In December 2005, the heads of government of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held their 11th summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur. In 1967, in the uncertainties of the Cold War strategic environment, the so-called Core 5 original members of ASEAN — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand — banded together to promote regional cooperation. They were joined by Brunei in 1984; Vietnam in 1995; Laos and Myanmar in 1997; and Cambodia in 1999. The latter four, placed in a lower economic tier, are collectively known as the CLMV (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam) states. The expansion of ASEAN from five to ten members seemed to fulfill the founders’ dream of an inclusive regional grouping peacefully sharing common goals and policies. Southeast Asia's newest state, East Timor, has applied to become ASEAN's eleventh member in 2011, after a five-year transition period. From ASEAN's inception, the member states have wrestled with the problem of how it should view itself and be viewed from outside beyond simply a loose agglomeration of disparate sovereign, independent national states. It has been easier to define what it is not — not an alliance, not an integrated supranational organization, not a confederal union — than what it is. The question is what is ASEAN's transnational identity.

The theme of the Kuala Lumpur Summit was “One Vision, One Identity, One Community”. The assembled leaders — four democrats, two communists, two authoritarians, an absolute monarch, and a member of a brutal military junta — issued a “Declaration on the Establishment of the ASEAN Charter”. The ASEAN Charter is conceived of as a kind of constitution for an ASEAN Community. The goal of an ASEAN Community was adopted at the 2003, 9th ASEAN Summit in Bali in the Bali Concord II which called for the creation of an ASEAN Community by the year 2020. The community is to be built on the three pedestals of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), an ASEAN Security Community (ASC), and an ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC). The Bali Concord II was designed to reinvent ASEAN with a re-emergent Indonesian leadership in the wake of the Asian economic crisis of 1997–98 and the collapse of Soeharto's Indonesian regime.