The most recent ‘ASEAN Leaders’ Declaration on the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific for the Future-Prepared ASEAN and ASEAN-Centered Regional Structure‘ could have a prolonged title, however its core message is obvious: the Affiliation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) goals to stay the principal regional group addressing Asia’s regional challenges. Launched on October 9, 2024, through the forty fourth and forty fifth ASEAN Summits in Vientiane, this declaration emphasizes ASEAN’s dedication to fostering a peaceable atmosphere amid regional and international uncertainties. In line with earlier statements, it underscores ASEAN’s function in selling inclusive cooperation, preserving peace, upholding worldwide regulation, and fostering regionalism and multilateralism. At its core, the declaration reiterates ASEAN’s dedication to “ASEAN centrality,” significantly in gentle of shifting geopolitics within the Indo-Pacific.
This yr’s declaration, with its emphasis on peace and stability, stands in stark distinction to these of 2023. Among the many seven statements issued on the forty third ASEAN Summit in 2023, the ASEAN Leaders’ Declaration on ASEAN as an Epicentrum of Development introduced the Chief’s principal message. Whereas it began with acknowledging the disruptive energy of geostrategic shifts, the declaration largely targeted on resilience and progress, it outlined areas for enchancment in a variety of areas together with well being, local weather change, catastrophe preparedness, meals safety, power techniques, macroeconomic stability, and provide chain connectivity. It launched drivers of progress, together with international provide chains, digital transformation, and efforts towards a inexperienced, blue, artistic, and inclusive financial system. In view of this, the 2023 declaration positioned ASEAN as “epicentrum of progress,” prioritizing financial and socio-cultural resilience over political-security issues. In distinction, the 2024 declaration shifts its focus, elevating the political-security pillar to prominence—a notable recalibration of ASEAN’s priorities inside a single yr.
The 2024 declaration revisits acquainted ASEAN themes, now with a a lot stronger emphasis on safety. It reaffirms ASEAN’s management in sustaining regional stability, emphasizes ASEAN-led mechanisms, and champions regionalism as a pathway to peaceable dispute decision. The declaration underscores ASEAN’s dedication to worldwide regulation, referencing key texts such because the UN Constitution, the ASEAN Constitution, and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). It additionally promotes inclusive cooperation and seeks help from regional companions. Nonetheless, it makes an unambiguous assertion that the Indo-Pacific regional structure should stay firmly ASEAN-centred, highlighting ASEAN’s indispensable function within the area.
Why does ASEAN’s centrality require such robust reaffirmation? In recent times, the rise of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic framework has challenged ASEAN’s function because the Asia-Pacific’s major regional organisation. Critics have questioned whether or not ASEAN’s sluggish decision-making and restricted enforcement powers undermine its capability to handle the Indo-Pacific’s complicated safety panorama. Nonetheless, such criticisms, generally the results of a comparative bias in regional research, are usually fast to neglect ASEAN’s distinct function as a regional actor. Not like the European Union (EU)—a supranational group targeted on deep integration—ASEAN was based as an intergovernmental group with the first goal of fostering regional peace, safety, and mutual respect. Whereas each organizations promote peace via financial growth, ASEAN prioritizes preserving the nationwide sovereignty of its various member states versus pooling their sovereignty.
The emphasis on sovereignty creates a extra complicated decision-making course of, which can restrict ASEAN’s flexibility. But, this very construction highlights ASEAN’s energy: its capability to construct consensus and function an important platform for dialogue. The ASEAN Manner, which prioritizes non-interference, mutual respect, and consensus-building, has been instrumental in sustaining regional stability and dialogue between nice powers. Within the Indo-Pacific period, ASEAN’s convening energy—its capability to convey collectively various actors for dialogue and cooperation—stays its best asset. The distinctiveness of the organisation’s convening capability, demonstrated by the ASEAN Regional Discussion board as an example, is central to ASEAN’s enduring relevance in an more and more aggressive geopolitical panorama marked notably by tensions between the USA and China. Amid heightening ranges of polarisation, the organisation’s historic closeness to non-alignment additionally enhances its potential to navigate the Indo-Pacific as space of increasing nice energy competitors.
