ASEAN and Southeast Asian Regionalism

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is the most consequential regional organisation ever built without the machinery such bodies are supposed to need: no supranational law, no court, no commission, no common external tariff, no majority voting, no enforcement. It nevertheless made the most conflict-prone corner of the Cold War world largely peaceful, and made itself the hub of the Asian architecture. The consensual, sovereignty-protective method known as the ASEAN Way is simultaneously the reason ASEAN survived and the reason it cannot act.

What ASEAN was built to avoid

Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s was not obviously a region at all: newly independent states with contested borders, unfinished internal wars and no habit of talking to each other. Two earlier attempts at regional organisation had collapsed, and why explains almost every design choice made in 1967.

• The Association of Southeast Asia (ASA), founded July 1961 by Malaya, the Philippines and Thailand, was the first indigenous grouping — and, fatally, excluded Indonesia. It was suspended in 1963 when the Philippine claim to North Borneo (Sabah) broke relations with Malaysia: a body of three could not absorb a quarrel between two.
• Maphilindo, proclaimed at Manila in August 1963, rested on the racial and cultural affinity of Malaya, the Philippines and Indonesia rather than on interests, and was dead within weeks, destroyed by the formation of Malaysia, which Indonesia refused to recognise.
• Konfrontasi — Indonesia’s undeclared armed confrontation with Malaysia from 1963 to 1966 — was the immediate poison: low-level war between the two largest maritime states.
• Communist insurgency was live in every founder state and the Vietnam War was escalating; the founders feared that great-power contestation would be fought out inside their societies rather than between states.
• Indonesia’s transformation was the enabling condition. The failed coup of 30 September 1965 and the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party brought Suharto’s New Order to power; Konfrontasi ended in 1966, and Jakarta exchanged anti-imperialist confrontation for regional order and development.

The founders did not want a strong organisation. They wanted a device that would stop them destroying each other while each got on with the harder task of becoming a state.

• The lesson was precise: any body that excluded Indonesia would fail, and any body that could adjudicate members’ quarrels would be torn apart by them.
• ASEAN has therefore never resolved a single one of its members’ bilateral disputes. Sabah, Preah Vihear, Sipadan and Ligitan were left outside, parked, or sent to the International Court of Justice. Non-resolution was the design, not the failure.

The Bangkok Declaration and the founding bargain

• ASEAN was founded on 8 August 1967 by the ASEAN Declaration, signed at Bangkok by the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand — Malik, Razak, Ramos, Rajaratnam and Thanat Khoman.
• It runs to about two pages, sets out five aims, creates no institution with power and is not a treaty: no member surrendered anything.

“To accelerate the economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region… To promote regional peace and stability through abiding respect for justice and the rule of law.” — The ASEAN Declaration, 8 August 1967

• The preamble carried the real bargain: the signatories were determined to secure their stability “from external interference in any form or manifestation.” The purpose was to protect newly won sovereignty, not to pool it.
• The economic language covered a security project: the founders could not announce an anti-communist alignment without inviting the charge of being a Western bloc, so the declaration spoke of growth while foreign-minister meetings did the real work.
• ZOPFAN, the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality, was declared at Kuala Lumpur in November 1971, committing members to keep Southeast Asia free of outside interference. It reflected Malaysia’s neutralism and the shock of the Sino-American rapprochement, which showed how fast great powers could rearrange the region over its states’ heads.
  • ZOPFAN was never implemented — Thailand and the Philippines kept American bases — but it established regional autonomy as ASEAN’s organising aspiration, and is the parent of ASEAN centrality.

Bali 1976 and the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation

The first nine years produced almost nothing institutional. It took the fall of Saigon in April 1975 and the communist victories in Laos and Cambodia to force a first summit.

• The first ASEAN Summit, at Bali in February 1976, produced the Declaration of ASEAN Concord (Bali Concord I) and the treaty that remains the organisation’s constitutional core. It also created the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, with an administrative rather than executive mandate, after nine years with no permanent staff at all.
• The Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC), signed 24 February 1976, is ASEAN’s only genuinely legal instrument of general application, and its principles are the ASEAN Way in treaty form.
  • Mutual respect for sovereignty, equality and territorial integrity; the right of every state to exist free from external interference, subversion or coercion; non-interference in one another’s internal affairs; renunciation of the threat or use of force; and effective cooperation.
  • The TAC provides for a High Council to mediate disputes. It has never once been convened — the clearest illustration of how ASEAN prefers an unused mechanism to a used one that might embarrass a member.
• The TAC’s most important later career was external. ASEAN opened it to outside states and made accession a precondition for East Asia Summit participation, converting a code of conduct into leverage over great powers.
  • China and India acceded in 2003, Japan, Korea, Russia and Pakistan in 2004–05, Australia and New Zealand in 2005, the United States in 2009, and the European Union in 2012 — the first by a regional organisation.
• That external powers queued to sign a treaty drafted by five middle powers is the best single evidence that ASEAN’s normative project worked. It did not change great-power behaviour, but it made ASEAN’s norms the region’s default vocabulary.

Cambodia, 1978–91: the campaign that made ASEAN

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 and the installation of a client government in Phnom Penh turned a consultative club into an actor with international standing.

• The objection was normative rather than humanitarian: Vietnam had used force to change a government across a recognised border, precisely what the TAC existed to forbid, and whatever the character of the regime displaced, accepting the outcome would have legitimised the principle.
• ASEAN’s instruments were diplomatic and it used them relentlessly for thirteen years, marshalling annual General Assembly resolutions demanding Vietnamese withdrawal and keeping Cambodia’s UN seat from the installed government.
• It engineered the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea in 1982, binding the Khmer Rouge to Sihanouk’s royalists and Son Sann’s republicans — a morally compromised construction that preserved a non-Vietnamese claimant to legitimacy.
• It convened the Jakarta Informal Meetings from 1988, feeding into the Paris International Conference and the Paris Peace Agreements of 23 October 1991.
• Three consequences define ASEAN’s later self-understanding.
  • Collective diplomatic weight could substitute for material power — the germ of centrality — and ASEAN now had standing with China, the United States and the Soviet Union as the region’s spokesman.
  • It had defended sovereignty norms against external violation without enforcing them internally: the reason it is potent against invasion and helpless against internal breakdown.

