I would like to share with you today some of my thoughts on what ASEAN is, what it is not, what it has done, what it was not meant to do, how events have changed its political and economic environment, how it is likely to respond to those changes, and why the international community ought to do to help it.

If, just fifteen months ago, the Secretary-General of ASEAN had stood before you the way I do today, he would have touted ASEAN as the most successful association of developing countries in the world and Southeast Asia as the most dynamic region on earth. He would have rattled off the statistical averages among the then seven ASEAN members to prove his point - eight percent economic growth rate a year for the previous five years, 16.5 percent average annual increase in exports from 1993 to 1996, an apparently interminable rush of foreign direct investments.

Perhaps more importantly, my predecessor would have cited the marked improvement in the lives of the people of Southeast Asia. The average person in the first seven members of ASEAN expected to live just slightly longer than fifty years in the 1965-1970 period. In the years from 1990 to 1995, the average person expected to live 64.7 years, or an increase in life expectancy of 14.6 years in less than thirty years. Related to this was the remarkable decline in the mortality rate, with the crude death rate dropping from 16 per thousand population in 1965-1970 to 7.7 per thousand population in 1990-1995. Access to health care showed similar improvements, whether in terms of population-to-physician ratios, in terms of population-to-hospital bed ratios, in terms of percentage of births attended by trained health staff, or in terms of infant immunizations. The per-capita calorie supply for all nine present ASEAN members increased by more than 23 percent from 1965 to 1996. The average adult literacy rate for the six original ASEAN members rose from 64 in 1970 to 83 in 1990, higher than the world average and much better than the average for the developing countries.

The Secretary-General would have cited the reasons for this impressive record - the remarkable savings rate, liberal trade and investment regimes, general freedom of capital movement, deliberate policies of attracting foreign investments into export industries, effective tourism programs, enlightened leadership, a skilled and industrious work force, the importance given to education and health care, the so-called "Confucian ethic," social discipline, and, not least, the effectiveness of ASEAN itself.

If my predecessor had boosted ASEAN in that way in June 1997, his words would have found resonance in this country, as many Australian commentators had similarly lauded the Southeast Asian record in precisely those terms, labeling their surging economies tigers and dragons. The overwhelming impression of ASEAN was of an unstoppable economic powerhouse with bright prospects of sustained growth and a force for regional stability. The association itself was deemed to be an effective instrument for stability and progress.

Even Paul Krugman, in his famous article in the November/December 1994 Foreign Affairs entitled "The Myth of Asia's Miracle," did not doubt that East Asia would continue to grow at impressive rates; he only expected that growth to slow down.

Today, fifteen months later, the overwhelming impression of East Asia's enduring strength and of ASEAN's efficacy has been cast aside and forgotten. The same commentators who used to assume a future of continuous growth for ASEAN now seem to believe that ASEAN can do nothing right - or can just do nothing.

This mass shift in perception is perhaps understandable. After all, the economic disaster that has engulfed Southeast Asia, together with much of the rest of East Asia, has wiped out many of the gains of the region's tiger-economies, with no quick end in sight. An environmental disaster arising from forest and peat fires has swept large parts of Southeast Asia.

The frustration and bewilderment over the sudden reversal of fortunes of the region have led many, including some in Southeast Asia itself, to raise questions about ASEAN's effectiveness and utility and about the validity of the very idea of ASEAN. It has become somewhat fashionable in some circles to cast aspersions on ASEAN and denigrate it for not "doing something" about the financial crisis or the forest and peat fires. To me, this is something akin to blaming the OAS for the financial crisis in Mexico some years ago or for forest fires in Brazil, or the OAU for Africa's recent sorrows, or the EU (European Union) for the problems in the Balkans.

The fact is that ASEAN has done some things about these two disasters, which are both very complex in their origins and impact and too massive and complicated for ASEAN to handle by itself. A little later, I will describe what ASEAN has done and, in so doing, help in some measure to illuminate the nature and purposes of ASEAN.

In order to be rational and objective about ASEAN's role in Southeast Asia's current problems, we must, first of all, be clear about what ASEAN is and what it is not, what it can and what it cannot or was not meant to do. At the same time, the economic crisis has obviously changed ASEAN. At the very least, the crisis has altered ASEAN's self-image and changed others' perception of the association, shifts in perception that are themselves part of the reality. In this light, it is valid to ask whether ASEAN should now do things differently and what it should do differently in the future.

What ASEAN is

ASEAN's founders in 1967 intended ASEAN to be an association of all the states of Southeast Asia cooperating voluntarily for the common good, with peace and economic, social and cultural development its primary purposes.

It is not and was not meant to be a supranational entity acting independently of its members. It has no regional parliament or council of ministers with law-making powers, no power of enforcement, no judicial system. Much less is it like NATO, with armed forces at its command, or the UN Security Council, which can authorize military action by its members under one flag.

Because it is not any of these things, is ASEAN of little value, as some seem to argue?

There are good historical, cultural and political reasons why ASEAN's members prefer the association to be the way it is and to function and evolve - slowly - in its own way. I will not go into those reasons here. The important thing is that ASEAN has to be measured against the purposes that it has set for itself and the limitations that it has imposed upon itself. ASEAN has to be judged by the results that it has produced in pursuit of those purposes and under those limitations, not against the wishes or expectations of others.

It is important to remember, in this regard, that ASEAN was founded in the midst of poverty and conflict.

A bloody domestic upheaval had just led Indonesia to end its "confrontation" with Malaysia. Singapore and Malaysia had just undergone their traumatic separation. The Philippines and Malaysia continued to be locked in their dispute over Sabah. Singapore had been torn by race riots, while in Malaysia racial tensions were simmering and about to explode, in 1969, into violence. Vietnam was engaged in a civil conflict, with the deadly involvement of the major powers. Laos and Cambodia were engulfed in that conflict, with fateful consequences for both. Thailand felt threatened by the spillover effects of the raging war in the former Indochina. With the installation of the "Burmese Way to Socialism" in 1962, Burma had retreated into isolation and eventually turned down its neighbors' invitation for membership in ASEAN. Brunei Darussalam had put down a rebellion aimed at bringing down the sultanate.

At the same time, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Laos and Myanmar continued to be threatened by internal insurgencies, even as the New Order in Indonesia had defeated an apparent attempt of the Communist Party to take power.

These insurgencies and other threats to internal security were fed by the abysmal economic and social conditions of most countries of Southeast Asia at that time.

In Southeast Asia's boom years, it was difficult to imagine the poverty and misery of the 1950s and the 1960s, just as it is now difficult to imagine that up to less than two years ago Southeast Asia's economies and societies were flourishing or on the threshold of doing so. It is also difficult to imagine today the bitter animosities that characterized the relations between Southeast Asian countries in the years just before and just after ASEAN's founding.

Today, tensions between Southeast Asian countries may occasionally surface. Some issues between them remain unresolved. A degree of mutual suspicion lingers. But no conflict has erupted between ASEAN members. The long period of peace and stability in Southeast Asia made possible the three decades of unprecedented economic and social progress in the region, unprecedented in Southeast Asia and unprecedented in the developing world.

ASEAN's viability

Indeed, the main reason for ASEAN's enduring strength has been the stake that each member has in the viability of the association. This stake goes beyond the economic and social benefits that each member-state has derived from the cooperative peace on which ASEAN is anchored. It goes beyond the results of the economic and other forms of cooperation that ASEAN has been undertaking over the past three decades. It has to do, above all, with the way each member-state looks at itself and its place in the region and in the world.

Through ASEAN, Indonesia has been able to wield its size, prestige and influence in the world without threatening its smaller neighbors. Singapore, its birth as a nation attended by tensions arising from racial and economic divisions, remains an island in a sea of Malays; but in ASEAN it has arrived at a common basic identity with its Southeast Asian neighbors. Malaysia, itself a multi-ethnic society, has unresolved jurisdictional disputes with every one of its immediate neighbors; but it has managed its relations with them in a civilized way and in an ASEAN setting. In ASEAN, Thailand has forged an enduring link to maritime Southeast Asia. The Philippines, after almost a century of colonization by and over-dependence on the United States, has found in ASEAN its identity with Southeast Asia.

Wealthy but tiny Brunei Darussalam deals with the world through ASEAN, as well as on its own, thus amplifying its voice, as well as that of ASEAN, in the world. After the end of the Cold War and the settlement of the Cambodian conflict, Vietnam sealed its place in Southeast Asia with its membership in ASEAN. Small, land-locked Laos can, through ASEAN, better manage its delicate relations with its neighbors and deal with the rest of the world with greater resonance. Myanmar's membership in ASEAN is its primary link to Southeast Asia and the most visible manifestation of its new openness to the world.

For all of ASEAN's progress in pulling Southeast Asia together, centrifugal tendencies remain. These tendencies arise from the great diversity of ASEAN's membership, diversity in size, levels of development, natural and human resources, histories, cultures, languages, religions, races, economic and social institutions, political systems, and values and traditions. This diversity is certainly greater than that of Europe or Latin America and has, moreover, been increased by ASEAN's recent enlargement. ASEAN, therefore, must carefully nurture its cohesion. Its institutions and processes must be allowed to evolve slowly. The pace of that evolution cannot be forced.

The loose nature of the association, its informal style, and the subtlety of its processes have led many who write and speak superficially about ASEAN to disparage it as a mere "social club" or "talk-shop." First of all, there is nothing wrong with a social club. If that club fosters enough friendship, if it has given its members enough of a stake in the association so as to preserve the peace in a region with centuries of mutual animosity and conflict, there must be some value to that club. Nor is there anything wrong with a talk-shop. Talking is certainly better than fighting. A talk-shop instills in its members the habit of talking in order to arrive at solutions to disputes and to cooperate in solving common problems. Only talk can lead to understanding, agreement and cooperation.

Talks in ASEAN

Talk in ASEAN has led not only to the prevention of conflict among its members but also to the setting up of the ASEAN Regional Forum. Here all the countries of East Asia and other powers which have an interest in it can consult together and build among themselves that mutual confidence that is so vital to regional peace and stability. Talk in ASEAN has led to APEC and the Asia-Europe Meeting. Talk in ASEAN has resulted in a steadily moving process toward an ASEAN Free Trade Area. Talk is necessary for the current negotiations on trade in services. ASEAN is now building an ASEAN Investment Area to draw investments from within and outside the region. Talk in ASEAN has set up an ASEAN University Network. It has led to regional cooperation in a wide range of areas -- from drug-trafficking and disease-surveillance to the environment, from transport to energy, and now finance.

Some people have expressed their impatience over the ASEAN way of deciding things by consensus, presumably preferring that ASEAN decide by majority vote. Yet, most other international organizations operate by consensus. In the Council of Ministers, the major decision-making body of the European Union, unanimity is required for decisions on many important issues. On those issues that call for weighted voting, consensus is often the rule, with a vote rarely resorted to. In any case, ASEAN is at a stage where forcing a majority decision on a minority could easily strain the fabric of the association.

It is for good historical, cultural and political reasons, in the context of Southeast Asia's diversity, that ASEAN has so far leaned toward informal understandings and voluntary arrangements rather than toward legally binding agreements. They are also why the building of formal ASEAN institutions has been slow and gradual.

Formal undertakings

It was not until 1976, nine years after its birth, that ASEAN signed its first binding treaty, the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia. (It was also only then that ASEAN set up a small secretariat.) The treaty, worked out and concluded by the five original ASEAN members, eventually became the first formal binding agreement signed by all ten countries of Southeast Asia. Although its dispute-settlement mechanism has not been resorted to by the signatories, it is available for them to use and provides a legal framework governing relations among states in the region, mandating cooperation and the peaceful settlement of regional disputes. It thus supplements the more traditionally ASEAN way of quiet and informal diplomacy. Last July, ASEAN's Foreign Ministers signed a protocol to the treaty that would, once ratified by all the parties, enable non-regional states to adhere to the treaty.

The next significant formal binding agreement concluded by ASEAN was the one on the Common Effective Preferential Tariff scheme for the ASEAN Free Trade Area, signed in 1992 by all ASEAN members and subsequently adhered to by the newer members. (Not coincidentally, also in 1992, ASEAN decided to enlarge and professionalize the Secretariat and empower it to take initiatives and undertake a more active role, particularly in the implementation of ASEAN economic arrangements and in the management of ASEAN cooperation in the social and cultural, as well as economic, areas.)

After a decision by the ASEAN leaders in 1995 to accelerate its timetable, the CEPT-AFTA agreement now commits ASEAN members to reducing tariffs on trade between them to zero to five percent by 2003 for the original six signatories and by 2006 for Vietnam and 2008 for Laos and Myanmar. The member-states also have to remove quantitative restrictions on and other non-tariff barriers to such trade. In fact, by the year 2000, most of the products traded within ASEAN will be receiving the full AFTA treatment. This scheme not only creates a free trade area among Southeast Asian countries but also binds their economies closer together than ever before.

In 1996, the ASEAN economic ministers decided to set up a dispute-settlement mechanism that would cover disagreements on AFTA and other significant ASEAN economic agreements, an important step toward a more rules-based regime.

In 1995, all ten Southeast Asian nations signed the treaty establishing the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone. They are now consulting with the nuclear-weapon states on a protocol that would enable those states to commit themselves to respecting the treaty.

Apart from these formal undertakings, ASEAN has, for the most part, contented itself with informal understandings and declarations based on goodwill and good faith. As I said earlier, these have served ASEAN well in the past.

However, ASEAN may have to move toward the greater use of more formal instruments and binding commitments in the future, as developments like the financial and economic crisis and the rise of such transboundary problems as the pollution of the sea and the air press ASEAN's members to ever closer coordination, cooperation and integration.

Response to the crisis

One of ASEAN's first responses to the outbreak of the crisis was to reaffirm AFTA's current timetable. This has been done by the leaders themselves and by several ministerial meetings. Indeed, the leaders last December called for the acceleration of AFTA's implementation. And yet, the question keeps coming up of whether the AFTA process remains alive and on track. The answer to that question is this: The ASEAN Free Trade Area is being created in order to bring about an enlarged market of nearly half a billion people, which would attract investments into the area. Why would ASEAN backtrack on AFTA at this time, when investments are precisely what the region needs to recover from the crisis?

Beyond AFTA, ASEAN members are moving ahead on negotiations to open up trade in services to one another. ASEAN has decided to establish an ASEAN Investment Area to facilitate the flow of investments among them. It has agreed to promote ASEAN as a single tourism destination. Gas pipelines and electricity transmission lines bind ASEAN economies closer together. ASEAN is negotiating agreements that would make it much easier to transport goods between and through the territories of ASEAN countries. Road and railway links crisscrossing ASEAN are on the drawing boards.

As a direct response to the crisis, ASEAN has agreed to set up a surveillance mechanism to keep an eye on the movement of capital and on shifts in economic indicators. This will serve as an early warning system to alert ASEAN ministers to impending trouble in the future. Steps have been taken to increase the use of ASEAN currencies for intra-ASEAN trade.

Like the economic and financial crisis, the forest and peat fires that raged for months in parts of Southeast Asia, mainly on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, have pressed ASEAN into cooperative action. This ecological disaster has affected millions of hectares and tens of millions of people, mostly in Indonesia, where much of it originated. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the disaster cost, at last year's exchange rate of 2,500 rupiah to one U. S. dollar, US$500 million in timber, US$470 million in damage to agriculture, more than US$700 million in non-timber forest products, and more than US$1 billion in indirect forest benefits like water supply, erosion control, soil formation, soil nutrient cycles and waste treatment.

But the disaster has also vividly demonstrated how trouble in one ASEAN country can severely affect others. The forest and peat fires had a sharp impact on Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam, particularly in terms of the damage to people's health, the disruption of education, the danger to sea and air transport, and the setback to tourism. In tourism alone, the WWF estimates the damage at US$250 million.

The disaster set off a frenetic round of intensive consultations among ministers and other officials on short- and long-term measures to fight the fires and prevent their recurrence on the same scale. Agreement has been reached on the strengthening of the ASEAN Specialized Meteorological Center in Singapore, which supplies satellite photos of the precise locations of fires, haze and "hot spots." Two sub-regional fire-fighting arrangements have been set up in the Sumatra-Riau area and on Borneo. A research and training center on fighting and preventing peat and forest fires has been established at the University of Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan. All this was done with the cooperation of other governments, NGOs and international bodies, with the United Nations Environmental Programme, the Asian Development Bank and the ASEAN Secretariat in coordinating and supporting roles. With ADB support, a new unit has been put up at the ASEAN Secretariat to manage ASEAN cooperation on and external assistance for the fire and haze problem. With these efforts, we have reason to hope and expect that this problem will no longer swell to the same magnitudes that it attained in the past few years.

