Introduction
In the early hours of 1 February 2021, the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, staged a swift and brutal coup d’état. The coup was carefully timed and was launched on the day the Myanmar government was scheduled to begin its second term after the November 2020 legislative elections. The ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), had won a landslide victory, and Aung San Suu Kyi was set to prolong her controversial tenure as state counsellor, the de facto leader of Myanmar. Instead, the military detained Suu Kyi, annulled the election results, and established a military regime headed by the newly created State Administration Committee (SAC). In the following months, the military regime quickly became deeply entrenched within Myanmar, and the military leadership showed no sign of relinquishing power. The new authorities launched a brutal and repressive crackdown on non-violent protesters, and Aung San Suu Kyi and other political leaders were put on trial.Footnote 1 Many political activists were disappeared, there were rolling electric and internet blackouts, and the military patrolled the streets in force.Footnote 2 Myanmar’s new leader, military general Min Aung Hlaing, consolidated his position and in August 2021 appointed himself prime minister.Footnote 3
The international response to the coup and its aftermath was complex and contested. The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting and expressed deep concern.Footnote 4 The United States and the European Union moved quickly to place sanctions on the new military regime in Myanmar, and several regional leaders called for the return to civilian rule.Footnote 5 However, international pressure on the new authorities was tempered by the actions of several influential countries that sought to minimise the severity of the coup and took steps to shore up rather than force out the military junta. Furthermore, the regional organisation ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) reacted tentatively to the coup and took several months before appointing a special envoy and, eventually, taking punitive steps against one of its own member states.
In this article, we examine the international response to the Myanmar coup to identify and illustrate important features of the international contestation over norm enforcement. Since the early 1990s, several states and international organisations have sought to promote and consolidate a global anti-coup norm, seeking to set standards of behaviour that rule out the unconstitutional overthrow of sitting governments.Footnote 6 However, the norm has failed to achieve universal acceptance, and its spread has been resisted by several countries (especially but not exclusively authoritarian states) who see its enforcement as a threat to competing norms of state sovereignty and non-interference, as well as a constraint on their foreign relations with coup-created governments. The international responses to coup episodes are thus often characterised by intense norm contestation, as diverse members of the international community debate each other about the applicability of the norm and the extent to which coup leaders should be condemned or sanctioned.
Our analysis of the international response to the Myanmar coup engages with and builds upon approaches to norm contestation that emphasise the ways in which external actors compete with one another over the application and enforcement of international norms against norm-violating states. We make two key original contributions. The first is conceptual, and relates to the typology of political actors who are involved in the process of contestation over norm enforcement. We draw on recent work that distinguishes between norm entrepreneurs, who seek to promote and enforce their favoured international norms, and so-called antipreneurs, who resist the spread of new norms and favour the status quo.Footnote 7 However, we move beyond this simple dichotomy to identify a third set of external actors whom we term ‘norm waverers’, namely those international states or international organisations who are not firmly within either of the ‘pro-norm’ or ‘anti-norm’ camps and are demonstrating some indecision on how much to embrace and enforce the norm. We show how the response of these waverers to instances of norm violations can become the subject of intense international struggle, as members of each hard-line camp seek to persuade or pressure the waverers to tilt in their direction. International actors thus engage in contestation across several dimensions – between pro-norm international actors and norm-violating states, between the two camps of pro-norm and anti-norm actors, and between both of those camps and the wavering international actors in the middle ground. By looking at these patterns of multidimensional contestation, we are able to trace how norm enforcement is contested outside of direct interactions between norm entrepreneurs and antipreneurs.
Our second contribution involves theory building about the impact of norm wavering on the nature and quality of norm enforcement. We show how efforts to lure norm waverers to the pro-norm camp can result in forms of ‘false enforcement’ that risk undermining rather than strengthening the norm. When norm waverers are pressurised by international peers to align their policies and join an enforcement coalition, their incentives to enforce the norm can increasingly deviate from any genuine commitment to the norm itself. Instead, states may pursue forms of strategic norm enforcement which are designed to avoid the negative consequences of non-enforcement that would be imposed by international peers, such as diplomatic isolation and shaming. Such incentive structures can lead to shallow forms of enforcement that resemble window dressing for an international audience rather than any real commitment to bringing about change in the target country. Norm enforcement becomes a signal to international peers rather than a genuine effort to change the behaviour of target states.