Enlargement and the making of the ASEAN-10

• Brunei Darussalam joined on 8 January 1984, a week after independence. Vietnam acceded on 28 July 1995, in the year Washington normalised relations with Hanoi: admitting the state ASEAN had spent thirteen years opposing was its boldest single act.
• Laos and Myanmar joined on 23 July 1997 and Cambodia on 30 April 1999, its admission deferred by the 1997 violence in Phnom Penh — the one occasion on which ASEAN used membership as a sanction.
• Myanmar’s admission was taken over explicit Western objection, defended by the doctrine of constructive engagement: that integration would moderate the junta more surely than isolation. Three decades later that proposition is the central charge in the case against the organisation.
• “ASEAN-10” completed the geographic idea of Southeast Asia at the cost of the organisation’s deepest structural problem.

Divide	Original six (ASEAN-6)	CLMV entrants
Economies	Market economies, decades of open growth	Transition economies from central planning
Income	Singapore’s GDP per capita among the world’s highest	Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia at a small fraction of it
Institutions	Established bureaucracies and customs services	Thin administrative capacity to implement agreements
Trade policy	Long AFTA experience	Extended tariff timelines to 2015 and beyond
Alignment	Diversified	Structurally dependent on China for finance and infrastructure

• The development gap is why ASEAN’s economic timetables are always staggered. The CLMV states received longer schedules under every instrument, so a single ASEAN market has never existed at one moment in time.
• The Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI), launched in 2000, is the response: capacity-building funded by the ASEAN-6 and dialogue partners, with nothing resembling the EU’s structural and cohesion funds.
• The Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (Bangkok Treaty), signed 1995 and in force 1997, was the era’s other achievement — the region’s most ambitious legal instrument, and one no nuclear-weapon state has signed the protocol to.

1997: the crisis that changed the agenda

The Asian financial crisis began with the flotation of the Thai baht on 2 July 1997 and spread through Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea within months — the most important event in ASEAN’s institutional history after the founding.

• The crisis exposed ASEAN as economically irrelevant to its own members’ survival. It had no financial instrument, no surveillance capacity and no crisis facility; rescue came from the IMF, on terms widely felt in the region as humiliating.
• Japan’s proposal for an Asian Monetary Fund in September 1997 was killed by American and IMF opposition and by Chinese wariness of a Japanese-led institution. The idea re-emerged in diluted, ASEAN-hosted form.
• ASEAN Plus Three was convened in December 1997 at Kuala Lumpur, bringing China, Japan and South Korea into an ASEAN-chaired process. The most consequential Asian institution of the last three decades exists because ASEAN’s own members could not rescue each other.
• Non-interference came under internal challenge for the only time in ASEAN’s history. Thailand’s foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan proposed “flexible engagement” in 1998 — that where a member’s domestic conduct produced transboundary effects, currency collapse, haze or refugee flows, the others had a legitimate right to comment.
  • It was defeated at the Manila ministerial of July 1998, supported only by the Philippines, surviving as the euphemism “enhanced interaction”: members may speak individually, ASEAN may never act collectively.
  • This is the clearest evidence available that non-interference is a defended choice, not institutional inertia. ASEAN examined the alternative at the moment of maximum pressure and rejected it.

From Bali Concord II to the Charter and the Community

• The Declaration of ASEAN Concord II (Bali Concord II), October 2003, committed ASEAN to an ASEAN Community by 2020, later advanced to 2015, on three pillars: Security, Economic and Socio-Cultural. The security pillar was Indonesia’s initiative and originally more ambitious, including peacekeeping cooperation, diluted by members wary of anything resembling a defence pact.
• The ASEAN Charter was signed at Singapore on 20 November 2007 and entered into force on 15 December 2008. It conferred legal personality on ASEAN for the first time, codified the organs, and provided for a human rights body, delivered as AICHR in October 2009.
• The Charter codified the ASEAN Way rather than transcending it. The Eminent Persons Group that prepared the ground had proposed voting where consensus failed, suspension of a member in serious breach, and dispute settlement with teeth; almost none of it survived.
  • Article 20 retains consultation and consensus, referring deadlock upward to the Summit rather than to a vote; Article 2 restates non-interference; there is no sanction for non-compliance; and Article 30 requires equal annual contributions, so the least willing payer sets the ceiling for everyone.
• The ASEAN Community was declared at Kuala Lumpur on 31 December 2015 — accurate about intent and generous about achievement. No pillar was complete, and a further ten-year programme followed under ASEAN Community Vision 2025.
• ASEAN Community Vision 2045 was adopted at the 46th Summit in Kuala Lumpur on 26 May 2025. It runs through five strategic plans — the three pillars plus Connectivity and Institutional Strengthening, which commits ASEAN to a strengthened Secretariat and more “agile, adaptive and decisive” organs.
  • It targets the world’s fourth-largest economy, and does not propose changing the consensus rule.

Timor-Leste and the ASEAN-11

• Timor-Leste was admitted as ASEAN’s eleventh member state on 26 October 2025, at the 47th Summit in Kuala Lumpur. Every description of ASEAN as a ten-member body is now out of date.
• The application was lodged in March 2011 and took fourteen years. Indonesia, once the occupying power, was its earliest supporter; Singapore was the most persistent sceptic, citing Timor-Leste’s capacity to absorb roughly a thousand ASEAN meetings a year.
  • The 40th Summit at Phnom Penh in November 2022 agreed in principle and granted observer status; an objective roadmap followed in 2023.
• Its accession shows the admission logic intact, the sceptic persuaded rather than outvoted. It adds a functioning electoral democracy to a grouping where democracies are a minority, and widens the development gap.

How ASEAN is organised

ASEAN’s institutional design is the physical expression of its politics: every organ is composed of serving national officials, every organ decides by consensus, and the only permanent body is kept too small to acquire an agenda of its own.

