EVENTS AND TRENDS DRIVING OUR COUNTRIES TOWARD CLOSER UNION

Both security issues and economic opportunities are driving the ASEAN states toward closer union. The first of these security issues is increasing instability and conflict in the region. We are seeing a distinct worsening of ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions in Eastern Indonesia, Southern Thailand, and Southern Philippines. All of these conflicts are liable to spill over across national borders and into the region. Already a regional terrorist movement objectifies the emergence of ideological-religious fundamentalism among our Muslim communities.

Yet another problem is Southeast Asia's rise as a strategic playing field of the long-term political competition between the United States and China, in the context of Beijing's apparent effort to recover its traditional centrality in East Asia.

An ASEAN security community will enable the countries of the region to assert their collective interest before the big powers more forcefully than anyone of them could do on its own.

Increase in Regional Trade is both a Problem and an Opportunity

The sharp increase in regional trade and East Asia's emergence as an autonomous region of vigorous growth pose both a problem and an opportunity. In 2004 alone, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects emerging East Asia — China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines — to average 7.1% GDP growth.

Within Southeast Asia, this expansion of regional trade has sharpened the disparity between the original ASEAN-6 and the four newer members. Within the individual countries, the rapid pace of industrialization and urbanization is intensifying social issues of poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation.

The increase in regional interdependence is also stimulating a movement toward an East Asian Economic Grouping of the ASEAN-10 plus China, Japan and Korea. This Economic Grouping is likely to be in place by 2010. Its completion will signal the northward shift of the region's center of economic gravity, to the bigger and more technically advanced economies of Japan, Korea and China. This economic trend, too, compels ASEAN to unify — if it is to strengthen its bargaining power relative to its Northeast Asian neighbors.

These instabilities, conflicts, and economic trends are all stimulating new thinking, new insights and new proposals for ASEAN to consider its progress toward a security community.