In the case of Myanmar, we show how advocates of the anti-coup norm acted quickly to enforce the norm and punish the new military regime in Myanmar. These efforts were undercut, however, by the supportive policies of powerful anti-norm actors (especially Russia and China) who sought to block enforcement measures and offered lifelines of political and economic sponsorship to the military junta. We also show how ASEAN was a wavering actor during this period, and how states in both pro- and anti-norm camps sought to persuade ASEAN to align its policies with their favoured approach. After months of tentative and hesitant responses, ASEAN did take firm action against Myanmar in October 2021, disinviting its political leadership from high-level ASEAN summits. However, its justification for the move, couched in language that referred to the need to protect ASEAN’s credibility and centrality, suggested that international pressure to act had led only to a shallow and partial embrace of the norm rather than a more genuine form of socialisation. ASEAN appears to have acted for reasons that have less to do with a commitment to restoring democracy in Myanmar and more with institutional self-preservation and reputation management at a time of intense norm contestation and international scrutiny.
The remainder of the article explores these issues in three sections. The first section reviews the scholarship on norm contestation and moves beyond existing approaches by introducing the new concept of norm waverers. The second section traces the rise of the anti-coup norm and highlights the limits of its global adoption. While the norm has been enthusiastically embraced by some, it has been the subject of criticism and active resistance by others. The third section examines the role of ASEAN as a norm waverer in the aftermath of the 2021 coup in Myanmar. While pro-norm international actors immediately condemned and sanctioned the coup leaders, ASEAN displayed all three forms of wavering that we introduce in the paper: prevarication, inconsistency, and backtracking. The conclusion synthesises our findings and identifies avenues for future research on norm waverers.
The politics of norm contestation: Promoters, resisters, and waverers
Norms are standards of appropriate behaviour for actors with a particular identity.Footnote 8 Early work on the role and importance of norms in international politics focused on the ways in which international norms emerge, how they come to be widely accepted, and how they shape and structure the behaviour and identities of both national and international actors. Finnemore and Sikkink’s classic article on the norm ‘life cycle’ identified the central role of norm entrepreneurs who seek to change the prevailing normative order and advance new standards of behaviour.Footnote 9 Similar work focused on key norm promoters and their efforts to persuade and pressure other actors to adopt and internalise their preferred norms.Footnote 10
Much of this research has been criticised for focusing on international actors primarily as norm entrepreneurs and downplaying the independent role of international opponents of international norms.Footnote 11 According to this critique, the early work on norms neglected the agency of those actors who sought to maintain the status quo and resist or adapt the new normative standards that were being actively promoted by norm entrepreneurs. More recent work has thus focused on the role of norm contestation, and the often prolonged and divisive debates between international actors over the validity and appropriateness of different norms.Footnote 12
The scholarship on contestation has addressed issues relating to both the types of contestation that take place, as well as the identity of the actors involved. Deitelhoff and Zimmermann, for example, distinguish between two ideal types of contestation, relating to contestation either over the validity of the norm (whether a norm is righteous or should be prioritised) or over the application of the norm (whether a norm fits a given situation and requires action).Footnote 13 Bloomfield and his colleagues have identified the critical role of so-called antipreneurs, who work in direct opposition to norm entrepreneurs and resist the promotion of new norms and seek to maintain the status quo.Footnote 14 Different forms of contestation between these different sets of actors can have implications for how norms spread and evolve over time. Acharya’s work on norm localisation highlights the ways in which local actors, such as regional organisations, can significantly modify international norms and adapt them to fit their own beliefs and practices.Footnote 15 Scholars have also shown how norms can change over time as a result of ongoing debates, and also how they may decay and even die due to active resistance and reinterpretation.Footnote 16
We seek to build on this scholarship on norm contestation by identifying a wider set of international actors that engage in contestation over norms. In particular, we focus on contestation over the application and enforcement of particular norms during and after specific episodes of norm violation. While norm contestation can play out in a variety of ways as norms emerge and evolve, including through debates over language usage, organisational policies, and international treaties,Footnote 17 we focus in particular on those moments when specific actors have been accused of violating international norms and contestation emerges over the nature and scope of the subsequent enforcement measures These debates over the application and enforcement of individual norms in specific test cases provide crucial insights into the extent of power and influence of norms in international politics.
