Old chair, new chair: Indonesia, Cambodia, and the need for a niche

Cambodia is the new ASEAN chair-for-a-year.

During the handover ceremony, PM Hun Sen said the country’s priorities for its time as chair included achieving the requisite ASEAN Community milestones, making progress on the Initiative for ASEAN Integration and the grouping’s connectivity plans, and enhancing cooperation with ASEAN Dialogue Partners and other regional entities. 

The Southeast Asia Globe reports (28 Dec): “Last month, Cambodian foreign minister Hor Namhong said that, as chair of the regional body, Cambodia would attempt to improve relations between ASEAN and China, which will donate $10 billion in aid to the region.” Chheang Vannarith, meanwhile, from the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, predicts that one of Cambodia’s challenges “would be the continuing strategic competition between China and the United States, as well as the economic implications of this struggle. ‘The region should court both countries,’ he said.”

How this will mesh with predicted Chinese moves “to bring back the charm” will be interesting to watch.

Cambodia is kicking off a series of chairmanships by smaller and/or more politically conservative states. Not surprisingly, therefore, its performance as chair figures on Jamil Maidan Flores’s “watch list” for the year (2 Jan):  “Artillery duels at the disputed border area are not likely to erupt between Cambodia and Thailand during the year, but a lot of work needs be done by way of ASEAN community-building and sustaining a regional architecture in which China and the United States are involved. Cambodia will need all the help it can get from the rest of the ASEAN family, especially Indonesia.”

Apparently thinking along the same lines, Indonesian FM Marty Natalegawa made it abundantly clear in his annual statement to the press (4 Jan) that Indonesia will not be renouncing its leadership role along with its chair status:

“As Chair of ASEAN in 2011, Indonesia is determined that its contribution goes beyond the period of its chairmanship. Indeed, during the four decades of ASEAN’s journey, every time Indonesia served as ASEAN Chair, Indonesia always marked its chairmanship by taking ASEAN to a higher level…

“In 2012, Indonesia will ensure the continuation of the three ASEAN priorities set by Indonesia in 2011 as endorsed by ASEAN member states.

“Some major issues which are of great interests for Indonesia in 2012 are: making progress in the discussions on the Code of Conduct on the South China Sea; managing potential conflicts in the region; development of democracy and reconciliation in Myanmar; completion of the accession to the SEANWFZ Protocol by the Nuclear-Weapon-States; enhancement of maritime cooperation; implementation of a regional mechanism for disaster management, food security, energy security and economic sustainability of the region; ASEAN Connectivity; strengthening of the Bali Principles; and a Plan of Action of the Bali Concord III.”

As the region’s undisputed heavyweight, Indonesia is always going to be SEA’s indispensable nation. How it plays that hand – the degree to which it proves able to juggle internal and external pressures, and material and ideological constraints and opportunities – will be crucial in determining whether Cambodia’s chosen theme for the year (“ASEAN: One Community, One Destiny”) moves closer to being a reality.

But there’s another crucial difference in the two chairs’ beginnings. Indonesia – democratic backslidings notwithstanding – was still riding pretty high in the world’s press at the beginning of last year. Many Indonesians might have been thoroughly fed up by then with SBY’s performance, but the world at large, it seemed, was not. It suited many quarters to give Indonesia and its ASEAN role the benefit of the doubt.

Hun Sen and Cambodia start with distinctly less fanfare. Commentaries warn of “challenges ahead”, and the nation’s turn as chair is rather ominously seen as “a chance to gain credibility in the international community”.

Clearly, it’s not going to be an easy ride for Cambodia. As a small and poor country, it has to find its leadership niche – which will be very different from Indonesia’s.  And being much less of a democratic poster-child, it will have to contend with much more generalized hostility.

Yet, attempting an early reframing in September 2011, Ernest Bower presents Hun Sen as “a pragmatist and realist”, and writes of the need “to uncover new opportunities for alignment with Cambodia”. 

This plea for a tempered approach is not only relevant to the US. It is in everyone’s interests to make Cambodia’s turn in the sun a warming experience, not a roasting one.