It so happens that, in the past eight months, the countries of Southeast Asia have been confronted by three challenges that they have never had to face before - the financial crisis, the haze across parts of the region, and Cambodia.

Each in its own way, these three challenges foreshadow the nature of the challenges that will likely face Southeast Asia in the first few decades of the new millennium. They have shown how the conditions and destinies of the Southeast Asia countries are interwoven with one another. They point to the shape of the challenges of the future, and they will have to do with how, more and more, the problems facing Southeast Asian governments and societies are becoming regional and trans-national in scope. Increasingly, events in one country affect the lives of people in the others. Thus, increasingly, ASEAN will have to summon regional, cooperative solutions for problems that are, more and more, regional in scope. Indeed, the way in which ASEAN is dealing, and has to deal, with its most outstanding problems today sheds light on the way in which ASEAN will and must handle its problems in the new millennium; that is, in a coordinated, cooperative way.

ASEAN's challenges are increasingly regional in scope; its prospects are and must be of stronger regional solidarity and cooperation.

So far, what I have said seems to be self-evident, even trite; but hitherto, in many areas, some in ASEAN seem to pay mere lip service to the ideal of regional solidarity and cooperation. They act as if they did not truly believe in the need for regional responses to regional problems. Now, the financial crisis, the haze problem and the Cambodian question have brought home to all of us the need to forge a stronger sense of unity in ASEAN if our most serious problems are to be addressed.

The Financial Crisis

First, the financial crisis. If there is anything that has shown - once and for all - how seamlessly interwoven the fates of the countries of Southeast Asia have become, it is the financial crisis that has swept the region, infecting all countries with small regard for the objective conditions in each individual country. Movements in the exchange rate for the currency of one country have affected the values of the currencies of the other countries. The level of investor confidence in one economy has influenced the level of confidence in all.

The very same international agencies of high repute, which generalized about the East Asian economic miracle with scant regard for the underlying weaknesses in some East Asian economies, have now taken to generalizing about an East Asian rot with little regard for the underlying strengths of some economies. The same financial institutions that shoveled loans onto East Asia's economies now wring their hands and shake their heads over newly discovered fundamental defects in those economies.

On the surface, such generalizations betray a lack of sophistication and are unjustified. At a deeper level, they must be taken as part of the reality. First, the generalizations about the region that have swept the investor community, by their very nature, shape perceptions -the famous herd instinct, if you will- and therefore the level of confidence. They thus take on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Secondly, the generalizations are valid to the extent that Southeast Asian economies have succeeded in becoming integrated.

Intra-ASEAN trade now accounts for about twenty-five percent of ASEAN's total trade. Any weakening in an ASEAN country's capacity to import can diminish to one degree or another the market for the other countries' exports. For some ASEAN countries, particularly the newer members, other ASEAN countries are important sources of investments. ASEAN nations account for more than half of foreign direct investments in Laos and Myanmar. The economic slowdown in capital-exporting ASEAN nations cannot but reduce the flow of such investments.

Similarly, tourists from ASEAN countries themselves have been an increasingly important portion of tourism in ASEAN. In 1996, of the 28.6 million tourist arrivals in ASEAN, 11.2 million, or almost 40 percent, came from within ASEAN itself. Hence, the reduction in the capacity of ASEAN nationals to travel has hurt tourism in all ASEAN countries.

The financial crisis has thus brought to the fore an emerging irony in ASEAN: The very integration envisioned and long regarded as a source of strength can be a point of weakness.

ASEAN can address this irony in two ways. One is to hesitate and slow down or pause, if not retreat or reverse course, on the road to further economic integration, as individual economies seek to avoid being contaminated by the economic and financial troubles of others. At the very least, each country could attempt to bolster its balance-of-trade and safeguard its own jobs by protecting its industries and entire economy from competition from its neighbors. The other way is to proceed and, indeed, advance faster on the road of integration and cooperation, while ensuring that closer and faster integration is further developed as a source of strength and its potential as a point of weakness diminished.

When the financial crisis struck with full region-wide force, there were voices - there still are some - that expressed concern over the possibility that the ASEAN countries would retreat from their hitherto resolute progress in the direction of economic liberalization and openness and regional solidarity and cooperation, or even reverse course or at least waver in their commitment to these goals.

The ASEAN countries, at the highest levels, early on firmly rejected this option. Indeed, they categorically and resoundingly re-affirmed their commitment to a trade and investment regime that is increasingly integrated in ASEAN and open to the rest of the world. Not only that. They resolved to speed up even further the process of internal and external liberalization.