We contribute to existing understandings of norm contestation by examining a wider set of relationships than has previously been considered. In episodes of contestation over norm enforcement, we identify four distinct sets of actors that engage with one another and seek to influence the outcome of enforcement efforts. We add nuance to existing understandings of the politics of norm contestation by identifying and including a previously overlooked category of international actor: norm waverers. These actors are uncertain or internally divided over how to respond to norm violations, and they play an important part in the political theatre of norm contestation over the nature and extent of international norm enforcement. Our framework is captured in Figure 1, and we outline each of our four sets of actors below and identify the different channels of contestation between them.
Norm enforcement contestation and norm waverers framework.
The first actor we identify is the norm violator. These actors initiate episodes of norm contestation by engaging in behaviour that (in the eyes of norm promoters) constitutes a breach of the standards of behaviour that a particular norm enshrines. Some norm violators may deny any wrongdoing, although they are identified as norm violators by norm promoters and their actions become the focus of norm contestation. In other cases, norm violators are open and explicit about their violations and make no effort to conceal their norm transgressions.Footnote 18
We group the remaining three sets of actors in the broader category of norm responders. These actors each take a different approach to responding to the initial act of violation and often clash with one another over how to treat the violating state. Two of these sets of responding actors are well established in the existing scholarship and include the norm promoters/entrepreneurs who will actively seek to enforce the norm, and norm resisters/antipreneurs who argue against and seek to undermine enforcement efforts. Norm promoters often focus on the violating state, condemning its behaviour and pursuing punitive measures designed to bring about compliance with the norm and deter future violations by other actors.Footnote 19 By contrast, norm resisters argue against enforcement measures and often provide symbolic and material forms of support to the violating actor, which often finds itself under intense international scrutiny and pressure.Footnote 20 The clash between active norm promoters and norm resisters can play a decisive role in the fate of individual norms and helps determine their global spread and robustness.
We move beyond existing approaches, however, by introducing a third set of norm responders who are involved in debates about how norms should be enforced in the wake of violation episodes. Distinct from active norm promoters and resisters, this third set of norm responders are best understood as ‘norm waverers’ who are not clearly situated in either camp and whose response is uncertain and becomes the subject of political struggle. Norm waverers are not simply neutral actors who have decided not to take a stance, or actors who have no interest in the particular norm. Rather, their behaviour suggests that they are actively considering joining either the pro- or anti-norm camp but are beset by political indecision and are struggling to reconcile competing interests related to the norm.Footnote 21
We identify three behaviours that are indicative of norm wavering.Footnote 22 First, norm waverers may prevaricate over key decisions related to the norm, taking time to respond to instances of norm violation and being slow to clarify their position. Second, norm waverers may take inconsistent positions about the norm over time, offering different statements and policies at different times in ways that suggest some internal disunity as to whether the actor is committed to the norm. Finally, norm waverers may indicate their uncertain position by backtracking from their initial statements or commitments and taking a ‘one step forward, two steps back’ approach to norm promotion. Overall, norm waverers are defined by their hesitancy with respect to the norm in question, and uncertainty over whether they are firmly committed or opposed to the enforcement of a given norm. To the extent that they place pressure on norm violators, their efforts are likely to be intermittent and unpredictable compared to committed norm promoters.
In that sense, waverers differ in important ways from norm resisters even though they share some similarities. Norm resisters make no effort to embrace or enforce the norm in question and often seek to directly undermine it. By contrast, waverers send mixed signals, paying lip service to the norm and indicating support for it at times, but ultimately falling short of a fulsome embrace of the norm and its enforcement. Waverers may ultimately decide against participation in norm enforcement efforts, but their approach to the issue is more hesitant and contradictory than that of all-out norm resisters. Understanding their role is crucial to understand the overall complexity of the norm enforcement process.
