Locked out of the trade club,
but for how long?

In the 30 years since ASEAN was founded, conflict in Cambodia has been more responsible than anything else in helping to forge a sense of ASEAN solidarity.

ASEAN really came into its own at the time of the 1978 Vietnamese army blitzkrieg that drove Pol Pot from power, installed Mr Hun Sen in Phnom Penh and rolled on west across the great Cambodian rice plains, halting only when it reached the Thai border, barely 150 kilometres from Bangkok.

Yet Vietnam, which so angered ASEAN by its decade-long occupation of Cambodia, is today a paid-up member of the group. Cambodia will now be the last member to join, thanks to the actions of the Khmer Rouge defector whom the Vietnamese took with them to Phnom Penh.

ASEAN was born, amid no great expectations, in 1967. At the time, Western powers still played an important role in regional affairs. The Americans had hundreds of thousands of troops in Vietnam and two major bases in The Philippines. The British had yet to fully withdraw from Singapore.

But there was concern that an eventual Western withdrawal would create a power vacuum which other nations might be tempted to fill.

There was concern about China, then engulfed in the self-destructive excesses of the Cultural Revolution. There was residual uncertainty about Indonesia, which, under President Sukarno, had alarmed its neighbours with a combination of belligerence and bluster.

Nor was there any existing or planned regional organisation that held out much promise. The anti-communist South-East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) had not worked. The Association of South-East Asia (ASA) had not worked. And no-one in the region had shown any interest in the vague talk in Manila about a possible Maphilindo grouping linking Malaysia, The PHILippines and INDOnesia. A feeling developed that it was necessary to have something to fill the vacuum.

ASEAN was the right pact at the right time. It allowed five non-communist South-East Asian countries (Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and The Philippines) to show they were eager to explore the scope for political co-operation.

"ASEAN bypassed ASA, Maphilindo and SEATO," says Professor Jamie Mackie of the Australian National University.

"At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when a number of South-East Asian nations were having trouble with Beijing, it was a kind of "China, Keep Off' sign."

Equally important, the formation of ASEAN allowed President Soeharto "to emphasise that Indonesia had every intention of being a good regional citizen", a signal welcomed in the region.

For all that, ASEAN amounted to little until 1975, when a North Vietnamese tank smashed its way through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. That triggered fears, many of them unrealistic, that a heavily armed Vietnam would now turn around and threaten its non-communist neighbours.

The fall of Saigon also set the scene for the eventual departure of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people, who were to wash up on ASEAN shores, imposing a major burden on countries of first asylum. Faced with this tide of humanity, the ASEAN nations found themselves working closely together.

But it was the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that really gave ASEAN something it could get its teeth into. Responding in large measure to the concerns of Thailand, ASEAN's only front-line state, the group fell into the habit of close co-operation.

In 1995, six years after Hanoi withdrew its troops from Cambodia, Vietnam was admitted to ASEAN, becoming the seventh member, after Brunei.

Despite some misgivings in the non-communist member states, ASEAN leaders took the view that Vietnamese membership would promote regional stability, dampening long-standing tension between Hanoi and Beijing.

Although China will always be viewed with scepticism because it is so large, the ASEAN foreign ministers reject suggestions that Vietnamese membership might give ASEAN an anti-Chinese colouration.

"People say China wants to dominate [South-East Asia]," says a former ambassador in China. "That misses the point. The US has hegemony over the Americas because it's the only power in the region. China isn't [the only power in this region]. If China moves to assert itself, that will only trigger countervailing forces in Japan.

"Second, if China seeks to dominate South-East Asia, those countries will look outside the region for support, as they have for 150 years. ASEAN has been turned from a force to counter Vietnam into a group that includes Vietnam and positions South-East Asia vis-a-vis China. There's a message there."

Just where ASEAN goes from here is anyone's guess. ASEAN has its heart set on a grouping of 10 member states. Hun Sen will be hoping that, after a decent interval, ASEAN will find the urge for "completeness" stronger than the desire to sit in judgment on a wayward neighbour. He may not have to wait long; it is not "the ASEAN way" to go pointing admonitory fingers.

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald. July 11, 1997