2022: Does ASEAN have a leadership deficit?

11 January 2022

In 2021, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) faced growing questions about its ability to lead regional dialogue as it faltered on a range of pressing issues including the South China Sea disputes with China and the coup in Myanmar.

With the intensifying US-China strategic rivalry placing new strains on the region and proliferating minilateral arrangements, 9DASHLINE invites several leading experts to explore whether ASEAN will be able to navigate the trials it faces in 2022.

BESET WITH CHALLENGES

Susannah Patton, Project Director and Research Fellow, Power and Diplomacy Project at the Lowy Institute.

ASEAN’s traditional role as a broker of regional dialogue in Asia, and its central place as convenor of regional security and economic institutions, hang in the balance in 2022. In 2021, growing polarisation between the US and China saw the Quad have its breakthrough year, holding two leaders’ summits and launching new cooperation to deliver public goods to the region. However much the United States, India, Japan, and Australia profess support for the principle of ASEAN centrality, the Quad’s existence shows the reverse is true: ASEAN will no longer be a gatekeeper for the region’s architecture. In the words of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, institution building will be a flexible “latticework”. ASEAN, with its slow-moving and inflexible practices, appears poorly suited to this new approach.

ASEAN’s role as a broker, too, faces challenges. Brunei’s decision as chair to not invite Myanmar’s junta leader to the October 2021 summits facilitated the attendance of US President Joe Biden. But Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, the chair of the summits in 2022, has already said the junta has a right to attend. This approach will make it harder for the United States to engage with ASEAN, and therefore harder for ASEAN to maintain the strategic equilibrium that it seeks.

HAMSTRUNG BY STRUCTURAL FLAWS

Zachary Abuza, Professor at the National War College in Washington, DC.

ASEAN is clearly hampered by a leadership deficit. A part of this is structural, having a relatively weak secretariat and a presidency that rotates annually amongst the 10 member states, with their disparate sizes, interests, strategic cultures, and relationships with the great powers. Despite the structural flaw that allows one country to largely shape the organisation’s agenda for a year, ASEAN is further hampered by consensus-based decision-making, which tends to lead to the least common denominator policies that are acceptable to all. These tend to make ASEAN appear weak and feckless, unwilling to take on thorny issues or challenge the status quo. Although Indonesia, which accounts for half of ASEAN’s size and wealth, is the natural leader of the grouping when it does not actively lead, the group is further weakened.

On some of the most important security issues in the region, including Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the 2017-18 ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, and now the consequences of Myanmar’s February 2021 coup d’etat, ASEAN’s lack of leadership is pronounced. While member states often talk about ASEAN centrality, no country comes close to putting organisational interests and reputation ahead of their parochial national interests. This is no European Union, nor will it ever be, as states remain too guarded of their sovereignty. Amongst political elites within the grouping, there is little interest in any meaningful structural reform, such as replacing consensus-based decision making with a majoritarian process or revisiting the group’s non-interference policy.

Due to these factors, it is easy for an external power such as China, whose interest it is to keep ASEAN weak and divided, to exploit fissures. As such ASEAN doesn’t always get the attention and respect that it thinks it deserves from Washington or other capitals. The result is an increasing trend towards minilateralism to address specific issues and disputes. While minilateralism can be important for resolving narrow disputes, it both still requires leadership and doesn't enhance ASEAN centrality.

A DECENTRALISED NETWORK INCREASINGLY AT RISK

Hunter Marston, Associate at 9DASHLINE.

Great power rivalry and the proliferation of new minilateralism are challenging the ASEAN to reclaim and redefine its notion of centrality in the Indo-Pacific region. As a consensus-based organisation, ASEAN has never had a clear leadership structure. The ASEAN Secretariat, based in Jakarta, is under-resourced and underleveraged to act in a unified or decisive manner. ASEAN is, by default, a decentralised network defined by the diversity of its member states. ASEAN nations are acutely concerned by great power rivalry between the United States and China, which they fear will render Southeast Asia the epicentre of a 21st-century conflict. In light of such strategic anxieties, in June 2019 the organisation issued an “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific”as an attempt to reclaim ASEAN centrality and put the regional bloc back in the “driver’s seat” as the member states like to say, lest great powers attempt to carve up the region for their own geopolitical ambitions.

While ASEAN states have a range of views toward the Quad comprising the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, their greatest fear is that brewing US-China confrontation could lead to conflict and regional instability, which would cause an end to the region’s steady economic growth over the last several decades. ASEAN states are by and large developing or underdeveloped nations that look to both the United States and China — as well as the European Union, Japan, and Australia — for public goods such as infrastructure development. They don’t want to be forced to choose sides in a conflict they have no interest in seeing take place and don’t see themselves as part of. At the same time, the February 2021 coup in Myanmar has exposed deepening rifts within ASEAN between democratic member states and their authoritarian counterparts. This divide has stymied collective action and threatens to make the group irrelevant or, worse, tear it apart.

A GENTLEMAN’S CLUB NOT UP TO THE CHALLENGE

David Hutt, Journalist, and Research Fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies.

In its current organisational structure, ASEAN is showing itself to be increasingly unfit for 21st-century problems. The rotating chairmanship, which changes hands between states alphabetically each year, is afforded the freedom to do as it sees fit. The last few years have thankfully seen chairs in Thailand, Vietnam, and Brunei that want to rule consensually, but already this year’s chair, Cambodia, has shown it is happy to lead unilaterally on issues, especially with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s recent visit to Myanmar. The Secretary-General post, which changes hands among member states alphabetically every five years, is either weak or strong purely on the calibre of the occupant. At the same time, the entire organisation is designed to make decisions that all members can agree on, which usually means keeping the status-quo and avoiding difficult, but necessary, issues.

At its heart, ASEAN is a gentleman’s club for discussing business, not a serious multilateral organisation that can debate the finer points of 21st-century geopolitics. This system has done okay since its expansion from six to ten members in the 1990s because that period was typified by high-rates of economic growth across the region and little geopolitical interest in Southeast Asia. Former US President Barack Obama only launched his “pivot” to Asia in 2011 and China only became a leading actor in the region around the same time. Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, fundamentally changed the script by recognising that America was in some sort of ‘New Cold War’ with China. As such, ASEAN is now being asked to respond to issues that it reformed itself away from being able to cope with — it essentially dropped any geopolitical pretence by admitting former US adversaries Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar in the 1990s, as well as moving ASEAN’s border onto China’s.

The organisation’s obsession with stability and consensus is at times pathological and certainly doesn’t make ASEAN resilient. The ongoing Myanmar crisis is a difficult fix, but awaiting ASEAN are even more problematic scenarios: what happens if there’s a Taiwan crisis, a limited war between the US and China, or even undisputed Chinese hegemony of the region (the likely outcome if America refuses to defend Taiwan)? ASEAN may have only a limited timeframe to reform itself. One suspects it will carry on regardless, crisis after crisis.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform. Image credit: US Indo-Pacific Command.