Norm waverers may either be states or international organisations. For both sets of actors, wavering may result from both internal and external pressures. For states, norm enforcement decisions are made by governments who have to balance the costs and benefits of taking a firm stance. Wavering may occur if governing parties are split on the issue or if domestic or international pressure leads governments to reverse initial decisions. For example, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine many international actors framed their support for Ukraine in terms of protecting the norm of territorial integrity. Within Europe, Germany was quickly identified as a wavering actor over its reluctance to send heavy weapons to Ukraine. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, pointed to the risks of becoming a party to the conflict and raising the prospects of nuclear war. However, he reversed his initial position and agreed to send anti-aircraft tanks to Ukraine after domestic and international pressure, including accusations from the leader of the opposition of ‘wavering, procrastination and timidity’.Footnote 23
In the case of international organisations, wavering may result from internal divisions between member states, who may struggle to reconcile their normative preferences and strategic interests. An important site of norm contestation can involve the disagreements and negotiations between member states within international organisations over how to approach the politics of norm enforcement. For example, the European Union was divided over the question of how to enforce norms relating to democratic backsliding in Hungary.Footnote 24 The African Union has often been internally divided over how to enforce its own anti-coup norms, with unanimity on the need to sanction some members (such as after the 2021 coup in Mali), but divisions on others (such as after the 2017 coup in Zimbabwe).Footnote 25
Whether they are states or international organisations, norm waverers play a key role in the politics of international norm enforcement. In particular, we argue that an under-appreciated site of norm contestation involves the efforts by international actors in each of the unambiguous pro- or anti-norm camps to persuade and pressurise norm waverers to join their side and align their response to either the enforcement or non-enforcement approach. Norm promoters can work to persuade and pressurise the waverers to join their camp and help enforce the international norm that they allege has been violated. By contrast, norm resisters may place pressure on the waverers to act in the opposite direction, and to join the antipreneurs in denying or minimising the violation and defending the alleged violator. Work on economic sanctions has illustrated the complex politics involved in building sanctions coalitions, often entailing the use of pressure and inducements to bring reluctant partners on board.Footnote 26 However, research on the politics of norm enforcement has to date neglected the important element of contestation that involves the struggle over norm waverers.
We argue that norm waverers play a key role in the politics of contestation between the pro- and anti-norm camps at the international level. By focusing on norm waverers, we are able to show how the broader international community engages with norm contestation outside of the key relationship between the target and enforcer states. As each side tries to draw wavering actors into their camp, they engage in acts of contestation through persuasion or pressure. The result may be that the waverer is drawn closer to whichever camp exerts the most leverage and has the most influence.
These dynamics also have important implications for the nature of any subsequent norm enforcement actions. The scholarship on norm enforcement has often placed an emphasis on the relationship between the norm promoter and violating actor, suggesting that enforcement will partly reflect the balance of power between the two sets of actors.Footnote 27 We highlight how enforcement decisions are also the result of contestation between international actors over how best to respond to the violator.
Pro-norm actors will seek to build a wide enforcement coalition, and if the pro-norm camp has the stronger influence, wavering countries may ultimately join the enforcement coalition. However, this stance may be strongly driven by non-normative considerations as the wavering state is pressed into action. Any decision to adopt new policies may reflect its need to bow to outside pressure rather than any genuine normative commitment and might thus represent a form of ‘false enforcement’. Sociologists have shown how social actors may sometimes engage in the false enforcement of norms they do not fully support as a result of peer pressure or a desire for social approval.Footnote 28 False enforcement is tied to the existence of what Axelrod terms ‘metanorms’, that is, norms that create an obligation to punish actors who do not punish norm violations.Footnote 29 If norm promoters treat the non-punishment of norm violations as unacceptable within a given community, members of the community who are not committed to the norm nonetheless face a strong incentive to signal their support for it by joining in with the punishment. On the international level, enforcement actions can thus offer the social rewards of recognition and credibility in the eyes of the international norm promoters, whereas a decision not to enforce the norm risks ostracism and even sanctions. The act of norm enforcement thus becomes decoupled from any real interest in whether the target country engages in norm compliance.Footnote 30 Rather, it serves a signalling function to international peers that is designed to secure benefits and avoid costs and is thus driven by instrumental rather than normative considerations.Footnote 31 Understanding the role of norm waverers in the political landscape of norm contestation thus helps explain the gap that is often seen between normative commitments and the depth and consistency of norm enforcement.
We explore these dynamics with reference to recent, and heated, diplomacy over the application of the anti-coup norm in Myanmar. While many international actors fell squarely into the pro- or anti-norm camp, we identify ASEAN as a norm waverer that initially hedged its response and took a hesitant and tentative approach to dealing with Myanmar. However, intense international pressure on ASEAN from both the pro- and anti-norm camps forced it to take a clearer position in favour of norm enforcement, albeit one that fell short of the position of the committed pro-norm actors.
