Rhetoric vs. Reality:
ASEAN's Clouded Future

Nicholas Khoo

Last October, at the Ninth Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Bali, the leaders of the organization formally declared their aim of establishing a security community in Southeast Asia by the year 2020. The declaration serves as a bold statement of the ASEAN members' attempts to rejuvenate an institution at once plagued by internal paralysis and subject to assault from the forces of Islamic radicalism. Hopes are high within ASEAN. As ASEAN Deputy Secretary-General Wilfrido Villacorta noted: "This security community…[will] strengthen national and regional capacity to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, trafficking in persons and transnational crime."1 This is not mere rhetoric. In early March this year, the ASEAN foreign ministers met in Vietnam's scenic Halong Bay to make headway on initiatives to build a security community. One idea under serious consideration is the establishment of an ASEAN peacekeeping force. An increasing number of scholars and the organization itself argue that ASEAN should strive to realize the goal of a forming a security community.

Nicholas Khoo is currently a Ph. D. Candidate at Columbia University. In 2002-2003, he was Visiting Scholar at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing.