Understanding ASEAN as a Duality
![Kishida Fumio](img/ph1_2.jpg)
Kishida Fumio
Prime Minister of Japan
Japan’s present prime minister, Kishida Fumio, reported that the September 2023 ASEAN-Japan summit in Jakarta had reinforced the counterparties’ relationship further. “We upgraded the relationship between Japan and ASEAN, which spans 50 years, to a comprehensive, strategic partnership. . . . Japan clearly stated its support for the mainstreaming of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, which ASEAN is promoting.”
“ASEAN,” emphasizes Oba, “has attained a multifaceted sophistication in its evolving approach to addressing the members’ common goals. The members laid a durable foundation in the 1960s with the mutual acknowledgement of national borders and the pledge not to intervene in each other’s domestic affairs. That addressed what, in a time of profound regional unrest, was an existential challenge for Southeast Asian nations.
“The ASEAN members have since accompanied their commitment to noninterference with increased emphasis on other principles, such as democracy and human rights. They enshrined a commitment to those principles in the ASEAN Charter, adopted in 2007, and they reaffirmed their commitment to human rights with the 2012 adoption of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. The expressed commitment to human rights might sound inconsistent with the principle of noninterference. But the verbal commitment, even in the absence of an enforcement mechanism, has been instrumental in fortifying ASEAN.”
Highlighting the notion of ASEAN centrality
![Oba Mie](img/ph1_3.jpg)
Oba Mie
Professor, Kanagawa University
Oba is a voice for rhetorical precision in discussing ASEAN. A professor of international relations at Kanagawa University, she chaired a panel of 12 experts on ASEAN-Japan relations assembled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in 2022. The panel prepared policy recommendations and submitted them to the deputy chief cabinet secretary in 2023, the 50th anniversary of the establishment of formal relations between ASEAN and Japan.
“We need to understand ASEAN,” Oba urges, “as a duality: as a single organization and as 10 sovereign nations. The organization, headquartered in Jakarta, performs important functions in coordinating interaction among the member states and between those states—collectively and individually—and other nations. Meanwhile, the member states each have their own domestic and diplomatic priorities. So we can discuss the organization, ‘ASEAN,’ or we can discuss its constituent parts, ‘the ASEAN member states.’ But we need to be clear as to what we’re talking about.”
ASEAN is a central emphasis, Oba notes, in the Kishida government’s approach to managing Japan’s multilateral relations in the Indo-Pacific. Kishida inherited the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision from his predecessor, the late Abe Shinzo, and he has taken pains to mesh that vision with the aforementioned ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP).
“Southeast Asian countries,” declared Kishida in a January 2023 speech in the United States, “are the closest and most crucial partners for Japan [in the Global South]. A Free and Open Indo-Pacific, FOIP, and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, AOIP, resonate with each other. And I will be soon upgrading the FOIP vision.”
At the heart of the AOIP is the notion of ASEAN centrality. The AOIP, explains the ASEAN secretariat, “envisages ASEAN centrality as the underlying principle for promoting cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region.” ASEAN has predicated the AOIP, meanwhile, on openness to engaging with any and all neighbors in the Asia-Pacific.