The Indo-Pacific is commonly framed as a transformative shift in Asia’s geopolitical panorama. Nonetheless, ASEAN’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific—primarily via the 2019 ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP)—suggests continuity fairly than disruption. The choice of Southeast Asian nations to collectively outline their stance on the Indo-Pacific by adopting the AOIP as a regional technique, fairly than pursuing particular person home methods, completely exemplifies this continuity.
Latest debates about the way forward for Indonesia’s international coverage echo the widespread emphasis on novelty related to the Indo-Pacific and supply priceless insights into how ASEAN’s centrality within the Indo-Pacific is at present being mentioned. Because the major advocate for the adoption of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP), Indonesia has performed a pivotal function in aligning the brand new Indo-Pacific idea with present ASEAN values of stability, cooperation, and inclusivity. Some analysts, nonetheless, speculate that Indonesia may pivot away from the Indo-Pacific beneath the Prabowo administration which got here into energy a month in the past. This attitude displays a disciplinary tendency to strategy regional research primarily from the angle of nice energy politics. As each ASEAN’s geographic and institutional coronary heart, Indonesia can’t “pivot away” from its personal neighbourhood, and the emergence of the Indo-Pacific won’t change that. Regardless of embracing the terminology, ASEAN’s Outlook on the Indo-Pacific displays Indonesia’s dedication to embedding ASEAN values within the Indo-Pacific framework, making it a reinforcement of ASEAN’s rules fairly than a paradigm shift.
Below the previous President Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s Ministry of Overseas Affairs, led by Retno Marsudi, championed the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) as a key aspect of Indonesia’s international coverage. This advocacy displays Indonesia’s view of the Indo-Pacific as a pure extension of ASEAN’s centrality. Whereas every successive Indonesian administration could search to tell apart its international coverage with new landmark ideas, the AOIP’s grounding in ASEAN’s longstanding precept of centrality ensures its continued relevance for each Indonesia and ASEAN. From an exterior perspective, the adoption of Indo-Pacific terminology by ASEAN may seem as a big shift. When in actuality, for political elites concerned within the AOIP’s growth and institutionalisation, the Indo-Pacific idea strongly reaffirms ASEAN’s function as a stabilising pressure fairly than introducing radical change. In different phrases, the doc indicators a reassertion of ASEAN’s—and by extension, Indonesia’s—dedication to the organisation’s enduring centrality in addressing issues important to Southeast Asian nations, no matter whether or not one frames Southeast Asia as a part of the Indo-Pacific or not.
The above-mentioned Declaration exemplifies ASEAN’s ongoing efforts to stay central in regional affairs, even in a a lot enlarged Indo-Pacific area. By emphasizing centrality, stability, and inclusive cooperation, the chief’s declaration reiterates ASEAN’s readiness to handle modern regional challenges and its pivotal function in shaping the Indo-Pacific regional structure. It additionally extends an invite to exterior companions to help the AOIP in alignment with ASEAN’s rules. This reaffirmation of ASEAN’s function is just not a departure from custom however fairly a continuation of its longstanding dedication to Asian regionalism.
ASEAN’s imaginative and prescient for the Indo-Pacific stays firmly anchored in its core rules of centrality, multilateralism, and inclusivity. Whereas the concept of the Indo-Pacific has gained international traction for fascinated with modern Asia, ASEAN’s dedication to (regional) multilateralism ensures its relevance as a primary regional convener. Concurrently, declaration such because the 2024 chief’s declaration underscore the organisation’s dedication to peace, connectivity, and cooperation, reinforcing its enduring function in Asia’s regional structure. Amid geopolitical uncertainties, ASEAN’s “sempiternal” message of centrality stays as very important as ever within the Indo-Pacific.
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