Providing for the other: rethinking sovereignty and responsibility in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the ethical discourse on and practice of ‘responsible provision’ adopted by the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM) and the ADMM-Plus and their member countries. Despite their ambivalence towards the ‘responsibility-to-protect’ (R2Protect) norm advocated by the United Nations, Southeast Asian countries have in fact been developing a brand of sovereign responsibility that could be termed a ‘responsibility-to-provide’. Though less exacting in requirements compared to the R2Protect, this provision-based ethic – the ‘R2Provide’, if you will – still embryonic and patchy in its materialisation, is no less important as it reflects Southeast Asian states’ maturation as political communities and as responsible stakeholders in the international community. In contrast to the longstanding debate between communitarianism and liberalism as the appropriate normative and strategic foundations on which Southeast Asian countries ought to build political community, I propose that Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical concept of ‘responsibility to the other’, notwithstanding its demanding suppositions, offers a plausible basis on which to conceptualise the regional obligation of Southeast Asian countries as responsible providers.

KEYWORDS:

• Southeast Asia
• responsibility
• sovereignty
• provision
• Levina

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the journal’s three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The respective positions of ASEAN states on the R2Protect reflect an interesting diversity, ranging from the Philippines’ robust advocacy, at least for a time, of R2Protect during its stint in the Security Council in the period leading up to the adoption of Resolution 1674, to democratic Indonesia’s ambivalence to the concept, and to illiberal Singapore’s involvement in the ‘Group of Friends’ of R2Protect, which aims to facilitate dialogue between likeminded states at the level of the permanent missions to the UN (Bellamy and Davies 2009; Tan 2011).

2. The tension between the unilateral exercise of one’s sovereign responsibility against a recipient state, on one hand, and receiving the consensual agreement of that recipient state to do so on the other has been acknowledged by Francis Deng. In his 2010 Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture, Deng argued that ‘issues could not be left entirely to the states to manage’, because if their peoples were suffering and dying and their governments stand by idly, ‘the world would not watch and do nothing. They would find a way of getting involved’. On the other hand, he also said, ‘We cannot live on ideals that cannot be fulfilled. We have to aspire to the ideals, but we have to deal with the reality on the ground. And the reality on the ground is that we need the cooperation of the member states to fulfil our mission’ (Deng 2010, 13, 15).

3. Arguably, a motivation behind the formation of the ADMM/ADMM-Plus was the perception held by some in regional defence circles that the ARF was simply not faring as it should. Indeed, some have even hinted that the ARF, with its inability to graduate beyond being just a talk shop, serves as a model of what not to do if progress in security cooperation were the goal (Emmers and Tan 2011). Some have also alluded to the likelihood of resentment among some regional defence practitioners for their secondary role and status in the ARF, a regional arrangement initiated and helmed by foreign policy practitioners (Tan 2012b).

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Notes on contributors

See Seng Tan

See Seng Tan is Professor of International Relations at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He is also Deputy Director and Head of Research of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies and was the founding Head of the Centre for Multilateralism Studies at RSIS. He is the author/editor of 11 books and over 70 academic papers and book chapters. His authored books include Multilateral Asian Security Architecture: Non-ASEAN Stakeholders (Routledge, 2015) and The Making of the Asia Pacific: Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation (Amsterdam University Press, 2013).