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Creator: Hunter Marston, ANU
On the forty first ASEAN Summit in Phnom Penh in November 2022, the leaders of the grouping agreed ‘in precept’ to confess Timor-Leste as their eleventh member. Whereas Dili’s accession has been a very long time coming, with it first making use of for membership in 2011, it nonetheless has sure standards to fulfil earlier than membership is assured. Timor-Leste’s ascension additionally has essential implications for ASEAN and the nation’s function in regional diplomacy.
The context of Timor-Leste’s ASEAN ascension is price taking into account. The explanations are threefold. First, ASEAN’s resolution to confess Timor-Leste comes at a time of mounting regional uncertainty and considerations over how the bloc will reply to worldwide crises. These embody rising US–China rivalry and Myanmar’s unresolved civil warfare because the navy coup in February 2021.
Second, Timor-Leste will be part of a minority of democracies inside ASEAN, alongside Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, introducing a counterweight to the group’s authoritarian majority. Third, Timor-Leste’s ascension comes at a time of inside division in ASEAN and organisational drift. ASEAN critics abound and a few distinguished figures are involved that including a brand new member will undermine ASEAN centrality and weaken its means to kind consensus on main points.
Timor-Leste’s accession comes amid a number of geopolitical challenges confronting the bloc. ASEAN has struggled to say its centrality and company in opposition to a backdrop of bipolar pressures from nice energy competitors. It launched the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) in response to former US president Donald Trump administration’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific framework and different regional powers’ personal methods, which threaten to miss the multilateral grouping. The AOIP emphasised an inclusive regional imaginative and prescient, warning that ‘the rise of fabric powers’ requires trust-building and avoiding zero-sum logic.
Timor-Leste’s membership would strengthen ASEAN’s promotion of an inclusive regional structure and assist it stay the preeminent cross-regional establishment for exterior powers to work with. ASEAN makes use of its convening energy by way of boards such because the ASEAN-hosted East Asia Summit and ASEAN Defence Ministers Assembly-Plus. These boards deliver collectively exterior powers, together with Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA.
But, ASEAN — which cherishes its doctrine of non-interference in members’ inside affairs — has didn’t advance a diplomatic resolution to Myanmar’s spiralling disaster. On the summit in Phnom Penh, at which Myanmar’s junta was not current, leaders acknowledged the dearth of progress on the problem and referred to as for a brand new plan with ‘measurable indicators’ and a ‘particular timeline’. Additionally they ‘tasked’ ‘ASEAN [f]oreign [m]inisters to develop the implementation plan’.
Timor-Leste’s President Jose Ramos Horta has been an advocate for the Myanmar individuals’s battle in opposition to the junta and is a supporter of Myanmar’s deposed former democratic authorities chief Aung San Suu Kyi. Earlier than his election in April, Ramos Horta criticised Dili’s resolution to abstain from a UN Common Meeting decision condemning the Myanmar navy as a ‘vote of disgrace’. Dili might have banked on Cambodia and Myanmar’s help for its membership bid in ASEAN in return for abstaining on the measure. Given Ramos Horta’s curiosity in Myanmar, Dili might help additional diplomatic efforts underneath Indonesia’s chairmanship of ASEAN in 2023.
Timor-Leste’s inclusion additionally strengthens the ASEAN Constitution’s mandate of ‘adhering to the ideas of democracy, the rule of regulation and good governance, respect for and safety of human rights and elementary freedoms’. This pledge is at odds with ASEAN’s present membership, which resembles extra of a strongman membership than a gaggle of democracies.
Southeast Asia has demonstrated an authoritarian flip lately with a number of democracies displaying developments and options of hybrid regimes. Political scientist Tom Pepinsky has argued that ‘[t]he actual story of the state of democracy in Southeast Asia is… the power of sturdy authoritarianism within the non-democracies’. Pepinsky factors to the success of ‘neopatrimonialism’ in Cambodia and Malaysia, the place political leaders (‘patrons’) have rewarded their supporters (‘shoppers’) with spoils equivalent to enterprise offers or political safety.
Amid this authoritarian development in regional governance, Timor-Leste represents a brilliant spot for Southeast Asian democracy with useful classes to impart on different members. Its success might display the viability of a democratic path to regional autocrats.
It appears that evidently the best way is lastly paved to Dili’s accession, with Singapore having given up its resistance primarily based on Timor-Leste’s comparatively low improvement requirements. But sceptics proceed to insist that Timor-Leste’s membership will exacerbate ASEAN’s inside divisions, making consensus harder, and additional exposing the bloc to nice energy interference. Political scientist Thitinan Pongsudhirak has argued that permitting Timor-Leste to hitch ASEAN will ‘make the organisation extra susceptible to be picked off and co-opted by the large powers’.
This argument doesn’t maintain weight. ASEAN is already struggling to cope with nice energy rivalry. Including yet another member won’t weaken the organisation however can strengthen it. By including Timor-Leste, ASEAN can display that it’s dwelling as much as its requires an open and inclusive regional order.
A regional organisation that features all eleven Southeast Asian states shall be a stronger counterweight to rising bipolar pressures and extra able to resisting the efforts of nice powers to divide the area or enlist particular person nations to their aspect.
Hunter Marston is a PhD candidate in Worldwide Relations on the Coral Bell Faculty of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian Nationwide College and an Adjunct Analysis Fellow at La Trobe Asia, La Trobe College.
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