• The ASEAN Summit of heads of state and government is the supreme policy-making organ, meeting twice a year.
  • The ASEAN Coordinating Council of foreign ministers prepares it, three Community Councils convene the relevant ministers under each pillar, and sectoral ministerial bodies do the substantive work.
• The Committee of Permanent Representatives, created by the Charter, seats an ambassador from each member permanently in Jakarta — the closest thing to a standing negotiating forum.
• The Secretariat, under a Secretary-General serving one non-renewable five-year term by alphabetical rotation, is the structural weak point: staff in the low hundreds and a core budget a small fraction of what a body coordinating nearly 700 million people would need.
  • Article 30 fixes contributions equally across all members, so the ceiling is set by the least willing contributor rather than the largest economies — the opposite of the EU’s gross-national-income key.
  • The Secretary-General has no right of initiative, no enforcement power and no independent political voice. Empowering the office has been a standing reform proposal for two decades and has gone nowhere.
• The chairmanship rotates annually in alphabetical order. The chair sets the theme, hosts the summits and drafts the Chairman’s Statements, giving one medium-sized state disproportionate influence over what ASEAN says in a given year, as Cambodia showed in 2012.
  • The Philippines chairs in 2026 under the theme “Navigating Our Future, Together,” and hosted the 48th ASEAN Summit at Cebu on 8 May 2026.

The ASEAN Way

The ASEAN Way is not a code and is nowhere written down in full. It is a cluster of procedural norms that together determine what ASEAN can and cannot do, and the most examined concept in the study of Asian regionalism.

• Musyawarah and mufakat — consultation and consensus — are the Malay-Indonesian village-deliberation practices from which ASEAN takes its decision rule.
  • Consensus here means the absence of stated objection rather than unanimity: proposals that would attract a veto are not tabled, negotiation happens privately in advance, and the meeting registers a result.
  • The effect is a veto all the same: any one member can stop any ASEAN position, which makes the organisation penetrable by an outside power with a client inside it.
• Non-interference in members’ internal affairs is the load-bearing norm, restated in the TAC and in Article 2 of the Charter, barring ASEAN from commenting on how a member governs itself.
• Non-use of force and peaceful settlement among members, which has largely held, with the qualification examined below.
• Informality and the avoidance of legalistic instruments. For four decades ASEAN produced declarations, concords, visions and blueprints, almost never treaties, preferring the political commitment because it cannot be breached in a justiciable sense.
• Quiet diplomacy and face-saving. Disagreement is managed in corridors and no member is criticised by name in an ASEAN document — functional rather than polite, since public criticism makes retreat domestically impossible.
• Incrementalism and the “comfort level.” ASEAN advances only as fast as its most reluctant member allows, and treats meeting as valuable in itself: the socialisation of officials into shared habits over decades.
• The deliberate absence of enforcement. No court, no infringement procedure, no sanction, no suspension; compliance is voluntary and implementation runs at each member’s own pace.

Why the ASEAN Way exists

• The ASEAN Way is a doctrine of normative sovereignty, not procedural timidity. These are post-colonial states of recent and contested statehood, and the threats they faced at the founding were internal — insurgency, secession, communal division — not invasion by a neighbour.
• For such states, a regional organisation able to pronounce on internal affairs would have been a weapon aimed at each of them: at Indonesia’s regional rebellions, Malaysia’s fragile communal settlement, the Philippines’ Muslim and communist insurgencies, Thailand’s restive Malay-Muslim south, and Singapore’s position as a Chinese-majority city-state in a Malay world.
• Non-interference was therefore a mutual security guarantee between regimes, and ASEAN never developed enforcement because enforcement was never what the members wanted from it.
• Amitav Acharya’s constructivist reading, treated below, is that these norms became genuinely internalised rather than merely instrumental. The realist reply is that ASEAN’s peace is a by-product of external structure — American guarantees, the Sino-Soviet split, then Chinese economic gravity.

	The EU method	The ASEAN method
Legal character	Supranational law with direct effect and primacy	Political commitments; treaties only where unavoidable
Decision rule	Qualified majority in most areas	Consensus; no voting
Enforcement	Commission, Court of Justice, infringement proceedings	None
Trade form	Customs union with a common external tariff	Free trade area; each member sets its own external tariff
Membership	Accession conditionality	Admission by consensus; conduct not a criterion

ASEAN did not fail to become the European Union. It declined to.

The three pillars and what each has delivered

• The ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC) is the weakest pillar in output and the most important in ambition.
  • It has delivered the TAC and its external accessions, SEANWFZ, the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM, 2006) and counter-terrorism and maritime-security cooperation — and no conflict-resolution capacity, no role in members’ internal crises and no peacekeeping capability.
• The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) has the most machinery and the widest gap between blueprint and market reality.
• The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) is the least discussed and the most quietly functional.
  • Disaster management is its genuine success. The ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER), in force 2009, is one of ASEAN’s few binding treaties, and the AHA Centre in Jakarta coordinates real operational responses to typhoons and earthquakes and — under Point 4 of the Five-Point Consensus — humanitarian assistance in Myanmar.
  • Also delivered: haze cooperation under the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (2002), which Indonesia did not ratify until 2014 and which has not stopped the fires; health cooperation during COVID-19; and an ASEAN identity project that remains thin outside official circles. AICHR sits in this pillar.

Economic integration: from the PTA to the AEC

• The ASEAN Preferential Trading Arrangements of 1977 failed, instructively. It worked by voluntary, item-by-item offers of preference, and members duly offered concessions on goods they did not trade — snow ploughs being the standing joke. A positive list of voluntary offers produces nothing; liberalisation has to be automatic.
• The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) was agreed at the Singapore Summit in January 1992, driven by the end of the Cold War and the fear that investment would divert to a liberalising China and a NAFTA-consolidating North America.
  • Its instrument, the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT) scheme, used a negative list and a repeatedly accelerated timetable to bring manufactured-goods tariffs to 0–5 per cent.
• The ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA), in force 17 May 2010, consolidated AFTA and its protocols into one instrument covering tariffs, rules of origin, non-tariff measures, customs and standards. The Second Protocol, the “upgraded ATIGA”, was signed from October 2025, adding digital trade and supply-chain resilience.
• The AEC Blueprints of 2015 and 2025 set the programme: a single market and production base, a competitive region, equitable development, global integration.
• Tariffs are, for practical purposes, gone, with residual sensitive lists only in the CLMV states. The tariff achievement is complete and no longer where the problem is.

The barriers that actually bind

• Non-tariff measures have multiplied as tariffs have fallen and are now the binding constraint: divergent standards and technical regulations; licensing, quotas and prohibitions rarely withdrawn once introduced; customs procedures whose cost on small consignments exceeds the tariff saving; and behind-the-border regulation — equity caps, local-content rules, services licensing, procurement preference.
• The ASEAN Single Window, linking national customs systems for electronic exchange of the ASEAN certificate of origin, is the most concrete facilitation achievement, alongside mutual recognition arrangements on product standards.
• Preference utilisation is a quieter failure: much eligible intra-ASEAN trade still moves at most-favoured-nation rates because the origin paperwork costs more than the preference is worth.
• There is no customs union and no common external tariff. Each member runs its own external trade policy and its own bilateral FTAs, which is exactly why rules of origin are unavoidable and why the region’s trade law is a thicket of overlapping preferences.

