Depressing...

We’re in dynamic times, and in many ways the story of shifting power and influence is invigorating and inspiring.

But some things remain depressingly the same, shockingly common to developed and developing, old powers and new. Nationalism is one, inequality another.

The meeting of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Council closed on Monday 8 October. Malaysian Information, Communications, and Culture Minister Rais noted that regional “history and culture has so much in common that sometimes we are confused as to where certain aspects of our culture originate from, so much so it may even result in friendly tiffs among us”.

But those “tiffs” often don’t look so friendly. Especially the ones between Malaysia and Indonesia. Cultural quarrels are just one area of contention. Migrants and domestic workers are another. Boundaries a third.

The heat is turned up so, so easily. Earlier this week, the Indonesian government had to deny reports of Malaysian encroachment in West Kalimantan, after members of a Indonesian House of Representative commission “accused Malaysia of seizing parts of Indonesia’s territory”.

A storm in a teacup. But it still produces the messages on Facebook – from young, intelligent people – accusing Malaysia of stealing Indonesian land, spewing threats and bluster.  

It's going to be hard to produce a community with this stuff still lurking.

Inequality is the other old, old problem that seems disturbingly familiar across the economic and geographic board. As Asian Trends Monitoring puts it, alongside the economic miracles in SEA,  “the problems of endemic poverty, increasing divides between rural and urban communities, and absolute growth in economic inequalities, represent the dark shadow of Asia’s success that is too easily overlooked”.

Their crystal clear charts illustrate the gaps in SEA (between countries and within countries) in terms of access to basic infrastructure, communications technology and financial services, and health provision.

A problem of the region’s stage of development? Well, you’d like to think so. Except that gross inequality is not something that developed countries have remotely managed to deal with either.

Where are the models for taming destructive nationalism and corrosive inequity? Are they replicable? Because wherever we are on the power cycle, we desperately need to find some. Otherwise, power shifts will just bring more of the miserable same.