How the Myanmar coup and South China Sea disputes are deepening Asean’s irrelevance

Name: SCMP Explains: How did Myanmar’s military become so powerful?
Uploaded: 2021-05-12T01:15:09.000Z
Duration: 5 min 18 s
Description: SCMP Explains: How did Myanmar’s military become so powerful?

With Myanmar heading into a full-blown civil war and the South China Sea a powder keg of disputes, Asean’s ineffectual leadership has never been more obvious

Asean’s insistence on consensus sounds good on paper, but in practice it is a recipe for institutional dysfunction

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Richard Heydarian

Published: 9:15am, 12 May 2021Updated: 10:59am, 12 May 2021

“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted,” Arthur Miller once observed. In the same vein, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), a once promising regional organisation, is confronting its own moment of truth.

The raging civil war in Myanmar, and the festering disputes in the South China Sea, are cruelly exhausting the basic illusions of supposed Asean “centrality” in shaping the post-Cold-War order in Asia. Unless Asean rethinks its woefully dysfunctional decision-making structures, and develops decisive leaders in its ranks, the regional organisation will fade into irrelevance.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Without a robust and coherent Asean, the whole Indo-Pacific region could sleepwalk towards a new cold war, with dire consequences for Southeast Asian nations.

Two flashpoints underscore Asean’s existential crisis. One, following a decade of “constructive engagement” with Myanmar’s junta, the regional body is now confronting the prospect of a full-blown civil war in a member country. And it’s partly responsible for it.

Time and again, the regional organisation has unwittingly served as a legitimisation platform for Myanmar’s brutal generals. In the late 2000s, Asean enthusiastically endorsed cosmetic political reforms by the junta, which temporarily empowered a more reform-minded civilian leadership without stripping away the prerogatives of the military.

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SCMP Explains: How did Myanmar’s military become so powerful?

Even worse, Asean treated the junta’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya minority with a shameless mixture of diplomatic silence and strategic diffidence. All the while, Asean members poured billions of dollars of investments into Myanmar, boosting the coffers of the rapacious junta, which controls myriad business empires.