Services, investment, labour and the digital economy

• The ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services (1995) was replaced by the ASEAN Trade in Services Agreement (ATISA), in force from 2020, shifting to a negative list with a standstill on new restrictions. The ASEAN Comprehensive Investment Agreement (ACIA), in force 2012, consolidated the investment instruments, subject to extensive reservations.
• Free movement of skilled labour, one of the AEC’s four declared freedoms, barely exists.
  • Mutual recognition arrangements cover only a handful of occupations — engineering, nursing, architecture, medicine, dentistry and tourism professionals, with framework arrangements for surveying and accountancy — amounting to roughly one and a half per cent of the regional workforce. Several are closed frameworks in which the destination country keeps full licensing discretion.
  • About seven-eighths of intra-ASEAN migrant workers are low-skilled and move entirely outside these frameworks: Burmese, Lao and Cambodian workers in Thailand, Indonesians and Filipinos in Malaysia and Singapore. The region’s real labour market is one ASEAN’s instruments do not govern.
  • Restrictions are explicit: several members require skills transfer to locals, Indonesia requires proof a post cannot be filled domestically, and the Philippine constitution reserves certain professions to citizens.
• The ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA), the first region-wide digital trade treaty of its kind, was substantially concluded at Kuala Lumpur on 24 October 2025, covering paperless trade, electronic payments, cross-border data flows, data protection and artificial intelligence.

Why intra-ASEAN trade has stayed around a fifth

Intra-ASEAN trade is roughly 21 to 22 per cent of the bloc’s total merchandise trade, against about 19 per cent in the early 1990s: three decades of tariff elimination moved the number by two or three points. Comparison with the EU’s roughly 60 per cent is the standard rebuke, and a misreading unless the reasons are stated.

• The members are competitors more than complements. Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines export overlapping baskets to the same third markets, and economies with similar endowments and export structures do not trade heavily with each other. No tariff cut changes that.
• The production networks that do exist run outward, not inward: Southeast Asian factories are nodes in chains whose design authority and end markets sit in China, Japan, Korea, the United States and Europe. China has become the region’s trade hub in both directions, converting what might have been intra-ASEAN exchange into ASEAN–China exchange.
• The region’s growth model is extra-regional by design. Every member pursued export-led industrialisation aimed at rich-country demand, and the AEC was built to make the region a more attractive platform for that trade, not a substitute market for it.
  • Judged against its own purpose, the low intra-regional share is a feature of the strategy, not evidence of failure.
• A fifth of a very large and fast-growing total is not trivial, and far exceeds intra-regional trade in South Asia, Africa or Latin America. The EU comparison flatters a set of large, similar, rich, adjacent economies.

ASEAN in the world economy

• Combined GDP passed four trillion dollars in the mid-2020s, population is close to 700 million, and Vision 2045 targets the world’s fourth-largest economy.
• ASEAN is the largest developing-region destination for foreign direct investment, with inflows of about $226 billion in 2024, roughly 15 per cent of global FDI. The United States was the largest single source at about $42 billion, with intra-ASEAN investment second at about $31 billion: intra-regional investment has deepened faster than intra-regional trade.
• “China+1” relocation is the decade’s dominant investment story, moving semiconductor and electronics capacity into Malaysia and Vietnam, data centres into Johor, and battery chains into Indonesia and Thailand.
• The 2025 American tariff round exposed the model’s dependence. The reciprocal tariffs of April 2025 hit Cambodia and Vietnam among the hardest of any economies on earth before being paused and settled bilaterally, most Southeast Asian economies landing near 19 to 20 per cent.
  • ASEAN did not negotiate as a bloc; each member dealt with Washington separately. on the largest external economic shock in a generation its collective machinery did not act — the sharpest recent illustration of what an organisation without a common commercial policy cannot do.

The external network: ASEAN+1 agreements and RCEP

ASEAN’s most effective economic instrument has not been internal liberalisation but collective bargaining power directed outward. Members with little individual leverage over China or Japan have, as a bloc, negotiated agreements with all of them.

ASEAN+1 agreement	Key dates
ASEAN–China (ACFTA)	Framework 2002; goods 2005; fully in force 2010; ACFTA 3.0 Upgrade Protocol signed 28 October 2025, adding digital and green economy and supply-chain connectivity
ASEAN–Korea	Goods 2007; investment 2009
ASEAN–Japan (AJCEP)	Signed 2008; services and investment chapters added 2020
ASEAN–India (AITIGA)	Framework 2003; goods in force 1 January 2010; services and investment 2014; under review, substantial conclusion aimed for 2026
ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand (AANZFTA)	In force 2010; upgrade protocol 2023; the most comprehensive of the ASEAN+1s
ASEAN–Hong Kong, China	Signed 2017, in force from 2019

• China’s decision to propose an FTA in 2000 was strategic, not commercial. Beijing offered an “early harvest” on agricultural products and accepted an asymmetric bargain to reassure a region that had begun to fear it — the most successful instrument of Chinese regional diplomacy in the post-Cold War era.

RCEP

• The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership was conceived at the ASEAN Summit in Bali in November 2011, with negotiations launched at Phnom Penh in 2012.
  • Its origin was institutional self-defence. A Chinese-favoured East Asia FTA among ASEAN+3 and a Japanese-favoured partnership among ASEAN+6 were both circulating; RCEP was ASEAN’s compromise, built on its own ASEAN+1 agreements and chaired by ASEAN, which kept the drafting pen in Southeast Asian hands.
• RCEP was signed on 15 November 2020 and entered into force on 1 January 2022. Its fifteen members — ASEAN plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand — make it the world’s largest trade agreement by combined GDP and population, roughly 30 per cent of each.
  • It is the first agreement of any kind binding China, Japan and South Korea into common trade disciplines.
• RCEP is wide but shallow. Tariff commitments are modest, phased over up to twenty years and largely consolidating what the ASEAN+1 agreements had already done; there are no meaningful labour, environment or state-owned-enterprise chapters, no investor-state dispute settlement, and limited services and procurement coverage.
  • The real achievement is a single unified rules-of-origin regime. One certificate and one set of cumulation rules replace five overlapping schemes, so a Japanese component processed in Vietnam and finished in Thailand counts regional content across the whole bloc.
  • That makes RCEP a supply-chain agreement rather than a market-access one, and its effects appear in the reorganisation of production rather than in headline tariffs.