In the joint statement on the financial situation which they issued at their second informal summit in Kuala Lumpur last December, the ASEAN heads of government "reaffirmed their commitment to maintain an open trade and investment environment in ASEAN, including through the accelerated implementation of the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), the ASEAN Investment Area (AIA) and the ASEAN Industrial Cooperation (AICO) scheme. They agreed that in view of the present situation, every effort should be made to remove barriers to trade and to promote greater intra-ASEAN trade and investment."

At their meeting in Jakarta on 28 February, ASEAN's finance ministers reiterated the leaders' commitment to an open trade and investment environment and to the early realization of AFTA, the ASEAN Investment Area, the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services, and the ASEAN Industrial Cooperation scheme. They also re-affirmed their commitment to the WTO liberalization process and the success of the negotiations on financial services.

At the working level, officials are actively working out ways of accelerating the AFTA process further. This means not only the faster reduction in tariff rates, which is already going on, but other measures as well. These include reducing further the already small number of products excluded from AFTA treatment, removing technical barriers to trade, and streamlining and harmonizing customs rules and procedures. ASEAN's leaders have renewed their determination to bring to full reality an ASEAN Investment Area by 2010. By that time, legal and administrative impediments to investments will have been removed or greatly reduced, and ASEAN industries, with a few exceptions, will be open to all investors.

ASEAN's reaction to the financial crisis has, therefore, been an even stronger commitment to economic openness, in the first place to faster and closer economic integration within ASEAN. This has arisen not from mere ideological reflex or a stubborn philosophical idealism. It is, rather, a pragmatic, rational response.

ASEAN's leaders knew that what their besieged economies need for their enduring recovery are investments from within and from outside ASEAN, investments in productive enterprises, investments of the kind that stay for the long term and not those that take flight at the first sign of trouble. They knew that strength in the competition for such investments can be achieved only in an enlarged integrated market and not by retreating into the old fragmented markets and narrowly-based economies of the past.

Thus, ASEAN has responded to the financial crisis with greater solidarity. This solidarity has taken the form not only of a stronger commitment to faster economic integration but also other ways of cooperation.

There has been a misunderstanding of the ASEAN response to the financial crisis. In an article entitled "ASEAN's Failure" in a recent issue, The Economist charged that "the financial turmoil has also shown up the inadequacy of the region's own self-help mechanisms" and concluded that the "'ASEAN way' no longer works."

Being based in Europe, The Economist's view of regional associations may have been influenced by the example of the European Union. Like many people, its writers and editors have come to expect ASEAN somehow to act distinctly from its member-states. But ASEAN is not that kind of association, with supra-national bodies like the European Commission and the European Parliament.

At the same time, ASEAN is more than an association of states. It is also a process, a spirit, a state of mind. Nor is ASEAN a closed, exclusive club. It is open to cooperation with others. Its dialogue system of relating to other countries and groups is unique in the world. So is its role in APEC and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), where the participation of ASEAN countries is both coordinated and individual. So are its ability and willingness to act with other countries and groups of countries in varying combinations as the situation calls for.

Thus, the ASEAN response to the financial crisis has taken many forms - concerted action as a group, bilateral cooperation in the ASEAN spirit, ASEAN's actions with others - in various combinations.

After a series of consultations, among themselves - all together and bilaterally -- and with other countries and institutions, ASEAN has established a monitoring and surveillance mechanism as an early-warning system for impending financial and currency problems. Such a mechanism should in the future help ASEAN countries to avoid crises like the one ravaging their economies today. Initially, for the first year or two, this mechanism is to be located at the Asian Development Bank and operated with ADB's assistance. ASEAN has also endorsed the use of ASEAN currencies for intra-ASEAN trade, with specific modalities to be worked out by the pair of countries undertaking the trade. This should to some extent reduce the pressure on ASEAN countries to secure hard currencies for trading purposes.

At their Jakarta meeting two weeks ago, Southeast Asia's finance ministers placed ASEAN's weight behind their call for greater flexibility in the application of conditions in the IMF's programs for ASEAN countries. At the same time, they urged the IMF to speed up the implementation of those programs. They called on the Group of 7 to open their markets to ASEAN's exports, to be more "proactive" in cooperating with ASEAN countries, and to encourage their banks to maintain credit support for ASEAN economies. They urged Japan to take the lead in pulling the region out of the crisis and encouraged China in its decision not to devalue the renminbi. Not least, they "urged the international financial institutions and concerned agencies, in devising their support programmes, to take full account of the need to protect the poor, particularly in terms of education, health and livelihood."

