EU/Asean ties could herald an alternative to world led by US and China

“Asean and the EU are strategic partners with a shared interest in a peaceful, stable and prosperous region, where international law and the rules-based international order are respected and upheld, and where peace, security and stability are maintained, including through, among others, the promotion and protection of human rights such as gender equality and fundamental freedoms.”

This statement by the 27-member European Union and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations at their summit meeting in Brussels on December 14th affirms their wish to co-operate in a world more polarised by competition between the United States and China. Other passages affirm principles of equality, mutuality and reciprocity in the 45 year-old EU-Asean relationship, now defined as a strategic partnership.

If they can live up to the detailed commitments adopted on peace and security, economic co-operation and trade, connectivity and digital transition, sustainable development and climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and on international issues such as Ukraine and Myanmar, then their partnership can make a real difference to international politics over the next five years.

Their joint commitment to “regionalism and multilateralism, which are mutually reinforcing and which contribute to regional and global peace, security, stability and prosperity” potentially heralds a third-way alternative to a world dominated by competition between blocs led by the US and China.

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The EU and Asean are the two most developed regional organisations in the world. While contemporary events make their interests and values converge, they come to this from very different historical and geographical paths. The EU’s origins in the 1950s were an effort to find a peaceful way to reconcile previous imperial enemies and smaller European states. Asean’s origins are among a group of states coming out of colonial rule in the 1960s, determined to protect their new independence and sovereignty against former European rulers and new communist neighbours.

That this shared security origin is as important as the economic interdependence that subsequently developed in both regions is more noteworthy now that security questions are being so much foregrounded. The donor-receiver model dominating much of their 45-year relationship has postcolonial echoes, and reflects the EU’s far more developed institutional machinery for pooling and delegating state sovereignty. Nevertheless both organisations had parallel enlargements to communist and post-communist states in the 1990s and 2000s.

The summit statements on Ukraine and Myanmar echo these varying histories and approaches. They acknowledge differences, yet reach sufficient agreement to give evidence of a more frank and maturing exchange. The same applies to neuralgic trade issues on palm oil, steel subsidies and an EU-Asean free trade agreement, long sought but still difficult to tackle and attain.

The political psychology and symbolism of this summit encounter is worth underlining. It was the first time their respective political leaders met personally. Informal summitry is taken more seriously in Asean. It has a more diverse range of political regimes and cultures among its members, with greater development gaps between them, than has the EU. This means the EU’s distinctively normative calling cards on democracy and human rights, conditions for its members, can create real difficulties for Asean if clumsily applied in the bilateral relationship.

This point was made by Dr Seun Sam, a senior Cambodian policy analyst, at a conference on EU-Asean relations held in Kuala Lumpur at the University of Malaya before the summit. He disputed accounts of Cambodia as a bandwagoning Chinese client state, citing the important Japanese economic role there and the ability of its president Hun Sen to move issues forward on Myanmar, and with its old antagonist Vietnam, during his presidency of Asean this year.

Other speakers expect that the incoming Indonesian presidency of its dynamic leader Joko Widodo will take a more active role on Myanmar. They stress how important it is that the EU heeds Asean advice on this and similar issues such as security in the South China Sea.

[ The Irish Times view on the EU/Asean summit ]

Establishing such a two-way political flow is a central challenge for this strategic relationship over the next five years, according to Dr Rahul Mishra, the Indian director of the university’s Centre on Asean regionalism. A relationship is what you make of it and it needs to be more dynamic and reciprocal, he argues.

Simple non-alignment vis-a-vis the US and China by either or both the EU and ASEAN is unrealistically passive. Rather, they should share platforms and policies on how to manage and limit superpower rivalry in their regions.