India’s withdrawal

• India walked out in November 2019 at the Bangkok Summit, after seven years and more than thirty rounds, on the eve of conclusion. Its stated reasons were four.
  • The trade deficit with China. India already ran its largest bilateral deficit with a country against which it had no FTA, and opening 70–80 per cent of tariff lines without adequate protection was judged to invite a far larger one.
  • Inadequate safeguards. India sought a credible automatic trigger against import surges and did not obtain one, and feared circumvention of rules of origin by Chinese goods routed through ASEAN members with which India already had an FTA.
  • The base year. RCEP proposed 2014 for applied tariffs, and Indian tariffs had risen after 2014, so that base implied deeper cuts than the schedule appeared to require.
  • No movement on services or people. India’s offensive interest is mode-4 movement of professionals, on which the others would not move. Domestic pressure from dairy, steel, textiles and small manufacturing was politically decisive.
• India’s own formulation was that the agreement did not reflect RCEP’s “basic spirit and agreed guiding principles.” The accompanying ministerial declaration leaves the door open: India may accede at any time and attend as an observer — a provision written for no other country.
• Whether India was right has not settled.
  • For: India’s FTA record, AITIGA included, is that imports grow faster than exports; its manufacturing was not competitive against Chinese scale; and a China-anchored bloc looked worse still after the Galwan clash seven months later.
  • Against: RCEP is where East Asian supply chains are being reorganised, and staying outside leaves Indian producers on the wrong side of a unified cumulation rule — which weakens India’s economic claim to the Indo-Pacific role its security policy asserts.

ASEAN centrality and the wider architecture

This is ASEAN’s largest achievement and it has no equivalent anywhere else: a grouping of small and middle powers, with no military capacity and no common commercial policy, built and still chairs every significant multilateral institution in the Asia-Pacific.

• ASEAN centrality means four things at once, and arguments about it usually conflate them.
  • Convening: the region’s multilateral meetings are ASEAN-initiated, chaired, hosted and calendared.
  • Agenda-setting: ASEAN drafts, which decides what is discussed and what is not.
  • Membership control: ASEAN decides who is admitted to the institutions it convenes.
  • Normative framing: the TAC, consensus and non-interference are the terms on which outside powers are received.
• The underlying logic is that no great power will accept another great power as convenor, but all can accept a weak one. ASEAN’s institutional centrality is a direct product of its material weakness.

The ASEAN Regional Forum

• The ARF was agreed in July 1993 and first met at Bangkok in July 1994 — the first region-wide security dialogue in Asian history, born of the post-Cold War fear that American withdrawal would leave a vacuum for China or Japan.
• Its twenty-seven participants are its point: ASEAN, all the major powers, and states no other forum will seat together — North Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and the European Union.
• Its 1995 Concept Paper set out three sequential stages: confidence-building, then preventive diplomacy, then “elaboration of approaches to conflicts” — deliberately weaker than “conflict resolution”, which China would not accept.
• The ARF never left stage one. Preventive diplomacy has been under discussion for three decades and nothing has been preventively done. Its defenders reply that confidence-building among twenty-seven states including North Korea is itself substantial.

ASEAN Plus Three

The APT is the most substantive of ASEAN’s outward institutions, and the only one to have produced financial machinery rather than dialogue.

• It was convened in December 1997 at Kuala Lumpur during the financial crisis and institutionalised at the Manila summit of 1999. It brings ASEAN together with China, Japan and South Korea — the three economies whose reserves could actually stabilise the region.
• The Chiang Mai Initiative, agreed by the APT finance ministers in May 2000, created bilateral currency swaps letting a member under speculative attack draw foreign exchange from its neighbours — the AMF idea rebuilt in a form China would accept and Washington would not veto.
• The Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM), effective from 24 March 2010, converted that web of bilaterals into a single reserve-pooling arrangement under one contract.
  • Its size was doubled to $240 billion in 2012 and remains there, split 80:20 between the Plus Three and ASEAN — China and Japan at 32 per cent each, Korea at 16 per cent.
  • The IMF de-linked portion, the share drawable without an IMF programme, was raised from 30 to 40 per cent in 2021, with further increases under review.
  • A Rapid Financing Facility was approved in May 2025 for faster emergency access after sudden shocks such as pandemics and natural disasters, and its entry into force was accelerated at the Samarkand ministerial of May 2026. The ministers have also endorsed a roadmap shifting CMIM from a promise-to-pay structure to a paid-in capital model.
• AMRO, the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office, established in Singapore in 2011 and a treaty-based international organisation from 2016, is the CMIM’s surveillance arm — a permanent independent body, and a real departure from the ASEAN Way’s aversion to institutions.
• The ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve (APTERR), operational from 2012, holds earmarked and stockpiled rice for emergency release and has been used repeatedly for typhoon and flood relief in the Philippines, Laos and Myanmar. It is small in tonnage and it works — the opposite of the CMIM’s profile.
• The Asian Bond Markets Initiative, launched 2003, addressed the “double mismatch” — Asian savings recycled through Western markets and borrowed back short and in foreign currency — that made 1997 so violent. Its Credit Guarantee and Investment Facility, established 2010, guarantees local-currency corporate bonds, cumulatively above $4 billion.