The cooperative work on the fire and haze problem is only one of many such examples of ASEAN cooperation on a wide array of regional problems that transcend national boundaries and impel ASEAN to take regional action and thus bring its members closer to one another.

Towards greater cohesion

To be sure, centrifugal tendencies remain. Not only do these arise from issues left over from history; they could also ensue from strains imposed by new ones, such as the economic and financial crisis and various transnational problems. The expansion of ASEAN's membership has also brought greater diversity to the association.

On the other hand, consciousness of these tendencies could, in fact, move ASEAN to greater solidarity and coherence. From the beginning, ASEAN has placed the highest priority on Southeast Asian solidarity within the association, an aspiration that is only now about to be fulfilled. ASEAN hopes to acquire greater strength not only through greater numbers but also through that cohesive mass that can come only from geographical propinquity. In this and other ways, it is certainly in the interest of all of Southeast Asia that each of the countries in the region be within the ASEAN fold rather than politically and economically adrift. In the same way that conflict among the older ASEAN members has been avoided, ASEAN can reasonably hope that discord with and among the newer ones will be averted.

The financial and economic crisis and the environmental problems, because of their gravity and scope, have, as we have seen, pushed the ASEAN countries closer together. They have also moved ASEAN's leading personalities to deal with one another with greater frankness and openness. Similarly, the greater diversity in ASEAN arising from its enlargement requires two things of all its members: a greater effort to keep ASEAN's cohesion and strengthen its solidarity and a greater willingness to speak more freely to one another.

Frankness and openness do not mean a license to interfere in one another's internal affairs. After all, the principle of non-interference underpins the entire inter-state system and all international organizations, both universal and regional. But on the basis of explicit statements by some leaders and ministers and the pressures exerted by the problems that ASEAN is facing and the association's greater diversity, one can expect interactions within ASEAN to be more intensive and more free. This is a development that has to be handled with the utmost delicacy and sophistication, if it is to foster cohesion rather than friction and disarray.

From what I have said about ASEAN, we can discern what ASEAN stands for and continues to aspire for at its core. Liberal economic policies. Open trading and investment regimes. An increasingly integrated market. Progressively more open societies. The increasing ascendancy of the rule of law. Regional security on the basis of mutual confidence, consensus, cooperation and a balance of interests. Firm opposition to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. A cooperative approach to transboundary environmental problems. A growing determination to deal regionally with transnational crimes, particularly drug-trafficking.

To be sure, individual ASEAN members differ in where they are on the road to these goals; but all of them have been explicitly and collectively articulated by all nine of ASEAN's leaders. Australia and the international community in general share these goals. In the light of our common interests, I think that ASEAN deserves the support of the international community, support first of all for ASEAN to maintain and strengthen its cohesion and solidarity, as only through cohesion and solidarity can ASEAN make steady progress toward our common goals.

ASEAN governments realize more and more clearly that today's problems and crises - economic, financial, environmental, social, political - because of their increasingly transnational nature, have to be dealt with ever greater solidarity and ever closer cooperation. This is, however, too big an enterprise to be handled by governments alone. It is too difficult for governments to carry out without the full support of their societies and political constituencies. The support of political parties and factions, the business community, industrial and commercial groups, advocacy groups of all kinds, and the people at large has to be marshaled in the cause of ASEAN solidarity and cooperation, behind the validity of the ASEAN idea.

Wherever possible and appropriate, countries such as Australia, too, need to get behind the effort to strengthen the cohesion of ASEAN through support, for example, for the regional, in addition to the strictly bilateral, dimension of their relations with the countries of Southeast Asia.

A fragmented Southeast Asia does no good for the security of the Asia- Pacific or for the prosperity of the world. A united, cohesive and strong ASEAN is a potent force for regional peace and security and for the economic vitality of the Asia-Pacific and of the world.