Regional Cooperation of Asean

Regional Cooperation of ASEAN
To investigate the character of ASEAN regional cooperation, some questions, as asked in the case of the EU, would also be asked in the case of ASEAN. Whether regional integration is consciouslycreated and driven by deliberate political sanction, or whether regional integration arises out of world economies and private market actors. These questions aim to analyze the relationship between formal and informal organization, and between regionalism and regionalization in the case of ASEAN. For ASEAN, the integration and homogeneity effects are both statistically significant, but lack the same degree of simultaneous occurrence as discussed in the case of the EU. Although ASEAN began in 1967 with the signing of the ASEAN Declaration, it was not until 1976 that the members decided to create a uniquely ASEAN institution.
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Since the founding of ASEAN, its governing bodies were slow in extending their scope of cooperation, and never imposed a clear functional mechanism for its institution like those of the EU. Significantly different from the Copenhagen Criteria, the ASEAN Declaration and other agreements and treaties are freely open to all states in the Southeast Asia region.
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And even if the ASEAN Charter aims at making ASEAN to be a more legally-based regional organization,
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The implicit nature of relations among the member nation-states is still enveloped by the principles of the ASEAN Way. According to Amitav Acharya, the informal and non-legalistic procedures are preferred by proponents of the ASEAN Way because they create a non-threatening atmosphere for exploring ways of problem-solving.
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In a general sense, the ASEAN way is a method of interactionand a decision-making process which seek to reach corporate decisions through consultation andconsensus building. More importantly, when common decision cannot be reached, they agree to gotheir separate ways. As ASEAN evolved, the organization developed formula that allowed it toadopt positions without unanimity.Therefore, following the ASEAN Way, Asian participants in multilateral securityconsultations constantly emphasize the importance of the comfort level among them, arguing that contentious issues should be dropped from an agenda rather than risk raising tension. As DonaldEmmerson said, a pluralistic security community is simply defined as a group of sovereign statesthat share both an expectation of intramural security and a sense of intramural community.
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Bylogical extension, an amalgamated security community is a group of no-longer sovereign states thatshare these same two conditions of security and community. By further extension, in securitycommunities generally these same features would be shared by a group of more or less sovereignstates. The more pluralistic the security community is, the more sovereign its members are. By thesame token, the more amalgamated the arrangement, the less sovereign its components.In this regard, the demand for multilateral institutions in the Asia-Pacific is fueled by threefactors. First, there is a desire to build upon the payoff of economic liberalism and interdependence.It is believed that this would encourage security multilateralism since interdependent states presumably have a greater interest in reducing the danger of war among themselves. Second,multilateralism is conceived as a problem-solving exercise aimed at preventing and containing therisk of regional disorder posed by an array of historic and emerging disputes and rivalries. Third,multilateralism is seen as an insurance policy to cushion the region against the current flux in theglobal economic and security climate. In addition, the various regional organizations in SoutheastAsia are much less formalized than that of the EU.Rather, Asian regionalism is pluralistic. There is no single dominant organization, as seenfrom the case of ASEAN, ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), or Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation(APEC), that supplies continental regional integration in the manner of the EU in Europe. BesidesASEAN, an example is that of APEC’s commitment to an open regionalism approach founded on a promise of unilateral liberalization of member state economies. The APEC’s regional project wasdesigned to facilitate wider global processes and could be read as a means of preventing theemergence of a specific East Asian regionalism.
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They are more explicitly state-led and their chosen mode of integration is intergovernmental.APEC has no more than a modest secretariat and operates through regular meetings of national officials and annual Summit Meetings of national leaders. It has no collective aspiration to build a binding body of international law. For its part, ASEAN has been described as a soft securityorganization whose primary function has been to build relations of trust among its componentmember states rather than to construct firm agreement. In short, while economic regionalism in theAsia-Pacific is generally considered to be market-driven and hence relatively unconstrained by stateaction, the fact is that the national interests and preferences remain a major determinant of the possibilities for economic cooperation within ASEAN, and even in APEC. For economic cooperation to move ahead, a model will be required that is acceptable to all because it promisesequal benefits. Therefore, a greater political will to sacrifice at least some national interest for thewelfare of the whole is necessary.