Introduction

An ASEAN of the People, by the People and for the People – the title of the report of the First ASEAN People's Assembly – voiced a strong constitutional appeal to Southeast Asian's political elite (Centre for Strategic and International Studies 2001). The idea of a people-oriented turn in the regional integration process in Southeast Asia was building momentum towards the signing of the Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Singapore in November 2007. Over a period of less than seven years, the term people increasingly permeated both diplomatic and scholarly language (Severino 2006; Tan 2007). The idea that ‘ASEAN needs to shed its image of being an elitist organisation comprising exclusively diplomats and government officials’ infiltrated elite circles (Eminent Persons Group 2007). It was even suggested that the Southeast Asian elites understand the need to ‘reach out and engage the ordinary people of ASEAN with the ASEAN project’ in order to prevent a ‘disconnect[ion] between the elite and the people’ in the Southeast Asian integration project (Koh 2006). With the signing of the ASEAN Charter, however, that momentum was defied by Southeast Asian political elites (Koh 2006).

There is little to nothing in ASEAN's constitutive document which signals that the Southeast Asian elites are soliciting the engagement and cooperation of the Southeast Asian people, neither directly through representation and judicial review, nor indirectly through civil society organizations. It seems that Southeast Asian regionalism, and the political and peopleoriented interests of Southeast Asian's elites have been profoundly misread. The activist focus on ASEAN's so-called Track 2 and Track 3 diplomacy has ignored the elitist character of these mechanisms (Caballero-Anthony 2005). The political role of non-governmental actors has been profoundly overrated in the Southeast Asian context (Aviel 1999; Aviel 2000: 17). In terms of the people/elite dialectics, critical ASEAN scholarship must not only engage in politically scrutinizing NGOs in Southeast Asia, but also determine which NGOs are serving their own interests and which ones are serving the people's interest (Petras & Veltmeyer 2001). Analysts of regional integration, both in the European and the Southeast Asian context, have always recognized and stressed the intrinsic role of the ruling elites in those processes (Haas 1958a; Moravcsik 1993; Marks 1997; Case 2002; Richmond et al. 2002; Acharya 1999).