Keywords

Does ASEAN play a role in managing security issues in Southeast Asia and beyond? ASEAN is considered one of the most successful regional security institutions (RSIs), particularly after the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War created a power vacuum in East Asia, and there was political momentum in the region to establish multilateral economic and security organizations to fill that vacuum. Indeed, non-ASEAN member states, such as Australia and Japan, have successfully created a multilateral economic institution, the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation. However, it was ultimately ASEAN that shaped the regional multilateral architecture in the post-Cold War Asia–Pacific. Building on ASEAN’s Post Ministerial Conferences (PMCs) to interact with external actors, it started to establish a number of affiliated institutions, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1994, ASEAN Plus Three (APT) in 1997, East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005, and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM-Plus) in 2010. This was possible because the 1992 ASEAN Summit decided to expand its institutional agenda by including political and security issues in ASEAN forums (ASEAN Secretariat, 1992). In short, ASEAN, as the core of regional multilateralism, encompassing small, medium, and great powers in the region, became the RSI in East Asia.

Nevertheless, the strategic environment created by ASEAN through the construction of regional multilateral architecture in East Asia has been gradually changing because of the emerging strategic competition between China and the United States. China’s vast economic market attracted regional states and created significant trade and financial dependence on the country. Its Belt and Road Initiative provided an alternative development assistance to developing states that were unable to meet the high international standards set by global institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. China’s increasing military presence in East Asia also placed strategic pressure on regional states, such as Brunei, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, particularly over the East and South China Seas. Institutionally, China proactively established non-ASEAN institutional frameworks, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. As such, China’s military, economic, and political rise has altered the US unipolar system in the region.

The United States, on the other hand, has long considered ASEAN’s multilateral institutions in Asia–Pacific to be “supplementary” to the US-led bilateral security arrangement, the hub-and-spokes system (Goh, 2004). However, facing new security challenges in the 2000s, particularly the rise of international terrorism after September 11, 2001, and China’s strategic challenges in the 2010s, the United States and its allies began to transform its hub-and-spokes system into a more networked system, so that the “spokes” can cooperate more deeply. Examples include the US–Australia–Japan Trilateral Strategic Dialogue, the US–India–Japan framework, and the US–Australia–Japan–India quadrilateral framework, the so-called “Quad.” These trilateral and minilateral frameworks began to comprehensively enhance cooperation among major powers in the region. In fact, the United States has pushed for the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” concept since 2017, expanding its geostrategic focus from the traditional “Asia-Pacific” to the area ranging from the “west coast of India” to the “western shores of the United States” (The White House, 2017, pp. 45–46).

As new strategic groupings such as the Quad emerge, new, non-ASEAN institutional frameworks would be further created in the region based on these trilateral and minilateral frameworks. While the United States, China, and other major powers have repeatedly highlighted the importance of “ASEAN centrality”—the principle that ASEAN plays a central role in regionalism—the newly emerged frameworks, if fully developed, would potentially marginalize ASEAN’s institutional raison d'être (Koga, 2022). In other words, the current great-power rivalry between the United States and China would diminish the diplomatic viability of ASEAN as the RSI in Asia, and ASEAN would risk losing its central position.

Considering the increasing importance of these geopolitical and traditional-security trends, is ASEAN destined to be institutionally marginalized? Or can ASEAN continue to play a significant role in shaping the regional security landscape? Responding to these questions, scholars and practitioners have long debated over the effectiveness and utility of ASEAN, particularly in the political-security field, and their opinions are divided.

