By Puy Kea
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LANGKAWI, Malaysia, April 27 Kyodo - The 48-year-old Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a group of 10-member states, is running the bloc as it is dancing a popular Madison in Cambodia today.
The Madison is a novelty dance that was popular in the late 1950s to mid-1960s. The Madison was created and first danced in Columbus, Ohio, in 1957. It is a line dance that features a regular back-and-forth pattern interspersed with called steps.
The dance is being used to refer to the overall assessment of ASEAN’s blueprint with which good achievement and scores were claimed in a lengthy 19-page progress report by the ASEAN secretary general to the ASEAN leaders, according to ASEAN diplomats.
The diplomats said the achievements and failures are nearly half mixed with go-ahead and backward just like a Madison Dance, a popular dance in Cambodia today.
Of the three main pillars designed for the ASEAN community by the end of 2015, the diplomats told Kyodo News that the progress report filed by the ASEAN secretary general said, up to date, about 88 percent or 127 out of 145 action lines of the ASEAN Political Security Community blueprint have been implemented while the remaining 18 are in various stages of implementation.
For the second pillar, the most significant one for immediate realization of the ASEAN community in December 2015 is the ASEAN Economic Community at which, to date, 457 out of 505 measures stipulated in the AEC blueprint have been implemented, representing an implementation rate of 90.5 percent, according to the diplomats.
The third pillar, the ASEAN Socio-cultural Community, has 339 action lines, of which 10 or about 3 percent were completed, 328 or 96.75 percent are ongoing and only one is pending. The diplomats added that most of the action lines are ongoing as they require multiple projects and activities to fully realize their strategic objectives.
Whatever the results showed, the secretary general’s report also acknowledged the remaining work in implementing the outstanding measures in the Roadmap to an ASEAN Community (2009-2015).
Some of the issues that remain unapproved are ASEAN common standards, for example, an ASEAN Common Time Zone, ASEAN currency and the dragging maritime disputes in the South China Sea as they are left behind despite serious discussions, consultations and efforts made and approached by all in the grouping.
And while some challenges remain, some ASEAN leaders are noting and observing ASEAN’s central role and ASEAN’s centrality, with some fearing superpowers, the richer and bigger states like the United States or China, which are ASEAN dialogue partners, may take advantage of ASEAN or drive ASEAN off the rails and fall into their global game.
The diplomats noted the fears, saying that at particular forums and meetings such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit and ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus which are participated in by superpowers, they often have their own strategies and ASEAN should not allow these superpowers to drive ASEAN toward their “global games.”
Other issues which are considered as a step-back as in the Madison Dance are streamlining ASEAN from producing more and more documents every year and more and more meetings and the summits. In particular, they call for reducing the twice-yearly summits to one and that will start to be implemented next year when Laos becomes the chair, a reverse of implementation from years past.
Annually, ASEAN organizes or holds more than 1,000 meetings, forcing some ASEAN officials to claim that they miss to finalize their reports for their bosses because they have to fly out again and again for the next meeting and some topics of discussions are cross cutting among the three major pillars.
Another status quo if it is not a step-back is the development gap among member states, especially between the old ones and the new four-member states known as Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.
At the 12th ASEAN Leaders’ Forum held on Sunday in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, several member states spoke about a gap in the region. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said, “To achieve our ultimate goal of ‘One Community, One Vision, One Identity’ ASEAN must strengthen its commitment to resolve challenges in relation to narrowing the development gap among member states to promote connectivity in all aspects, including physical, institutional and people-to-people connectivity.”
At the gala dinner for 10 ASEAN leaders on Sunday, Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister and chair of the summit, said, “As many of you are aware, one of the five founding fathers of ASEAN was my father. I was 15 years old when he traveled to Thailand in August 1967 and, together with four historic documents brought ASEAN into being and set us on the course toward regional integration.”
Now, he added, “nearly 50 years later, that process will reach another milestone with the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community by the end of this December. It is with humility, but also with great pride, that I carry on his work, together with all of you, as, inspired by that founding vision, we continue to build and strengthen as ASEAN for the 21st century.”
==Kyodo