Table of Contents
It is taken for granted that the major countries have dominant status in the international community, while the minor ones have little influence. It is certainly assumed that they have more power than the minor countries. But this assumption often blinds us to the fact that small countries also seek to acquire and exploit power. In what kind of situations can such countries give the impression of playing on the same stage as the major powers? One answer is that they can acquire disproportionate power when they create a new kind of power resource and demonstrate that they can use this resource consistently to facilitate the emergence of a new world order.
This chapter analyses this contention by using the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) after the Cold War as a case study.
ASEAN suffered the strike of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, and it experienced a low tide in the final years of the last century. But in the new century, along with the revival of the ASEAN member states’ economies, ASEAN’s regional status and function advanced incessantly. It has made great progress in the fields of its integration process, the East Asia cooperation process and the strategy of balance of powers, which have made the world view it with new eyes, with some scholars even contending that ASEAN is becoming the centre of power in East Asia.[1] There are four concrete representations of this burgeoning power.
First, ASEAN is changing the traditional cognition towards the ownership of power. As we still keep to the old idea that the Southeast Asia region is the arena where the big powers struggle to acquire a sphere of influence, ASEAN’s strategy of balancing big powers has been in operation, with Singapore and Vietnam as the most conspicuous examples. The United States and Japan are ‘jealous’ that China’s influence is increasing in the Southeast Asia region, so they constantly offer more ‘carrots’ to ASEAN member countries. For example, if a big power wants to join the East Asia Summit (EAS), a regional cooperation network created by ASEAN to avoid becoming a marginal player in the competition to shape community-building in the region, it has to achieve the qualifications set by ASEAN; for example, it has to join the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). Because the United States is reluctant to join the TAC, it cannot become a member of the EAS.[2] Russia, on the other hand, has joined the TAC, but has also been refused entry into the EAS on the grounds that trade relations between the two sides remain relatively modest. ASEAN has achieved dominant status in the collective game with big powers.
Second, ASEAN is changing the traditional understanding about how countries seek to advance their interests. Generally speaking, the economic cooperation theory considers that when a large state and a small state are in the process of establishing a bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the larger one usually exerts its power to protect its economic interests, while the smaller one opens its market passively. The larger one becomes the axle country and gains more benefit by establishing FTAs with several small ones, which become the spoke countries and benefit less. For example, the United States intends to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the whole American continent, and its aim is to realise its institutional hegemony in the American continent. While people still keep to the old idea of these countries seeking to protect and advance their interests, ASEAN actually bypassed the China-Japan nexus a decade ago, and created the East Asia cooperation framework including China, Japan and South Korea. These three nations recognise and support ASEAN’s dominant and leading role and they are willing to accept ASEAN as the foundation of the future East Asia Economic Community through three ASEAN Plus One groupings (ASEAN plus China, ASEAN plus Japan and ASEAN plus South Korea), all with their respective FTAs. So, in the aspect of mechanism design, ASEAN becomes the axle country which gets more benefit, while the big countries become the spoke countries. ASEAN gets the dominant power as it seeks to protect and advance its interests.
Third, ASEAN is changing the traditional understanding about a country that seeks security. In the Cold War era, there were ceaseless wars in the Indochina peninsula which were not caused by ASEAN member countries. However, the old members of ASEAN, while there was no conflict between them, often had very strained relations. Since the Cold War, the steady expansion of ASEAN has finally extended peace to the whole of Southeast Asia. The ASEAN member states think that the traditional security threats come from the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. This ASEAN perception is the biggest motivating source pushing ASEAN’s implementation of the strategy of balancing big powers. And this idea of ASEAN is also the main reason that ASEAN hopes that the Asia-Pacific big powers will, one by one, join the TAC, whose tenet is to resolve conflicts through peaceful means. In the past, larger powers always forced the small countries to sign peace treaties, while today larger powers join the TAC on their own initiative to give security assurances to the smaller nations.
Furthermore, ASEAN has demonstrated that it is receptive to the concept of ‘human security’ and of the need to think as a community of states in advancing this dimension of security. In the face of the transnational non-traditional security threats, these states are more fragile, their own national capacity is more obviously insufficient, and they urgently need regional and international cooperation. But they also worry more about the erosion of their national sovereignty. So the ASEAN states are making great efforts to seek the balancing-point among the national, regional and international community. ASEAN’s preparedness to think more boldly about the absolutist conception of sovereignty and to take some initiatives that challenge it have also been a source of respect and, thus, power.
Fourth, ASEAN is changing the understanding of international norms. If we were to select the most engaging international norms in history, two strong candidates would be the ‘peaceful co-existence’ idea formulated during the Cold War era and the ‘win–win’ idea in the globalisation era. ASEAN members have realised peaceful co-existence among themselves, and now they are making a great effort to achieve ‘win–win’ outcomes with external powers. In their own region, ASEAN countries have found it impossible not to let the major powers win, which is the maximal reality in international politics and is also the original intention of its foreign strategy design. The tenet of ASEAN states is to realise a regional win: the small countries must seek independence, survival, development and might among big powers, which is the maximal reality of regional politics. From this point of view, ASEAN (whose leitmotiv is to seek to avoid conflicts and to seek common understanding) can gradually foster regional consciousness internally and also cautiously deal with the major powers externally. When ASEAN establishes the regional norms, it also creates the international norms, and the major powers are willing to abide by these international norms.
So, ASEAN is a power emerging in the region of East Asia.
[1] Pang Zhongying article available at <http://news.sina.com.cn/w/2005-12-12/10248559207.shtml>, accessed 5 May 2008.
[2] This chapter was written before mid-2009. On 22 July 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the United States’ ‘Instrument of Accession to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia’. The 10 ASEAN Foreign Ministers then signed an ‘Instrument of Extension of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia’, completing US accession to TAC.