Effectiveness of ASEAN

ASEAN was formed in 1975 with 5 founding members which are Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. Currently, ASEAN has 10 members including Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. It all started in the 1960s when the Southeast Asian countries were constantly at loggerheads, then, the Southeast Asian political leaders saw a need to set up a regional organization to maintain and build trust amongst the countries. ASEAN have contributed by setting up an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) which removes import taxes amongst Southeast Asian countries and create a regional market to boost the economic growth within the region. Another example is the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) which main purpose is to maintain peace by promoting political and security dialogue and cooperate among countries in the Asia-Pacific region. However, an example of an unsuccessful attempt to manage the situation is that because of the obstacle of consensus, ASEAN thus far also has demonstrated little capability to handle either traditional or nontraditional regional security challenges, thus giving major Northeast Asian powers, or the U.S., little incentive to work through ASEAN to handle challenges rather than addressing them unilaterally or bilaterally. Beyond ASEANs weak handling of the perpetual smog crisis, the organization also has developed little capacity to combat drug trafficking, human trafficking, pandemic disease outbreaks, terrorism, or other high-priority nontraditional security threats in the Asia-Pacific. This aversion to intervening in any member-states affairs has meant that when ASEAN nations have had disputes with each other, let alone China, such as Indonesia and Malaysias dispute over the Sipadan and Ligitan islands, ASEAN states do not even trust ASEANs nascent institutions, such as the High Council of ASEANs Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, to solve problems. Instead, Malaysia and Indonesia adjudicated their dispute at The Hague. ASEAN has been reasonably successful in preventing conflicts among its member nations. Confrontation between them reduced considerably after Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Soviet Unions support for Communist regimes in Southeast Asia and those states have all subsequently become involved in the capitalist economic system in one way or another. ASEAN has provided a forum in which governments have been able to communicate with each other when ideology would otherwise have kept them apart.

The ASEAN Economic Community was established to fully liberalize air travel between member countries. The Roadmap for an ASEAN Community, published in 2009 as a manual for the cohesion process, holds 2015 as the point where the world will see clear results of the efforts in economic integration. However, the Communitys six-year construction period is now half over and there is little marked improvement in terms of economic unification. ASEAN officials and representatives have come to realize that is it an ambitious goal.