Those who view ASEAN’s utility positively focus on intra-regional relations, regional norms, and non-traditional security issues. First, they attribute to ASEAN the long-lasting, peaceful relationship among member states. Since ASEAN’s establishment in 1967, there has been no major conflict among member states despite the political and military tensions among them (Kivimaki, 2012; Mahbubani & Sng, 2017; Natalegawa, 2018). While ASEAN has yet to resolve the fundamental interstate problems, it has facilitated stability through conflict management (Acharya, 2014; Collins, 2007; Koga, 2014; Scott, 2012). Second, they argue that the diffusion of ASEAN’s institutional norm, the “ASEAN Way,” transcends Southeast Asia to East Asia and beyond through ASEAN-led institutions. The ASEAN Way includes norms and practices of informality, the non-interference principle, consultation, non-use of force, and consensus decision-making process. This set of norms has been nurtured and practiced by ASEAN member states and diffused to regional states, including the great powers, through regional institutions (Acharya, 1997; Ba, 2006, 2009; Katsumata, 2004, 2006; Nabers, 2003; Roberts, 2012; Severino, 2006; Shambaugh, 2005; Suzuki, 2021; Tan, 2013; Terada, 2003). Third, ASEAN facilitates economic cooperation and provides forums for regional states to conduct multilateral dialogues, build confidence, coordinate policy, and create norms and rules (Ba, 2006; Kawasaki, 2006; Shoji, 2012; Simon, 1998; Tang, 2012; Yoshimatsu, 2006). In this context, non-traditional security issues, such as natural disasters, piracy, and international terrorism, which are transnational in nature and require international cooperation, become an important cooperative agenda in ASEAN meetings. These are the essential utility of ASEAN in shaping the regional order in Southeast Asia and beyond.

On the other hand, those who view ASEAN’s utility negatively tend to focus on ASEAN’s political disunity and its lack of capabilities. They argue that the member states’ pursuit of their own national interests, mutual distrust, limited material capabilities, the inflexible “ASEAN Way” as an institutional norm, and the shallow cooperative framework create the illusion of, or at best conditional, cooperation among member states and with external states (Haacke, 2003; Hsueh, 2016; Jetschke & Ruland, 2009; Leifer, 1999; Narine, 2008; Nischalke, 2000, 2002; Odgaard, 2003; Ruland, 2000; Sharpe, 2003; Yuzawa, 2006). Even for non-traditional security issues, ASEAN was unable to reach a deeper agreement among member states, such as information- and intelligence-sharing against disease, international terrorism, and environmental matters including Indonesia’s haze issue (Collins, 2013; Funston, 1998; Jones & Smith, 2007; Nurhidayah et al., 2015; Simon, 2008). Most fundamentally, critics argue that ASEAN has never been capable of addressing traditional-security issues, such as great-power politics and territorial disputes (Beeson, 2019; Buszynski, 2003, 2012; Buzan, 2003; Emmers, 2003, 2014; Emmers & Tan, 2011; Goh, 2011; Heller, 2005; Kausikan, 2017; Koga, 2010; Lim, 1998; Narine, 1997; Yates, 2017). They argue that great powers, such as China, Japan, and the United States, accepted ASEAN’s central role in regional multilateralism not because they considered ASEAN the best actor to facilitate interstate cooperation, but because ASEAN was convenient for preventing any one great power from dominating regional institutions (Caballero-Anthony, 2014; Sukma, 2010). In other words, it was the great-power strategic rivalry that pushed ASEAN to the center, not its effectiveness.

Debates between these two camps on the strategic utility of ASEAN have become a tradition of ASEAN studies. Questions range from whether ASEAN needs to relax the ASEAN Way, such as the principles of non-interference and consensus decision-making; to whether ASEAN has become a security community; to whether ASEAN can maintain unity among its member states (e.g., Ba, 2020; Beeson, 2020; Stubbs, 2020). To be sure, scholars and practitioners are generally cautious in evaluating ASEAN’s utility in Southeast Asia and beyond and thus do not categorically reject or affirm its strategic utility. Their analyses provide a more nuanced and balanced understanding of ASEAN, taking into account the historical development of its objectives, functions, and raison d'être. These multiple perspectives generate alternative theoretical analyses and different assessments of ASEAN, which enable us to examine the association multidimensionally.

