Southeast Asian leaders gathered for their annual summit on Saturday, aiming to enact plans to create a single EU-style community in the years ahead, while dealing with a deepening global economic crisis. The 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations has started on the road towards becoming a single community embracing 570 million people with a combined GDP of $2 trillion in six years, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.
"Asean will continue to be centrally located between growing poles of growth and power in the Asia-Pacific region, with Northeast Asia on one side and South Asia on the other. The challenge is how we can maintain Asean centrality in the evolving regional architecture," Abhisit said in an opening address.
But while the leaders look at their roadmap towards a future community, they are also seeking co-ordinated responses to the global economic crisis that raises the spectre of rising unemployment in the mostly impoverished region whose economies rely heavily on exports.
Some of them face elections this year or next. Host Thailand, which has had four prime ministers over the past year, offers some sobering lessons when political rifts are not healed. This summit, scheduled for December in Bangkok, was postponed and moved to the royal seaside resort of Hua Hin due to street protests that included the seizure of Bangkok''s main airports.
TRADE PROTECTIONISM: Days before the summit, finance ministers set up an enlarged currency pool which countries can tap into to defend their currencies if they become the victims of runaway capital flight. Top officials have offered homilies against signs of creeping protectionism in world trade, even as they defended their own buy-local campaigns as being consistent with world trade rules. Asean economic ministers did chalk up a victory for free trade on Friday by securing a Free Trade Agreement with New Zealand and Australia.
Pulling together an economic community appears to be going much better than efforts to create a harmonious political entity. This year''s summit theme "Asean Charter for Asean Peoples" was meant to introduce a dialogue between the leaders and civil society groups at the Hua Hin meeting. It got off to a wobbly start when Cambodia and Myanmar refused to recognise such groups representing their countries.
"We''re supposed to have a charter that legalises ASEAN, which promotes human rights and democracy, but even in this situation, people are not allowed to have dialogue with their own government," Debbie Stothard of the Alternative Asean Network on Burma told an impromptu news conference.
A loose informal grouping formed in 1967 under an anti-communist banner at the height of the Vietnam war has now become a legal entity under its landmark charter. But abandoning consensus to become a rules-based group is sorely testing Asean''s tradition of not interfering in each other''s internal affairs.
"A new Asean means an Asean living under the rules of law among ourselves," its secretary-general, Surin Pitsuwan, told reporters on Friday. "We will be very much compliant to our commitments that we make along the way, in every form, document and every agreement." ASEAN comprises Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and the Philippines.