What the APT has and has not achieved

• The achievement is specific: the APT built Asia’s financial safety net, its surveillance capacity and its bond-market machinery, in institutions ASEAN chairs. Nothing comparable exists in South Asia, Africa or Latin America.
• The CMIM has never been drawn upon — not once in a quarter-century, including through the global financial crisis and the pandemic.
  • The stigma of the IMF link deters use: beyond the de-linked portion, drawing requires an IMF programme, the very thing 1997 taught the region to avoid. Activation is slow and collective, requiring consensus among competitors when a government would least wish to advertise distress.
  • Better substitutes exist: Federal Reserve swap lines to Singapore and Korea in 2008 and 2020, the Plus Three’s own bilateral swaps, and very large unilateral reserves. Self-insurance by reserve accumulation was the region’s real answer to 1997, and CMIM is the policy that made it possible never to claim.
  • A facility never used proves neither failure nor success: it may be a deterrent that works, or a mechanism designed not to be usable.
• Sino-Japanese rivalry sets the ceiling on what the APT can agree. The equal 32 per cent contributions encode rivalry rather than partnership, and the two states’ competing preferences for the wider architecture — an ASEAN+3 core against an ASEAN+6 one — are exactly what RCEP had to split the difference on.
• Political ambition has stalled: an East Asian Vision Group reported in 2001 recommending an East Asian Community and an East Asian Free Trade Area, and neither happened, the idea being absorbed into the wider East Asia Summit that ASEAN preferred.
• The pattern is the ASEAN pattern. APT works where the task is technical, quantifiable and non-political — reserves, surveillance, rice, bonds. It does nothing where the task requires one member to constrain another.

The East Asia Summit and the ADMM

• The first East Asia Summit met at Kuala Lumpur in December 2005, and the argument over its membership is the clearest demonstration of centrality in practice.
  • China preferred an ASEAN+3 membership, a compact body in which its weight would be greatest; Japan, Indonesia and Singapore pressed for India, Australia and New Zealand precisely to dilute that weight.
  • ASEAN settled it, and settled it against China, admitting the three on criteria ASEAN wrote itself: accession to the TAC, dialogue-partner status and substantive relations with ASEAN. Russia and the United States joined in 2011.
  • That Southeast Asian states determined the membership of Asia’s premier leaders’ forum over the objection of the region’s largest power is what centrality means when it is working.
• The ADMM (2006) brought ASEAN defence ministers into the process and the ADMM-Plus (2010) added the eight EAS partners.
  • ADMM-Plus is ASEAN’s most operationally serious body: its expert working groups run real multilateral exercises in maritime security, counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping and cyber security, putting Chinese and American units into the same exercise.
• The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP), adopted in June 2019, was an Indonesian initiative and ASEAN’s response to being written into other powers’ strategies without being consulted. It accepts the Indo-Pacific as a geographic frame while rejecting the strategic content others load into it.

	The AOIP (2019)	The US / Quad framing	India’s framing
Purpose	Inclusive cooperation; no power excluded	Free and open Indo-Pacific; balancing China	Rules-based order, SAGAR
Character	Development and cooperation agenda	Security-first, competitor named	Both, China unnamed
Architecture	ASEAN-led mechanisms as the vehicle	Quad, AUKUS, minilaterals, alliances	Affirms ASEAN centrality while joining minilaterals

• The AOIP’s function is defensive: whatever the Indo-Pacific turns out to be, it must be built on ASEAN-led mechanisms — an argument ASEAN can make but not enforce.

Does centrality survive?

• The case that it is eroding is substantial.
  • AUKUS (2021) was announced without consultation and puts nuclear-powered submarines into Southeast Asian waters, implicating the SEANWFZ regime without ASEAN being asked; the Quad convenes four powers on Indo-Pacific security with no ASEAN member in the room; and IPEF (2022) placed a US-led economic framework alongside the ASEAN-chaired one.
  • US–China rivalry has made ASEAN’s consensus documents progressively emptier: language on the issues that matter is what a divided membership cannot agree.
  • The Thailand–Cambodia fighting of 2025 and the deadlock over Myanmar were both, in the end, addressed with substantial external mediation. The sharpest form of the charge is that ASEAN is being reduced from a driver to a venue — the hotel where Asian diplomacy books its conference rooms.
• The case that centrality holds is also substantial: nobody has proposed an alternative convenor, because no alternative is acceptable to everyone, and the EAS, ARF, ADMM-Plus and APT continue to meet because ASEAN chairs them.
  • The minilaterals are additions rather than replacements: they do security tasks ASEAN never claimed, and every Quad statement affirms ASEAN centrality — perfunctorily, but the affirmation is itself a constraint.
  • RCEP is an ASEAN-drafted agreement governing a third of the world economy, and the Timor-Leste accession and ACFTA 3.0 upgrade of 2025 show the organisation still doing what only it can do.
  • Centrality was never power, and treating its erosion as a fall from strength misdescribes what it always was. It is a claim to be the default meeting place, and it survives exactly as long as the great powers find a weak convenor more convenient than a strong rival.

Where the model fails

Everything ASEAN cannot do, it cannot do for the same reason: the rule that keeps eleven governments in the room forbids any of them from being told anything.

• ASEAN is shallowly institutionalised by design: no supranational authority, no enforcement, no compliance mechanism, no sanction. Agreements are soft, implementation runs at each member’s pace, and a member that does not act faces nothing.

Myanmar

• The Tatmadaw seized power on 1 February 2021, detained Aung San Suu Kyi and annulled the November 2020 election result. The country descended into a civil war of a kind it had not seen, with a National Unity Government, People’s Defence Forces and ethnic armed organisations holding large stretches of territory.
• ASEAN’s response was the Five-Point Consensus, agreed at Jakarta on 24 April 2021 with the coup leader present: an immediate end to violence, dialogue among all parties, a special envoy to mediate, humanitarian assistance through the AHA Centre, and a visit by the envoy to meet all parties.
  • It has not been implemented on any point except the humanitarian one, and the violence increased after it was agreed.
• ASEAN’s one unprecedented act was to exclude the junta’s political representatives from summits and ministerials, from October 2021, admitting Myanmar only at “non-political representative” level. This is the first time ASEAN has sanctioned a member, and it required amending no rule — the chair simply declined to issue an invitation.
• The special envoy rotates with the chairmanship, destroying continuity: each spends a year learning the file before handing to a successor with a different national position.
• ASEAN is genuinely divided. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have pressed hardest; Thailand runs parallel engagement reflecting a 2,400-kilometre border; Cambodia’s 2022 chairmanship broke ranks with an unmandated visit to Naypyidaw; Laos and Cambodia are constrained by dependence on China.
• The junta held phased elections from December 2025 on a constitution and electoral framework of its own design, the National League for Democracy dissolved and large areas outside government control.
  • ASEAN sent no observers and its members’ reactions diverged sharply — some treating the polls as a step towards normalisation, others as a legitimation exercise — and the 48th Summit’s language stayed on humanitarian assistance rather than the political process.

