Distracted ASEAN? Where To For ASEAN Centrality?

Abstract

The ASEAN Charter and key documents, such as the ASEAN Community Vision 2025: Forging Ahead Together, explicitly state that ASEAN maintains its centrality in the regional processes and in the conduct of its external affairs. Maintaining centrality is crucial to ASEAN’s success as a regional bloc and critical to its relevance in the international arena. Moreover, through ASEAN centrality, a rules-based regional order is promoted and developed, consequently diffusing potential tension and con-flict between and among states, whether big or small. ASEAN centrality rests on the idea that ASEAN has the capacity to play a leading and driver role vis-à-vis regional agenda setting. It also puts premium on ASEAN’s ability to act as leader, driver, and fulcrum of regional initiatives in relating with its external partners, while promoting, first and foremost, ASEAN’s own interests.