ASEAN and Ambiguity

ASEAN and Ambiguity Mathew Davies (bio) Perhaps more than any other regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ambiguity seem to go hand in hand. Since the establishment of ASEAN more than 50 years ago, it has been easy to point to the region on a map but harder to say what the organization is for, and harder still to say what it does. This essay identifies the origins, workings, and consequences of this ambiguity in Southeast Asian regionalism. While the term ambiguity has been widely and often used in discussions of ASEAN, it has not been analyzed or dissected as its own analytical lens.1 To address this issue, I identify two types of ambiguity in this essay—an ambiguity of purpose (i.e., What is ASEAN for?) and an ambiguity of meaning (i.e., What values does ASEAN embody, promote, and protect?). Further, whereas the term ambiguity is often deployed negatively or derisively as a trait ASEAN should be faulted for and endeavor to overcome, this essay adopts a more nuanced position. Ambiguity is a risk mitigation strategy, and it can be a positive factor for the realization of goals. Very often, it is far from being unintentional or uninformed. At least for some of ASEAN's core goals, ambiguity has been a productive and intentional strategy; removing ambiguity through specification, especially when accompanied by growing regulation, is a governance misstep. This is not to say, of course, that ambiguity is only ever positive, and this essay also identifies the ways in which it both weakens regional governance and produces significant overconfidence. [End Page 22] The Origins and Growth of ASEAN Meeting in Bangkok in 1967 to sign the ASEAN Declaration (also known at the Bangkok Declaration), the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand most likely had the risks of failure uppermost in their minds. Previous attempts to establish a regional body, including the Association of Southeast Asia and MAPHILINDO, had been unsuccessful, and the five abovementioned states were dangerously vulnerable to the vagaries of domestic insurrection and global political competition.2 Failure would exacerbate the insecurities, material and ontological, of the region. Yet, the foreign ministers that met in Bangkok faced daunting obstacles to success. Most fundamentally, the five countries they represented neither liked nor trusted one another, and their diplomatic relations were marred by tensions, disagreements, and overlapping sovereignty claims. At least in part, these tensions were the product of centuries of colonial rule and the resulting political dislocations and silencing that accompanied first European colonialization and then, far more briefly, the Japanese occupation of the region. The ASEAN framework that was crafted was a response to the necessity of coexisting in similar circumstances, with similar economic and geopolitical needs, absent a common understanding, let alone mutual trust.3 In this circumstance, specificity was an obstacle to coexistence, as the disagreements, lack of knowledge, and mutual suspicions meant that any substantial goal would reveal those disagreements in unhelpful ways. No wonder, then, that the Bangkok Declaration itself was deeply ambiguous in purpose and meaning. The declaration committed the five states to no more than cooperating on a range of economic, social, and cultural measures and institutionalizing various meetings and committees.4 Ambiguity of both purpose and meaning is evident in the creation of ASEAN. In terms of purpose, it is not clear why ASEAN itself has to exist, as states could cooperate on the issues raised in the Bangkok Declaration [End Page 23] in a plethora of ways without a regional organization to facilitate that cooperation. Similarly, some of the original goals of ASEAN that are most often relayed to me in discussions with regional representatives have yet to be realized despite being crucial parts of the reasoning behind the organization's establishment. Perhaps the most notable substantive goals of ASEAN as expressed by regional leaders and diplomats are to facilitate mutual comprehension and for leaders to embed themselves in common standards of diplomacy toward each other, in particular not pushing each other too much in public and accepting that all have a right to resist any problematic regional conclusions. Yet this goal is not textually present in the...