The leaders of individual ASEAN countries themselves have been visiting one another, helping one another with advice, counsel and resources, including financial support, rice and medicine, while working out ways of cooperatively dealing with the crisis. Whether in a full ASEAN setting or bilaterally between countries, discussions within ASEAN have been candid and open, if polite, but not public.

Recognizing that the private sector is deeply involved in the financial crisis, the ASEAN Secretariat is organizing a round-table discussion, at which business leaders of ASEAN can exchange views on the crisis, develop ways in which the business sector can contribute to its resolution, and recommend measures to ASEAN governments. The Secretariat is also initiating a comprehensive study of the impact of the crisis on livelihood, employment and other aspects of the wellbeing of people, lest the social and human repercussions of the crisis be neglected in the search for financial and economic solutions.

The Haze Problem

ASEAN has approached the haze problem in a similar mode, combining actions by ASEAN as a whole, bilateral cooperative undertakings, and cooperation with others.

The forest and peat fires that started in one country from a combination of natural and man-made causes last year seriously affected other countries in ASEAN. Similar fires have flared up again this year and threaten to have similar effects.

Again, ASEAN has launched frequent consultations, with ministers meeting once every two months for the sole purpose of discussing the haze problem. These consultations have resulted in a comprehensive Regional Haze Action Plan encompassing preventive measures, regional monitoring and fire-fighting, with each area under the leadership of one ASEAN country. Some ASEAN countries are giving help to other ASEAN countries on a bilateral basis. At the height of last year's haze, some ASEAN countries cooperated by pooling firefighters, equipment, and assistance in cloud-seeding to induce rain. The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre in Singapore has been of great assistance in frequently supplying the authorities in the countries affected with satellite photographs of haze, fires and "hot spots," electronically linking national meteorological agencies together, and sponsoring technical workshops among them.

In a meeting on 25 February, ASEAN ministers agreed to use the fires in East Kalimantan to test the Regional Haze Action Plan, especially the part related to fire-fighting, including the use of external assistance. Indonesia and Malaysia are to carry out their bilateral agreement on fire- and haze-prevention and control. ASEAN's Haze Technical Task Force is to identify long- term needs, such as for research and technology transfer, as well as immediate requirements for combating existing fires. With the ministers' approval, the ASEAN Secretariat has entered into an agreement with the Asian Development Bank for substantial technical assistance for strengthening ASEAN's capacity "to prevent and mitigate trans-boundary atmospheric pollution," including the possible establishment of a regional forest-fire research and training, center in Indonesia.

Again, discussions within ASEAN have been frank, and they have been effective, probably because their contents are not publicly disclosed.

The haze problem is only the most prominent and most dramatic of the environmental challenges that ASEAN expects to face in increasing numbers and gravity. Many of these challenges, particularly as they pertain to the marine and atmospheric environment, are essentially trans-boundary in nature and hence require regional solutions.

The Cambodian Question

The regional effects of internal developments in a Southeast Asian country are another challenge which, in the case of Cambodia, ASEAN has begun to confront. Future historians will probably look back on this stage of ASEAN's history and note that, for the first time, ASEAN took action on what could be validly considered as an internal development in a Southeast Asian country. To be sure, this was not the first time that ASEAN had been involved in Cambodia, but in the 1980s and the early 1990s, the problem of Cambodia had to do mainly with foreign intervention and big-power maneuvering. Today's Cambodian problem is essentially internal to Cambodia, but with regional resonance and repercussions.

When, in the first week of July 1997, Cambodia's Second Prime Minister effectively removed and replaced the First Prime Minister and moved against his followers, ASEAN deferred Cambodia's admission into the association. Since then, ASEAN has led the international insistence that the Cambodians settle their disputes mainly through free, fair and credible elections. ASEAN, primarily through the Troika of Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, has worked with the Cambodian parties and other interested countries, which call themselves Friends of Cambodia, in encouraging the holding of such elections and thus the restoration of peace, stability and normalcy to that country.

ASEAN has felt compelled to get involved in Cambodia in this fashion not out of a desire to interfere in a neighbor's internal affairs, but because of the regional repercussions of developments in that neighbor. Such repercussions arise precisely from the fact that Southeast Asian countries have become inter-linked more closely than ever before. ASEAN has to make sure that no unstable element intrudes into its midst, that de-stabilizing forces such as refugee flows do not shake the rest of the region, and that no change in leadership or form of governance by violent means is encouraged.