However, there is one common understanding between both camps: ASEAN’s inability to effectively manage great-power politics. They recognize that ASEAN’s strategic utility in great-power politics is extremely limited, and that even if ASEAN is able to shape the behavior of great powers, the effect is rather marginal and it is for non-strategic issues. In this sense, a general, long-held consensus is that ASEAN’s strategic utility rests not on material—military or economic—capabilities, but at best the normative power of the ASEAN Way, the ideational factor that constructivists emphasize, in shaping great powers’ behavior. Some realists who analyze the strategic utility of institutions concur with this limitation, highlighting the normative element by devising strategic concepts such as “soft balancing” and “institutional balancing” (He, 2008; Paper, 2005; Paul, 2005). Among them, He (2008) specifically analyzes the strategic utility of international institutions and provides three types of institutional strategy—inclusive institutional balancing, exclusive institutional balancing, and inter-institutional balancing—whereby a group of states attempts to prevent existing or emerging great powers from attaining more power to dominate a region or the world. As such, the strategic role of international institutions is generally based on normative and diplomatic elements, and these analyses, particularly He’s conceptual frameworks, help us gain a deeper understanding of the utility of ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions.

Still, there remain unanswered questions regarding both the theoretical framework and the ASEAN-specific case. The theoretical issue is two-fold. First, the concept of institutional balancing does not take into account the entirety of institutional strategy. While “balancing” is an imperative component of state strategy, the existing literature’s sole focus on balancing excludes other important strategies—notably, bandwagoning and hedging—employed by international institutions. Conceptual clarification of these strategies is thus necessary to comprehend the strategic utility of international institutions. Second, the logic of institutional balancing largely neglects the degree of flexibility in strategy shifts, considering the dynamics of intra-institutional politics on decision-making. This is partly because strategies are either given or considered easy to formulate in the face of a rise of strategic threat. However, it is always difficult for any international institution to come to an agreement quickly because of the diverging interests among member states, particularly if they employ a consensus decision-making process.

Also, in the existing literature on ASEAN, there is a gap between theoretical explanations and empirical evidence. On the one hand, constructivists assert the importance of ASEAN’s role in norm creation and diffusion in Southeast Asia and beyond, but if they are correct, it is puzzling why ASEAN has yet to concentrate its diplomatic and financial resources on one pivotal institution to consolidate and diffuse its institutional norms. Many examine the role of one particular ASEAN-led institution, such as the ARF, yet there is little literature that conducts a comparative analysis of the role of each ASEAN-led institution, such as the EAS and the ADMM-Plus. On the other hand, realists emphasize ASEAN’s ineffectiveness in managing and resolving traditional-security issues, but they do not explain why ASEAN member states and major powers have been discussing both traditional and non-traditional security issues since 1992 and continue to do so. In fact, the number of ASEAN-led institutions that discuss security issues increased significantly—from the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (AMM) to the ASEAN Summit to the ARF, APT, EAS and the ADMM-Plus. These two sets of facts—the proliferation of ASEAN-led institutions and the spread of security agendas among them—need to be clearly explained because both relate to the strategic utility of ASEAN.

The other important factor that is often neglected in the literature is ASEAN’s institutional change and its strategy shifts. Simply put, ASEAN as an RSI has changed significantly since its inception. ASEAN today is not the same as ASEAN in 1967 (Koga, 2017). Its institutional format and strategy evolved over time. During the Cold War, its geopolitical scope was confined to Southeast Asia, and its strategic influence in the region was very much limited because of the strong presence of great powers, namely the United States, China, and the Soviet Union. However, in the post-Cold War era, ASEAN’s functionality and geopolitical scope expanded to East Asia by including the Indochina states as members and by creating political and security linkages with external powers through institution-building. ASEAN member states now have more strategic tools than before to shape the broader Asian regional order. Admittedly, this is not to say that ASEAN has transformed into a completely different institution. There still is institutional continuity, and the origin of ASEAN’s fundamental institutional principles and raison d'être is imperative for understanding the potential and limitations of its institutional and strategy changes. However, it is also important to acknowledge ASEAN’s institutional changes and strategy shifts that reconstruct itself and create new affiliated institutions.

