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The Greater Mekong Subregion programme: reflections for a renewed paradigm of regionalism

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Abstract

Southeast Asia shares many similarities with Europe, among others, deep economic, historic and cultural ties, as well as the trauma of wars, which led to the desire to turn battlefields into marketplaces. However, in Southeast Asia, regional economic integration has preceded institutional integration, reversing the order of European integration. Despite drawing on different models of integration, programmes favouring the setting up of cross-border and transnational areas have burgeoned both within the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) development programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) since the early 1990s, is currently one of the most dynamic transnational integration processes occurring in mainland Southeast Asia. Among the flagship initiatives of the programme are three economic corridors that have revived the ancient caravan trade routes and networks, which once traversed the Indochinese peninsula. This article sketches out the specificities of the GMS integration by examining the “corridor approach”. As institutional regionalism in Europe appears to have encountered problems, and Southeast Asia seems to have stretched its open and network-based integration model to a great extent, the main argument of this essay is that reflections on the success and the limits of the GMS’ specific type of integration can contribute to a new understanding of regionalism, particularly in Asia.

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Notes

  1. http://www.adb.org/countries/gms/overview, accessed on 20 February 2012

  2. My PhD thesis in political science was based on empirical data—interviews with Chinese migrants, local traders and Lao officials as well as the analysis of socio-economic statistics and reports—collected between 2007 and 2009 during several fieldwork trips carried out in the main cities of three northern provinces of Laos (Oudomxay, Luang Namtha, Bokeo) affected by the NSEC. In June 2012, I conducted interviews with local entrepreneurs in Northern Thailand who were involved in the implementation of the Economic Quadrangle, one of the growth triangle projects developed within the GMS.

  3. It should be noted that China’s “open door policy” initiated by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978 was paramount in its conception. The adoption of such a policy from a centrally planned economy was an incontestable “great leap forward” in terms of institutional reforms.

  4. About one third of the resources mobilised came from ADB and the remainder from the GMS governments, official sources of development support and private sector co-financing.

  5. The origins of the Mekong Committee are linked to the legacy of decolonisation in Indochina. The Mekong Committee was established in hopes of coordinating water resources in the Lower Mekong Basin. The cooperation was undermined by the Vietnam War and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Since 1995, the Mekong River Commission (MRC) has replaced the Mekong Committee.

  6. The shift was initiated by important economic reforms: the open door policy (改革开放—gaige kaifang) in China since 1978, the Doi Moi (renovation) policy in Vietnam and the NEM—New Economic Mechanism (Chintanakan mai—new imagination) in Laos since 1986.

  7. ASEAN was established in 1967. When the AFTA agreement was originally signed, ASEAN had six members, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Brunei. Vietnam joined in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997 and Cambodia in 1999.

  8. In particular, the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation, “L’avènement du Quadrangle économique. La renaissance d’un espace transnational historique” (The rise of the Economic Quadrangle. The rebirth of a transnational historical space). More recently, I also conducted interviews with the businessmen who had initiated the Economic Quadrangle, Chiang Rai, in June 2012.

  9. Suvannaphum is the name of a country mentioned in ancient texts of the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Its location is still controversial among historians. Several countries in Southeast Asia claim this legacy, including Thailand, which recently named its new international airport by that name.

  10. For example, in 2002, the United Nations launched the project entitled “Capacity-building in developing interregional land and land-cum-sea transport linkages” to identify in each world region the interregional transport links that would contribute to better economic integration and development, cf. http://www.un.org/esa/devaccount/projects/2002/0203I.html, accessed on 24 August 2013.

  11. This edited volume gathers the research findings of the French Transiter programme (2008–2011) which compared economic corridors in the GMS and in the Malacca Straits. As part of the research team, I assessed the impact of the NSEC in northern Laos. My contribution is entitled “Chinese Networks, Economic and Territorial Redefinitions in Northern Laos”.

  12. The EWEC links Myanmar to Vietnam via central Thailand and Lao PDR; the SEC links Thailand to Southern Vietnam via Cambodia; and the NSEC links Yunnan Province in China with Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, via Lao PDR and Myanmar, as well as sub-veins that link Yunnan to Haiphong in Vietnam, and Nanning in China to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. In 1998, the EWEC was the first corridor to be defined, but it is not the most dynamic. That distinction goes to the NSEC, which has the advantage of linking major urban areas in the richest nations of the GMS—Thailand and China. The SEC lies well behind the other two in its development (Wiemer 2009; Ishida 2012).

  13. Cf. for example the reports from ActionAid, Oxfam, Care, International Rivers, World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, WWF or M-Power (The Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience)

  14. In the framework of the Transiter programme mentioned previously

  15. See the contribution of Vanina Bouté, “Population’s Mobility in Northern Laotian Transborder Areas”, in Fau et al. (2014).

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  1. The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, The Netherlands

    Danielle Tan

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  1. Danielle Tan
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Tan, D. The Greater Mekong Subregion programme: reflections for a renewed paradigm of regionalism. Asia Eur J 12, 383–399 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-014-0389-3

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