Pick of the fortnight: Powers, ASEAN, and Myanmar

• ISEAS has launched the quarterly Monitor, a socio-political survey of Southeast Asia – a welcome addition to the regional updates.
• In an interesting interview, ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan welcomes the new US engagement in SEA and in Asia more broadly. Asked whether this is “not a move by the US to contain China”, he offers a good summing up: “I think less so than the fact that the world would like to be reassured that this region is going to remain stable, peaceful and prosperous. I think the American attitude is that with less commitment and less involvement in the Middle East, they must look to where there are potential areas of instability that could affect the global economic recovery. When they look around for where best to go for global trade and investment to help them out of their own economic crisis, it’s got to be East Asia. It’s ASEAN. So their new pivot towards us is understandable. But what we don’t want is anyone coming in and bringing tension or confrontation. Everybody, including the US, is welcome on the basis of openness and fairness. To ensure that happens, ASEAN must learn to be a balancing mechanism, a fulcrum, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, of regional cooperation.”
• Joshua Ho, however, warns of the danger of “overstretching” the notion of ASEAN centrality, “especially if ASEAN states start to adopt an ‘inward-looking, it-is-all-about-ASEAN mentality’…  In light of the increasingly complex and multifaceted nature of global challenges, the tendency and temptation for ASEAN to look inwards and close in on itself will grow… The Bali Concord III which was signed last November by ASEAN leaders must not be used to justify an overly ASEAN-centric view of the world. Indeed such an outcome would paralyse the region whose very growth was founded upon its diverse and dynamic relationships its member states have with the wider world… [T]o what extent ASEAN is able to maintain its global engagement while at the same time keeping its own house in order will be a critical test of its readiness – and relevance – as a regional stakeholder.”
• And, a propos of powers and order more generally, Robert Ayson has a great piece at The Interpreter (21 Feb) on the kinds of common values we need “if the coming international order is going to be genuinely orderly”. These are values like accommodation, respectfulness, peacefulness, responsibility, and restraint – and they need to be stressed and promoted by all the powers in the region, large and small. The longer version is well worth reading.
• The ASEAN Secretariat reports that in a meeting on 17-19 February, the members of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) “discussed and agreed on the structure and the elements” of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), and “also agreed on the framework for discussion of the draft AHRD”. It notes: “The AICHR has received inputs from civil society groups on the AHRD. AICHR plans to hold regional consultations on the AHRD in the coming months to encourage more inputs.” This will be welcome, in light of criticism that too little consultation has taken place to date. Not surprisingly, achieving consensus on this issue is going to be difficult. But ASEAN has been here before. Incrementally, painfully – but still productively, I would argue – they manage to find a way forward. It may not be fast. It may not be ideal. But it is moving in the right direction. In the next round of debate and struggle, it’s important not to lose sight of how far the region has come in the last 10-20 years.
• Reuters reported last week (15 Feb) that “Myanmar's government expects to reach ceasefire deals with all of the country's ethnic minority rebel armies within three months,” citing Aung Min, the minister responsible for negotiating an end to the conflict. It’s an interesting report – let’s hope he’s right.
• Considering the huge changes that have taken place in Myanmar recently, Trevor Wilson, a former Australian ambassador to that country, notes: “Now the challenge for all concerned—Burmese and non-Burmese alike—is to manage the thaw better than they managed the freeze. The West can respond by gradually easing sanctions, as Australia has already begun to do, but very few countries have so far committed to this. Easing of sanctions should be done in a positive and generous manner, rather than with a grudging distrustful mindset, and without ‘moving the goalposts’. Aid donors should focus on how new international assistance can help the people of Burma make up for the years of deprivation and ensure that reforms, by virtue of their success, are irreversible.”

Two blogs that do it well...

A propos of my last post, here are two examples to emulate, one from an individual, one from a team:


Edmund Sim’s ASEAN Economic Community Blog offers a lawyer’s view on ASEAN’s big economic project. It’s informative, and offers a perspective that is refreshingly different.