This book aims to fill these theoretical and empirical gaps on the evolution of ASEAN’s institutional strategy for managing great powers with regard to a regional traditional-security issue—the SCS disputes. Here, institutional strategy refers to the collective policy that RSI member states pursue under the belief that such a policy can enhance their security. RSIs employ four types of institutional strategy—institutional balancing, institutional bandwagoning, institutional hedging, and institutional co-option—in order to mitigate the negative effects from the regional strategic environment. The strategy likely shifts when member states expect either a radical or moderate change in the regional balance of power.

With this concept of institutional strategy, the book’s core argument is that, since the 1990s, ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions have individually devised and/or shifted their own institutional strategy to manage the great-power politics pertaining to the SCS disputes, and that each institutional strategy aims to constrain great powers’ behavior and avoid being entrapped by their strategic competition so as to ensure member states’ interests. Strategy creation or shifts generally occur when member states perceive a change in the strategic environment relating to the SCS. But when ASEAN faces difficulty changing its strategy, it establishes a new institution to expand its strategic tools, which assumes a different functionality, geopolitical scope, and raison d'être. In doing so, ASEAN nurtures a quasi-division of labor among its institutions to manage the great-power politics in the SCS, creating a “strategic institutional web.”

The rest of this book consists of four chapters. Chapter 2 conceptualizes the types of institutional strategy and constructs a theoretical model based on agent-centered historical institutionalism to understand the timing of its strategy shifts. This theoretical model analyzes how RSI member states perceive and assess their immediate security environment and create or change the institutional strategy. Since member states’ perception is generally affected by the regional distribution of power, the chapter emphasizes the importance of analyzing the regional strategic environment as well as agent’s decisions. The methodology of the analyses is briefly discussed through case studies on the role of ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions regarding the SCS issue. The chapter also provides an overview and assessment of the general trend of the strategic environment in East Asia from 1990 to 2020 over four phases: 1990–2002, 2003–2012, 2013–2016, and 2017–2020. These four phases will be used as a principal indicator to understand the change and continuity of institutional strategies employed by ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions.

Chapter 3 chronologically explores the strategic trend of the SCS situation from 1990 to 2020 over four phases as discussed in Chapter 2. The main purpose of this chapter is to understand the timing of changes in the subregional power configuration in the SCS in a more nuanced way. Of course, environmental changes are not the sole determinant of institutional strategy shifts among RSIs. However, without understanding the subregional trends in the context of China’s increasing military and economic capabilities, it becomes difficult to clarify the responses or non-responses of ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions to the changing environment. The chapter serves as a useful reference for institutional strategy shifts, which are discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

Chapter 4 examines the institutional strategy of each ASEAN and ASEAN-led institution: (1) AMM, (2) ASEAN Summit, (3) ASEAN–China dialogues, (4) ARF, (5) EAS, and (6) ADMM and ADMM-Plus. All these frameworks, either formally or informally, discuss salient traditional-security issues in East Asia, including the SCS disputes (see Tables 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). Moreover, these institutions experience different institutional growths, and the specific timing and function of their institutional development highlight the divergences in the evolution of institutional strategy. The APT and the ASEAN-PMC are excluded in the analysis because the APT has not been actively discussing the SCS issue while the ASEAN-PMC only began to touch on the issue since the mid-2010s.

Table 1.1 Discussions on the SCS issue in ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions, 1990–1999
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Table 1.2 Discussions on the SCS issue in ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions, 2000–2009
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Table 1.3 Discussions on the SCS issue in ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions, 2010–2021
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Chapter 5 discusses the validity of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of institutional strategy, providing a quick overview of all the cases. It also compares the six cases and analyzes how the institutional division of labor among ASEAN member states was operationalized. The conclusion then discusses the future of the role of ASEAN and ASEAN-led institutions vis-à-vis the SCS situation as well as the strategic implications of an emerging geographical concept—the Indo-Pacific.