Why Myanmar is a regional security problem, not a domestic one

• Insurgency and arms. Territory controlled by neither the state nor any single authority supplies sanctuary and a market; North-East Indian insurgent groups have long used Myanmar territory, and the Manipur conflict from 2023 was aggravated by cross-border flows of weapons and fighters.
• Refugees. Displacement into Mizoram and Manipur, into Thailand, and into Bangladesh, compounding the Rohingya caseload at Cox’s Bazar that no state will absorb and no forum will adjudicate.
• Narcotics and the scam economy. Golden Triangle methamphetamine output has risen sharply, and industrial-scale cyber-scam compounds in the border areas traffic labour from across Asia and defraud victims worldwide.
• Stalled connectivity. The Kaladan project and the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway are blocked by fighting in Rakhine, Chin and Sagaing; Paletwa, a Kaladan node, fell in 2024.
• Strategic dependence. An isolated Myanmar leans further on China, deepening Chinese access to the Bay of Bengal and narrowing India’s room.
• No available instrument addresses more than one channel. ASEAN’s consensus cannot compel; Western sanctions have not altered the junta’s calculus and have pushed it towards Beijing; and India engages the authorities while calling for a return to democracy, having ended the Free Movement Regime and begun fencing the border.

The South China Sea

• The dispute is between China’s expansive claim — the nine-dash line, now often drawn with ten — and the maritime entitlements of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia under UNCLOS. Four members are claimants, one has an incidental stake at Natuna, and six have no direct interest at all.
• The arbitral tribunal constituted under UNCLOS Annex VII issued its award in Philippines v China on 12 July 2016, holding that China’s historic-rights claim had no legal basis, that no Spratly feature generates an exclusive economic zone, and that China had violated Philippine sovereign rights and caused severe environmental harm.
  • China refused to participate and rejected the award as “null and void.” There is no enforcement mechanism, and ASEAN as a body has never endorsed the award — because endorsing it would require consensus.
• The Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), signed with China in 2002, is political and non-binding, and has not restrained reclamation, militarisation or coercion of Philippine and Vietnamese vessels.
• The Code of Conduct has been under negotiation ever since: a framework in 2017, a single draft negotiating text in 2018, a third reading from 2023. The Philippines, chairing in 2026, has pressed for conclusion in that year; specialists doubt it is achievable.
  • Three questions have never been answered: whether the code is legally binding, what area it covers, and whether it constrains third parties — a Chinese draft provision restricting exercises with outside powers being unacceptable to several claimants.
  • A code that is not binding adds nothing to the 2002 declaration, and China has no incentive to accept one that is: time favours the party consolidating facts on the water.
• Phnom Penh 2012 revealed the structural flaw. At the 45th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting ASEAN failed to issue a joint communiqué for the first time in its history, because Cambodia as chair refused language on Scarborough Shoal and the Philippine exclusive economic zone.
  • Consensus means that a single member, cultivated by an outside power, can veto ASEAN’s collective voice. Cambodia’s economic dependence on China converted a bilateral relationship into a veto over the whole organisation.
  • Indonesia’s foreign minister salvaged a set of “Six Principles” by shuttle diplomacy within days, but China had learned that ASEAN’s decision rule is its most accessible point of entry.

The development gap, human rights and the diversity of regimes

• The income spread is the widest in any regional grouping — Singapore’s GDP per capita among the world’s highest, Myanmar’s among the lowest — so every instrument comes with staged timelines that fragment the single market in time.
• The political spread is as wide: consolidated democracies, a dominant-party city-state, communist single-party states in Vietnam and Laos, an absolute monarchy in Brunei, a military government in Myanmar, hybrid regimes elsewhere. A grouping that spans this range can agree only on procedure, never on values.
• AICHR, established in 2009, has a promotional mandate and no protection mandate: it cannot receive individual complaints, investigate, visit without consent or name a member.
  • The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration of 2012 was criticised by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for subordinating rights to “national and regional particularities” and to public morality — general-limitation language that critics argue swallows the guarantees.
  • The Rohingya expulsions of 2017 produced no ASEAN action, and remain the standing indictment of the human-rights architecture.

The “Asian values” defence

• The defence is a real position with real advocates.Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad argued in the 1990s that East and Southeast Asian societies rest on different priorities from the liberal West: community before the individual, order and harmony before adversarial contestation, consensus before confrontation.
  • Applied to ASEAN, non-interference and consensus are not deficiencies but an alternative modality of regional order, suited to states whose overriding needs are stability, development and nationhood. The developmental version is stronger still: rapid growth and poverty reduction are held to vindicate a sequencing in which prosperity and order precede political liberalisation.
  • It carries a post-colonial charge: that the human-rights critique applies a Western-centric lens and that norm-setting authority is itself a form of hegemony. Read this way, the ASEAN Way is a Third World assertion of the right to be judged by its own standards.
• The counter-argument is equally serious.
  • Amartya Sen’s reply is the decisive one. Asia contains half of humanity and no single set of “Asian values” can be extracted from it, and the traditions invoked are read selectively — Ashoka and Confucian remonstrance both contain arguments for tolerance and the accountability of rulers.
  • Freedom is not a Western taste but a universal capability, and its value is not diminished by poverty.
  • The doctrine’s advocates were incumbent governments, and a theory of politics articulated exclusively by those in power about the duties of the governed invites the obvious objection. The people whose values are invoked were never asked.
  • ASEAN’s own practice contains the contradiction: it created AICHR and adopted a rights declaration, conceding that the vocabulary applies, then declined to give the institution any power.

The peace claim, qualified

• The strongest single claim made for ASEAN — that no two members have gone to war since 1967 — now needs stating with care.
• Thailand and Cambodia fought a five-day border war in late July 2025 around the disputed temple areas of Ta Moan Thom and Preah Vihear, with air strikes and artillery, and fighting resumed through December 2025, displacement passing half a million and deaths reaching the low hundreds.
• Malaysia, as ASEAN chair, hosted the ceasefire talks and the Kuala Lumpur peace accord of 26 October 2025, and an ASEAN Observer Team was deployed to monitor compliance.
  • The decisive leverage, however, was American, applied through tariff and trade pressure, with China positioning as a mediator after the December ceasefire.
• Read charitably, ASEAN’s convening kept the war short and produced a mechanism. Read strictly, two members fought a war and ASEAN could neither prevent it nor stop it without an external power supplying the pressure — precisely the prediction the ASEAN Way’s critics have made for fifty years.

