Decoupling rhetoric and practice: the cultural limits of ASEAN cooperation

Abstract

Why have ASEAN member states declared and why do they continue to declare their intention to enhance cooperation and devise projects when implementation lags behind their rhetoric? Why do they rhetorically commit themselves to cooperation, when they continue to stick to self-interested policies to the detriment of ASEAN's collective interest? And given these diverging practices, how likely is it that the objective of a more legalized and binding cooperation associated with the recently ratified ASEAN Charter is being implemented? This article draws attention to ASEAN's hybrid or dual character of international cooperation, consisting of the emulation of the European integration project and the persistence of deeper cultural strata of Southeast Asia's cooperation project that determine the limits of cooperation: Southeast Asia's social structure and political culture that have not produced those mechanisms that might facilitate international cooperation. If our explanation is correct that cooperation within ASEAN comes about as a simultaneous process of emulation and established cultural practices, we expect change only under specified conditions. Based on our argument and the theoretical literature on normative change, we identify and discuss in greater detail three potential outcomes of change: inertia, localization and transformation. The three modes make different predictions concerning change within ASEAN. Based on an analysis of the two major shocks with which ASEAN has had to contend in the last two decades, namely the Cold War in Asia and the Asian financial crisis, we argue that ASEAN's dominant response to major ideational challenges has been combinations of localization and inertia and has not been followed by a fundamental change of practice

Keywords:

• ASEAN
• cooperation culture
• emulation
• European Union
• cultural realism
• international cooperation in Southeast Asia

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a paper presented to the ‘40 Years of ASEAN: Performance, Lessons and Perspectives’ conference organized jointly by the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, Munich, and the Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Germany, in May 2007. The authors thank the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt for funding the conference and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Dr. Anja Jetschke is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Margarete-von-Wrangell-Program jointly funded by the Federal State Foundation of Baden-Wuerttemberg and the European Social Fund. She is the author of several publications on human rights in the Philippines and Indonesia. Her current project deals with diffusion processes between Europe and Asia.

Dr. Jürgen Rüland is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

Notes

¹For cautious prognoses of such change, see Busse (1999), Acharya (2004) and Kivimäki (2008).

²For the fruitful application of a combination of sociological and historical institutionalism, see Stubbs (2008).

³In particular, the Speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives, José de Venecia, was a major voice calling for an ASEAN Parliament along the European model. Interview with de Venecia, Manila, September 2001.

⁴See Extraordinary Meeting of the Executive Committee of AIPA, 16–19 April 2007, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; accessed at http://www.aipo.org/Activities.htm, 4 April 2008.

⁵See, for instance, ‘ASEAN Charter – hurdles cleared over human rights commission’; accessed at http://www.siiaonline.org/?q=programmes/insights/asean-charter-hurdles-cleared-over-human-rights-commission, 17 March 2009.

⁶The United States is the first country to have appointed an ambassador to ASEAN. See The Jakarta Post, 9 May 2008, p. 11.

⁷Public lecture held during the ‘Security Culture in Africa and Southeast and Central Asia’ conference, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, 10 September 2007.

⁸See The Jakarta Post, 17 December 2007, p. 2.

⁹Currently resurging nationalist discourses in Thailand and Indonesia also deliberately revitalize pre-colonial and pre-modern conceptualizations of politics.

¹⁰See also The Jakarta Post, 21 September 2000, 25 November 2001, 1 May 2003, 11 April 2005, 7 September 2005, 4 September 2007, 28 February 2008.

¹¹See Modelski (1964: 550).

¹²For an example, see Kusnanto (2005: 67).

¹³For an example, see J. Soedjati Djiwandono, ‘Behind occasional strains between neighbours’, The Jakarta Post, 6 March 2002.

¹⁴See Far Eastern Economic Review, 6 August 1998, pp. 24–8.

¹⁵See The Jakarta Post, 19 April 2006, 6 October 2007, p. 6; International Herald Tribune, 13 January 2007, p. 2.