Asian Trends Monitoring has a blog to complement the thoughtfully compiled and superbly presented research they do on pro-poor, pro-development issues.

Both of these are well worth a look.

On academics and blogging

The Lowy Interpreter currently has a bit of a debate going on the topic of academics and blogging.

The central question is why academics, especially in Australia, blog so little. Respondents have suggested several reasons: lack of time, too much institutional focus on the peer-reviewed track, lack of comfort with a medium that often seems geared to quick-fire ideas rather than carefully considered output, and so on.

I identify to a certain extent with all of these (especially the time thing…), but I’d like to suggest a couple more, based on my brief experience doing SEAview.

Firstly, some of us are still fundamentally ambivalent about profile, and find it hard to predict the ratio between time expenditure and returns. In other words, we think we have something to contribute, and we want to be heard, but we’re not sure what level of visibility to realistically aim for. Clearly, we don’t want to be invisible, or what’s the point? But there is a lot of work involved in becoming highly visible – and then in managing that visibility. For example, to really get the most out of your blog (in terms of feedback and conversation-starting), you need to build a presence (linking to Facebook, Twitter, newspaper articles, etc). Or you need to organize to work as part of a team. All this requires even more investment from those limited supplies of time and energy already mentioned – which is why, in my case, it hasn’t been done. How much do you invest when the return is uncertain?

Then there’s the question of stance. In an academic environment, I guess most of us are not particularly used to being pundits. Of course, all lecturers and tutors have a particular line – there’s no such thing as totally objective teaching. But students are not there to hear a political sermon. They want to be exposed to the map of ideas that politically, historically, and culturally contextualizes a particular debate – in other words, they want the tools and scaffolding to form their own opinions, not a weekly digest of the lecturer’s or tutor’s opinions. I’m not saying you can’t do this kind of spectrum-mapping exercise via blog posts. But it’s not easy.

And finally there’s the whole big question of how to blog well. I’m very aware that my own blog has oscillated between opinion pieces and updates, and between long discussions and short comments. The opinion pieces are inspired by those aaaaaargh moments, while the updates stem from the practical consideration that a blog can kill two birds with one stone by providing another way to manage updates... There probably shouldn’t be this variation. The blog should probably pick a style and stick to it...

Ideas, anyone?

Why do bad ideas last so long?

At one time, it was common to compare ASEAN with the EU. Scholars and practitioners then started disputing such simple comparisons, so the trend was questioned, and the academic commentary (largely) moderated. But the invidious comparisons were still alive, as I’ve already noted, at least until very recently. What had already been nuanced in the literature was still starkly there in the classrooms of Southeast Asia. And despite Europe’s current woes, I’d not like to bet the comparisons won’t resurface once the dust has settled, and a new way forward has been found. Europe has a powerful propaganda machine, after all.

“Failed” states, that’s another one. There have been plenty of critiques, from academics and practitioners, of the deficiencies of this concept. Yet here we have UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, just yesterday, referring to Somalia as “the world’s most failed state”. Yes, Somalia faces a heap of problems. But is this the best standpoint from which to address them? As Gerry van Klinken and Joshua Barker so rightly point out (page 5), “A language of failure does not help us much to understand why things work the way they do.”

We could go on. The disparaging ideas that animated colonialism have long been discredited. Yet my email updates only today noted how they still found their way quite explicitly into an extraordinary speech by French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2007. And many of the same assumptions – along the lines that we, rather than you, know the best way to do things, and we will force you to do them if necessary – still linger close to the surface in many of the world’s current debates.

And what is usually called the “essentialist” approach to culture and identity – the notion that these things are fixed, bounded, innate, and immutable – has been refuted almost ad infinitum, but it is still alive and well in everyday political talk, from ideas of the “clash of civilizations” to the ways ethnicity is discussed in many places in Southeast Asia.

Creators and formulators and disseminators of ideas bear a huge responsibility. The starkest formulations of those ideas will still be out there, doing damage, long after subsequent debate has nuanced their contours, and moved them on…