Conclusion: East-West and North-South

Abstract

The extent to which ASEAN is something more than the sum of its parts remains an open question. The officials, journalists and academics who have contributed to this book naturally approach it from their own experience, and ASEAN appears in different guises when viewed from different member countries. Contributors who are particularly familiar with one country sometimes found themselves seeing issues differently from their co-contributors whose experience of other countries is greater. Views also differed on the weight the ASEAN countries give to their associations with nations outside the region, and on the approaches they take to economic objectives. These disagreements were matters of emphasis rather than substance, but they illustrate the difficulty of trying to achieve a coherent ‘focus on ASEAN’. As other commentators on ASEAN have noted, distinguishing the reality from the rhetoric is not always easy. ASEAN may well be, as Tan Sri M. Ghazali Shafie would have it, ‘in its essence … merely a state of mind’.¹ But such a subjective definition is open to a range of interpretations. The experience of other regional economic associations among less developed countries does not make for excessive optimism about ASEAN’s prospects.²