Norms, power, and SEA

The Asia Society’s November report on US-East Asia relations offers many sound conclusions, not surprisingly, given its eminent panel of contributors.

One of its most useful pieces of advice is to avoid rushing to “tidy” the region’s overlapping institutions (because this might lead to exclusion and imbalance), and to tolerate instead a looser “Asia-Pacific network” arrangement (pp. 19, 35).

The following recommendation, however, does not quite seem to capture the complexity of the SEA dynamic:

“ASEAN’s role in building a more integrated regional society based on shared norms and values should be fully recognized and supported. Asia currently faces tensions between two competing trends: Asia as a community of norms and values, and Asia as a region shaped by power relations, given the presence of the United States and China... Deeper ASEAN engagement with the United States can reinforce ASEAN’s role in promoting values and building norms. This may be a more productive focus for U.S.–ASEAN relations, rather than simply seeking to use U.S.–ASEAN ties as a means of balancing rising regional actors such as China” (p.36).

This somewhat dichotomous understanding of norms and power is even more starkly expressed in the executive summary: “ASEAN’s efforts to build a regional society based on norms and values rather than power relations should be supported by the United States” (p. 7).

There is a good point here, of course, which aims to encourage the US to see ASEAN as a producer of useful long-term norms, rather than just another element that can potentially be arrayed against China. It serves as a reminder that ASEAN has contributed to the normative environment of Southeast Asia in ways that have often been under-valued.

But it suggests that norms and power are on divergent tracks, which is misleading. One of ASEAN’s greatest strengths has been its capacity to maintain a balance with all the region’s major powers. This multi-dimensional, ever-oscillating balance has in itself a normative dimension. Behind it is the idea that a balanced region will create greater room for manoeuvre for individual states and the region as a whole – a situation that is regarded as better than other imaginable alternatives (such as out-and-out dominance by any particular power). And just as power-balancing has a normative dimension, so too does norm-creation have a power dimension. Power always plays a role in the development of norms.

This is particularly obvious in the case of SEA. The normative strand of the regional narrative has always, and will always, come with a distinct power component – and vice versa. These facets are two sides of a coin rather than “competing trends”.

The attempt to separate norms and power has often been at the root of skewed interpretations of Southeast Asian politics: realists have too exclusively privileged power; constructivists and liberals have too exclusively privileged norms. Many interpretations of Southeast Asis consequently come across as one-sided, since Southeast Asia epitomizes the interplay of both.

English School interpretations hit the spot more closely here, I would argue, since ideas of international society clearly recognize and value processes of normative change, but equally clearly foreground the dimension of power in the evolution of underlying institutions.

Attempts to somehow overcome power relations, as though they are embarrassing remnants of an old-fashioned past that we should have outgrown, are likely to leave Southeast Asia vulnerable. ASEAN needs to work with the grain of both dimensions – the normative and the power-conscious elements – if it is to ride out the waves of a US “pivot” that faces the Association with what Mark Valencia (30 Nov) sees as “perhaps its greatest challenge since its creation”.

The dangers of “wishing away” power are perhaps what Rizal Sukma (2 Dec) has in mind when he considers how Indonesia should react to the looming strategic rivalry between the US and China. In language reminiscent of Michael Leifer’s, he argues:

“For ASEAN’s normative multilateral framework to function well there is the need for a stable balance of power among the major powers. Hence, a ‘dynamic equilibrium’ within an ASEAN’s multilateral framework — such as the EAS — requires a stable conventional balance of power outside that framework.”

But this does not leave ASEAN or Southeast Asia as a powerless puppet of external forces. As another recent report on Southeast Asia suggests: “Southeast Asian states often ‘punch above their weight’ as ASEAN shapes the rules of the game in Southeast Asia, and individual Southeast Asian states are not compelled to side completely with either the U.S. or China.”

ASEAN and its individual states need to redouble their efforts to ensure they do their bit towards contributing to a stable Asia-wide balance of power, resisting all blandishments to favour one power over another.

Not having too many eggs in any one basket is still the best way to safeguard their normative Asia-wide room for manoeuvre. The two belong, inextricably, together.