ASEAN countries continue to regard as sacred the principle of non-interference in one another's internal affairs. The surest way of unraveling ASEAN is for its members to interfere in one another's domestic affairs.

However, ASEAN has now shown a willingness to express or demonstrate concern over internal developments in one country - whether they be economic upheavals, environmental disasters or political change - if they are likely to spread to others, to produce results that are intolerable to neighbors' well-being, or to legitimize violent methods of effecting internal change. At the same time, ASEAN has also shown that its preferred method of manifesting concern is that of friendly, quiet advice, searching but respectful questions, and mutual assistance, rather than that of public posturing or intrusive action.

At the same time, in terms of regional security, the ASEAN Regional Forum will have to develop further in the three stages originally envisioned for it - confidence-building, preventive diplomacy and conflict-resolution. To be sure, ARF's progress has to be gradual, evolutionary and subject to consensus, but move it must, if it is not to atrophy.

The Prospects

The nature of the problems which ASEAN has had to deal with in the past eight months and ASEAN's response to them point to the kinds of challenges that ASEAN is likely to face in the first decades of the coming millennium and the approach that ASEAN is likely to take in responding to them. The challenges will generally arise from the increasingly regional scope of the problems which ASEAN countries will be confronting in the economic, the environmental, the social and the political realms. The response will, accordingly, have to be regional, in the form of closer ASEAN solidarity and cooperation.

ASEAN must strengthen its solidarity, or it will drift apart. ASEAN's enlargement from six to seven and then, last year, to nine members has brought to ASEAN a greater diversity of Cultures, attitudes, styles, and ways of governance. This diversity brings with it inherent centrifugal tendencies and the potential for strain. ASEAN must exert even greater effort to fortify its solidarity and cooperation if it is to prevail over such tendencies.

The financial crisis has dramatically demonstrated how closely ASEAN's economies are bound together. As ASEAN's leaders have repeatedly directed, ASEAN members must work together more closely than ever before and bind their economies even more tightly together, if they are to manage the affairs of an increasingly integrated regional economy. This means not only accelerating the tariff-reduction process among themselves but also making it easier to trade with one another, creating a single investment area and a single tourist destination, and opening the way to greater and smoother flows of capital, services and, to some extent, people within the region. This means physically integrating Southeast Asia through strong and efficient transportation and communications links. It means, not least, coordinating economic and financial policies to a greater extent than ever before. Some of these measures would require adjustments in domestic policy and legislation.

In an increasingly global world economy, ASEAN members realize that they must work more closely as a group in international negotiating forums if they are to have any influence in shaping the emerging architecture of the global economy and the new structure of international finance. Otherwise, they will have to resign themselves to having their destiny determined by others.

Growing trans-national problems, notably those pertaining to the marine and atmospheric environment and cross-border crimes, are susceptible only of regional solutions, which means more intensive ASEAN cooperation in a broader range of areas. Agreed, enforceable rules and, at the very least, serious codes of conduct will probably be required in the future to deal effectively with these problems.

It is becoming clear that ASEAN solidarity also means ASEAN manifesting its concern over apparently internal developments in some members - whether they arise from ethnic conflict, political violence, or economic upheaval - if such developments threaten to spill over to neighboring countries. Such spillover effects may be in the form of contagion of the problem itself or refugees in massive numbers or severe economic repercussions or a serious impact on regional stability.

In this sense, ASEAN is emerging as a true community or even family. There are differences within the family, even serious ones; but there is also the underlying consciousness that, in some cases, the problem of one is the problem of all, that the group must stick together the better to deal with the world outside, and that, as in a family, the troubles of one can legitimately be the concern of the rest. Because the Southeast Asian community will be more closely integrated, a new equilibrium may have to be sought between national sovereignty and regional purpose. Precise rules may have to govern more of the many modes of ASEAN cooperation. ASEAN's institutions may have to be strengthened to keep pace with a more closely integrated ASEAN and more intensive ASEAN cooperation.

In the ASEAN Vision 2020 statement that they issued at their second informal summit in Kuala Lumpur last December, ASEAN's leaders projected the emergence of such a Southeast Asian community in the first two decades of the next millennium. It is up to the officials, the business leaders, the scholars, and all the people of ASEAN to bring that vision to reality.