The newly installed secretary-general of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), Ong Keng Yong, met reporters after his inauguration on Monday to talk about ASEAN's challenges and how the secretariat might help the region overcome them.  The following is an excerpt of his interview by The Jakarta Post's Berni K. Moestafa.

Question: Mr. Severino (former ASEAN secretary-general Rodolfo C Severino) mentioned the fourth integration, which he called the spirit of integration, in his speech. What is your view on that?
Answer: I think the founding fathers of ASEAN wanted all the countries in Southeast Asia to work together to avoid conflicts.  Over the, last 35 years, Southeast Asia as we know it today, has been relatively peaceful.  Yes, we occasionally have terrorist problems, and over the last two years we have seen a major international terrorist campaign in the region.  But by and large the region has been calm. Compared to other regions in the world, we should thank our lucky stars that we're doing quite well.  I think it's because all 10 leaders of Southeast Asia, in the back of their minds, (realize) that there is a point where we should not set off destabilizing elements.
Of course that is not enough. We need to do more, in terms of economic integration. If we want more (economic) growth in this area, we cannot go and tell people that yes we have 10 countries, I have one market called Singapore with 4 million people, one market called Malaysia with 25 million and one market called Indonesia with 210 million people.  People are not interested in this kind of one market. They want to look at the whole place and say: Can we have a bigger market? If that is possible, we can have more economic of scale, we can have more business transactions, we can have more profit margins.  I think integration is something we must go toward.  It's not easy. Some countries are facing problems because there is pressure domestically to prevent (import) tariffs from coming down. So we have to talk.

Do you think ASEAN's noninterference principle should be redefined?
I think the principle is doing okay.  But from time to time we have some problems. I don't think We want to easily change our principles. And we should try to stick to the principles as much as possible. I think the ingenuity in diplomacy can give some of the results that we want.  It takes some time, but nobody is punching each other in the face.
We must let all the 10 ASEAN countries know how competitive we are vis-à-vis rivals in attracting investment.  Everybody saw ASEAN as the best manufacturing base. Japan looked at Southeast Asia as the best offshore manufacturing base. But now we have competitors. They are competing openly.
Professionally, they're quite effective against investment coming into Southeast Asia. So I think some of the priorities of the ASEAN Secretariat is to pursue some of these issues, like competitiveness, (and see) how good our industries are vis-à-vis others, how good are our investment attraction scheme is vis-à-vis others, and suggest to the 10 ASEAN governments how we can improve some of the schemes.  The other thing, of course, that we can do at the secretariat is to make unified efforts. At the moment, every ASEAN country goes out on their own to promote investment, to promote business in their country.  It would be a good idea if we could say that instead of everybody promoting their own little sectors, we could say we combine (ours) to get people to (come to) Southeast Asia.

There is a vast gap between the levels of economic growth among ASEAN countries. Are there any efforts to try to bring them to some uniform level?
The GDP (gross domestic product) per capita depends very much on domestic issues. We say you can do whatever you want as an independent sovereign country. There is a sort of level where we say at the ASEAN level that we come together to achieve a certain integration. It's more like macro accounting. We cannot do the micro management. Given the very strong potential for economic growth in Northeast Asia and South Asia, If we don't put ourselves on the radarscope of investors and businessmen, by default people will go to Northeast Asia and South Asia. So we have to continue to keep knocking on people's doors and keep telling people to come look at Southeast Asia. We want to motivate people to come here. If they don't come, they won't know what we have. If they come here, they will see the Indonesian market. After they develop the domestic factory, eventually they might want to go and look at what is happening in Malaysia and the Philippines. It's quite natural. So the important thing is to get people (to come) here.
We know that everything goes to China. Eventually, there are some things that China has to buy from us. So what we are now saying is look at ASEAN. We now have a lot of raw materials, a lot of the basic essentials for making some of these products.

Should ASEAN become the supplier of raw materials to China?
We should not be saying that Southeast Asia is only the supplier of raw materials for China. Actually, South-east Asia can produce certain finished products. The electronics industry has different manufacturing bases so instead of doing everything in China, I think our strategy to the investor must be: OK, you can produce 70 percent of your things in China, but we already have factories in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand for the other 30 percent. So the idea must not be a zero-sum game. If we approach this whole thing as a zero-sum strategy, then we are likely to lose more on these investors. Very few start looking at the potential of China as being a buyer of other components, other parts and other manufacturing goods from South-east Asia. My argument is that if you close your shops and go to China you take another two years to get operations. Now if you do it this way: 60 to 70 percent in China, then the other 40 to 30 percent that you already have in Southeast Asia can carry on producing. So instead of coming on stream after two years, you come on stream after eight months, or after one year. Why not. But we are not doing that, we are not alerting our economy to this kind of potential.

How can we generate investment among ASEAN countries?
We have the ASEAN Investment Area, but right now, as I said, micro management is the occupation of each ASEAN country. We have to work on this in the next year or two to see how we can give it a boost. I think there is a potential there. So it is how to get the possibilities displayed on the table. So here again, we are going to do a bit of work to try to get our ASEAN economies to know a bit more. We will try our best at the secretariat to provide more information, more knowledge on how to go about getting more intra ASEAN investment. It's worth a try.