Role Creation: ASEAN and Post-Cold War Asia-Pacific
This chapter analyses ASEAN’s creation of its ‘regional conductor’ role in the Asia-Pacific. It shows how ASEAN conceptualised the role as part of an effort to maintain its relevance in the emerging order, but also as part of an effort to legitimise and e
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Role Creation: ASEAN and Post-Cold War Asia-Pacific
In the last two chapters we saw how ASEAN came to perform its ‘primary manager’ role in Southeast Asia as part of role bargains negotiated with the US and China. ASEAN’s performance of diplomatic leadership as part of its ‘primary manager’ role served to legitimise the common goal of containment, firstly of communism more generally, and then more specifically Soviet-Vietnamese communism during the Cambodian conflict. The US and subsequently China, performed the function of ‘holding-the-line’ within Indochina as part of their respective great power guarantor roles. This geopolitical division of labour supported the transformation in the capitalist structures of the regional economy as Southeast and Northeast Asia became increasingly integrated through the agency of Japanese corporate and ethnic Chinese diaspora networks. By the late 1980s China and even Vietnam had signalled their desire to integrate into the capitalist world market. The power of capitalist social forces within ASEAN was also secure as communists and revolutionary leftists were defeated as a political force. The end of the Cold War and the resolution of the Cambodian conflict in 1991 brought new challenges as there was no longer a need for containment and thus the basis upon which the previous ASEAN-great power role bargains had been built disappeared. There was no longer a threat to hold the line against and there was no longer the common goal of containment which the great powers required ASEAN to legitimise through its diplomatic initiatives. How would ASEAN cope in a context where the strategic © The Author(s) 2019 R. Yates, Understanding ASEAN’s Role in Asia-Pacific Order, Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12899-9_5
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rationale for the division of labour between itself and the US and China was removed? It was possible that ASEAN would become irrelevant in the emerging order. Yet, since the end of the Cold War ASEAN has been central to negotiations over regional cooperation not just in Southeast Asia, but in Asia more generally. In the early 1990s, ASEAN supplied an inclusive security dialogue forum to bring together all the major regional powers and players, something other actors were unable to do. Through this process all powers agreed to ASEAN’s TAC as a regional code of conduct, and to dialogue as a key aspect of regional strategic engagement, no mean feat considering the US’ and China’s scepticism and opposition to multilateralism in the initial post-Cold War years. Since then, despite challenges, ASEAN has remained central to further negotiations over regional institutions, regional trade agreements and the broader regional agenda. All the great powers and regional players have participated in ASEAN processes and have acceded to the TAC, committing themselves to rules defined by ASEAN. ASEAN has thus extended its diplomatic leadership beyond its own subregion into the wider Asia-Pacific. ASEAN is no longer just legitimising great p
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