Fragmented by geography, history, religion and language, the Southeast Asian region has sometimes been known as the “Balkans of Asia.” Colonial rule over the past four centuries encouraged divisions by linking these lands to Western powers with differing political and cultural systems. Only the Kingdom of Thailand retained its full independence and its predominantly Buddhist traditions.
As the nations of Southeast Asia became independent over the past 33 years, ancient and modern rivalries compounded the ethnic and political boundary disputes that were partly a product of World War II Japanese occupation. Lacking a consensus on the most effective path to modernization, some leaders lent themselves to outside political scheming. Lying athwart the strategic sea lanes from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf and Mediterranean, Southeast Asia was tempting as an arena for Great Power maneuvering.
The ASSOCIATION OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATIONS, known as ASEAN had its formal inauguration 12 years ago this month in Bangkok when the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines signed the declaration. The ASSOCIATION fosters economic cooperation for a region of some 245 million people who inhabit the mainland, the Malay peninsula and some 20,000 islands spread over more than three million square kilometers.
The performance of ASEAN since then has substantially exceeded the expectations of many, including skeptics both within and without the region. Shunning originally the controversial issues spawned by the conflict in the Indochinese states, ASEAN sought to emphasize constructive prospects. Special and ad-hoc committees representing member states have met and explored opportunities for collective action in transportation, communications, education, research and scientific development that promise common benefits.
Although Singapore is unique among the five neighboring countries in not having an immense underdeveloped rural hinterland, it has been possible for the ASEAN nations to agree upon specialization of production, emphasizing the advantages to each in locating industrial establishments to supply most effectively the larger regional market. An example is the soda ash industry to exploit the huge high quality rock salt deposits of northeastern Thailand.
ASEAN still has far to go in reducing regional barriers to trade, travel, and profitable industrialization, and in effectively controlling problems such as drug traffic and smuggling. However, a new vehicle for working together has been created wherein women’s groups, archaeologists, shipping executives, labor leaders, bankers and writers their growing mutuality of interests. Each ASEAN meeting of nongovernmental participants appears to generate increased enthusiasm.
So far neither a common market nor a regional economic community has been formed, but ASEAN is setting the pattern of productive and peaceful cooperation, creating a “Southeast Asian Sea of Tranquility.” ASEAN nations are rich in their resources of coconuts, copper, rubber, tin and timber, as well as in rice, maize, sugar and spices—for all of which they seek improved world earnings. Most importantly as an ASEAN founder expressed it: “For the first time now one of our foreign ministers can telephone another, take up a mutual problem and make an agreement in principle.”
In electing the ASSOCIATION OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATIONS to receive the 1979 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the Board of Trustees recognizes its supplanting national jealousies that led to confrontation, with increasingly effective cooperation, goodwill among the neighboring peoples of Southeast Asia.
