspective of regional identity-building and organizational fixity. This ten-nation bloc is generally considered a well-intentioned but flawed exemplar of inter-state community building. The article analyses how ASEAN has been ‘fixed’ as a social and political fact within the Asian geopolitical space. It reflects on the survivability of ASEAN as a social fact despite the centrifugal pressures of national interests and the impact of global forces. The findings indicate that ASEAN has achieved the effects of fixity and stability by constructing an interior political imaginary through a multifaceted discursive strategy. ASEAN’s ‘constitutive outside’ includes, inter alia, the transversal differentiation of its imagined interiority from external entities and political spaces, the focus on diachronically defined regional problem solving, the imperative of development, and through the emphasis on intra-mural connectivity along lower-level policy-making. The implications for the study of ASEAN and regional organizations are considered. Critically, the increasing salience of more functional and sectoral policy tiers dealing with transversal policy questions, compared to the more sensitive intergovernmental domains of political-security matters, is notable within the bloc’s official discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• ASEAN
• regionalism
• regional identity
• official discourse
• international organization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See poll on ASEAN Awareness 2018, retrieved from https://asean.org/poll-on-asean-awareness-2018/.

2 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to Quayle’s work.

3 Available at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations website www.asean.org (last accessed 14 June 2023).