Scholarly assessments

• Amitav Acharya is the most important theorist of Asian regionalism, and Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia is the reference work. His argument is constructivist: ASEAN’s norms are not decoration on a balance of power but a constitutive practice that changed how member states understand their own interests.
  • Norm localisation is his central contribution: external norms are adopted neither wholesale nor not at all, but reconstructed by local actors to fit prior local beliefs, or “cognitive priors”, so that the imported idea is grafted onto what already commands legitimacy.
    • Applied to ASEAN, cooperative security was localised into the ARF and the ADMM-Plus in a form that preserved non-interference and imposed no obligations, where European-style collective security would have been rejected.
    • The responsibility to protect met the reverse fate. Irreconcilable with the cognitive prior of non-interference, it was localised only into ASEAN’s disaster-relief practice under AADMER — which is why humanitarian assistance is the one point of the Five-Point Consensus that functions.
  • Norm subsidiarity is the outward-facing counterpart: local actors create norms of their own to defend their autonomy against great-power abuse of global norms. ZOPFAN, SEANWFZ, the TAC accession requirement and centrality itself are subsidiarity norms — rules made by weak states to bind strong ones.
    • Localisation is inward-looking and adaptive; subsidiarity is outward-looking and defensive. The distinction makes ASEAN a norm-maker rather than merely a norm-taker.
  • Whether ASEAN is a security community in Karl Deutsch’s sense — dependable expectations of peaceful change — is Acharya’s animating question, and his answer is qualified: ASEAN is at most a nascent security community, the practices in place but the transformation of expectations incomplete. The 2025 Thai–Cambodian fighting supports the qualification.
• Michael Leifer is the sharpest sceptic in the field: ASEAN is a diplomatic community rather than a security community, its achievement a set of habits for managing intramural relations, while the peace it enjoys rests on a balance of power ASEAN did not create and cannot maintain.
  • It has no capacity to act when the balance changes, and the ARF was in his reading an attempt to influence a balance of power by declaratory means.
• Kishore Mahbubani, in The ASEAN Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace with Jeffery Sng, makes the strongest case for the defence. ASEAN took the most diverse region on earth and produced peace and growth where scholars had predicted the opposite; the historian C. A. Fisher had called Southeast Asia the “Balkans of Asia.”
  • His formulation is that ASEAN moves like a crab — sideways, slowly, never in a straight line — but does not go backwards. It never imitated the EU, and its refusal to do so is why it is intact.
• The sceptical replies are serious.
  • Nicholas Khoo argues the security-community claim is unsustainable: members hedge, arm and balance against each other and against China, and the absence of war reflects deterrence rather than internalised norms.
  • Shaun Narine contends that institutional weakness is not a stage towards something stronger but a settled equilibrium in which ASEAN promises more than its members will let it deliver.
  • Donald Emmerson frames the choice as relevance against cohesion, and ASEAN has consistently chosen cohesion.
• The reply to the “talk shop” charge is not that it is false but that it mistakes the counterfactual. The comparison is not ASEAN against the EU but Southeast Asia with ASEAN against Southeast Asia without it, and against a South Asia whose summit process has not met since 2014.

ASEAN and India

• India’s absence from ASEAN’s founding was a choice, and a costly one. Non-alignment made New Delhi read the 1967 grouping as an American construction; ASEAN read India as Soviet-aligned after 1971 and as a potential regional hegemon. Two decades of mutual indifference followed.

Stage	Year
Sectoral Dialogue Partner	1992
Full Dialogue Partner	1995; India joined the ARF in 1996
Summit-level Partner, first ASEAN–India Summit at Phnom Penh	2002
Accession to the TAC	2003
Strategic Partnership, at the commemorative summit in New Delhi	2012
Comprehensive Strategic Partnership	2022

• Look East became Act East in 2014, a change of verb meant to signal delivery rather than orientation; India also opened a separate mission to ASEAN and the EAS in Jakarta in 2015.
• The ASEAN–India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA) entered into force on 1 January 2010, with services and investment agreements following in 2014. Two-way trade is around $128 billion, roughly 11 per cent of India’s global trade — but the deficit is large and persistent, imports running well over twice exports.
  • India’s grievance is that AITIGA is lopsided: concessions front-loaded on India’s side, rules of origin loose enough to let third-country goods be routed through ASEAN members, and a services agreement delivering little of India’s mode-4 interest.
  • The review has run since 2023 through a joint committee, and the parties are aiming for substantial conclusion in 2026 — the practical test of whether the relationship can be rebalanced.
• Connectivity is where ambition and delivery diverge most sharply. The India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project were to be Act East’s physical foundation, and India took operational control of Sittwe port in 2024.
  • Both are stalled by the Myanmar conflict: India’s land bridge to Southeast Asia runs through the one country ASEAN cannot fix.
  • The Mekong–Ganga Cooperation (2000) is chronically under-resourced beside China’s far larger Lancang–Mekong Cooperation.
• India’s stake in ASEAN centrality is direct. ASEAN-led forums are how a non-allied India sits at the region’s tables, and ASEAN’s inclusive Indo-Pacific framing lets it be present without appearing to join a containment coalition.
  • India entered the East Asia Summit in 2005, ahead of Russia and the United States, Vietnam pressing its case against Chinese objection.
  • The AOIP and India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative were deliberately aligned, and India’s South China Sea position — freedom of navigation, adherence to UNCLOS — matches ASEAN claimants’ language while stopping short of taking a side.
  • Defence cooperation is bilateral rather than ASEAN-wide: Vietnam above all, with Indian energy exploration in Vietnamese blocks and defence lines of credit, then Singapore.
• India’s absence from RCEP remains the standing question over the relationship. ASEAN’s economic architecture is organised around an agreement India has chosen not to join, which caps how far the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership can go and makes the AITIGA review carry more weight than a tariff negotiation normally would.

Conclusion

ASEAN is the strongest demonstration available that regional integration and regional order are different projects, and that the second can be had without the first. On Balassa’s ladder it has not climbed past a free trade area in six decades. Measured by what it was built to do — keep eleven states out of each other’s throats and place Southeast Asia at the centre of an architecture it could never dominate — it has few equals. Its costs are the price of the rule that keeps everyone in the room.