The rise and stall of the anti-coup norm
The interplay between norm promoters, resisters, and waverers can clearly be seen in the case of the anti-coup norm, which emerged and strengthened after the end of the Cold War. The promotion and protection of democratic norms rose dramatically after the 1990s, with many international and regional organisations institutionalising legal protections for democracy. As part of a wider suite of democracy-related ideals and standards, international actors began to promote the idea that coups constituted an unacceptable route to power and promised stiff penalties for coup leaders who oust sitting incumbents.Footnote 32
The initial emergence of the norm was spearheaded by a set of norm entrepreneurs in different regions of the world. The Organization of American States (OAS) began to introduce anti-coup instruments in the early 1990s and by the end of the decade had adopted a commitment to suspend any member state that experienced a coup (a measure it implemented against Honduras in 2009).Footnote 33 The African Union (AU) also developed similar measures and became an active promoter of the anti-coup norm.Footnote 34 The AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), began to institutionalise the anti-coup norm in the late 1990s, promising to suspend member states that experienced ‘unconstitutional changes of government’. These include not just military coups but also rebel overthrows and incumbent-led democratic breakdown (although in this article we focus purely on international responses to military coups). The AU adopted and expanded on these measures, including as part of its ambitious African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, which was adopted in 2007.Footnote 35 It also showed a willingness to enforce these norms, primarily in the cases of military coups, and began to regularly suspend member states that experienced coups (such as Mauritania in 2005, Madagascar in 2009, Egypt in 2013, and Mali in 2021).
However, despite pockets of regional institutionalisation, the global consolidation of the anti-coup norm remains limited by inconsistent implementation within the international community, and also by the firm resistance of some international actors who were sceptical of the new normative trend. Even where international organisations have promised to suspend member states that experienced coups, in practice the response often involved a less punitive measure such as mediation or a fact-finding mission.Footnote 36 At the United Nations (UN), the commitment to the norm has been partial and highly selective. While the UN did take steps to embrace the norm in the early 1990s in the case of Haiti, where it authorised robust international intervention to return the deposed leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, it has failed to develop a consistent approach to condemning coups. In contrast to the proactive stance of the regional organisations mentioned above, the permanent members of the Security Council have sought to protect the political and strategic flexibility that comes with a case-by-case approach and have resisted any effort to entrench a fixed and binding policy that would require identical responses to comparable coup cases.Footnote 37
Furthermore, several international actors have displayed active resistance to the norm. In particular, powerful authoritarian regimes often sought to block efforts to enforce the anti-coup norm and take steps to support coup-created governments.Footnote 38 These efforts fit in with an increasing trend in which authoritarian actors pursue policies designed to prop up and bolster non-democratic regimes abroad.Footnote 39 The strategies employed by autocracies include statements that emphasise the sovereignty of target states and that call for non-intervention, as well as more active measures of support to coup leaders who seize power. Resistance to the anti-coup norm can come in many forms. International actors can choose to recognise coup-created governments, which can offer important signals of international support and provide legitimacy to coup leaders.Footnote 40 Norm resisters can also offer more material forms of international sponsorship.Footnote 41 Financial and technical assistance is essential to the consolidation of post-coup governments and can enhance their sustainability in the face of democratic pressures from the international community.Footnote 42 As a result, financial and technical assistance from supportive international allies greatly increases the opportunities for post-coup governments to consolidate into autocratic regimes while limiting the impact of punitive measures employed by democracy promoters within the international community.
Aside from the clearly delineated camps of norm promoters and resisters, the global consolidation of the anti-coup norm has also been hampered by the prevalence of norm waverers: international actors who have struggled to adopt a consistent position and who are pressured by the other camps to align with their preferred policies. In what follows, we explore how ASEAN struggled to adopt a clear position in the wake of the Myanmar coup, and wavered in its response. While stopping short of embracing the anti-coup norm, the organisation responded to intense (and competing) international pressures by shifting its position and edging closer to the norm entrepreneurs. However, the policy shift was grudging and at times incoherent, with little evidence to suggest that it reflected a genuine commitment to the anti-coup norm. The analysis suggests that when wavering international actors are pulled towards a position that does not reflect their underlying normative commitments, the result is a form of shallow and hollow enforcement that risks undermining rather than consolidating the norm in question.
ASEAN as a norm waverer
In this section, we use a case study of the ASEAN reaction to the 2021 coup in Myanmar to examine the dynamics of wavering in international norm enforcement. Single case studies are particularly well suited to the development of new concepts and to theory building.Footnote 43 We use the case of ASEAN to illustrate the different forms of wavering that we introduced above and to demonstrate the potential of the concept of norm wavering for theory building about the politics of international norm enforcement.
Historically, ASEAN has eschewed democracy promotion as a foreign policy goal and has refrained from developing anti-coup policies or condemning coups within the region. In the wake of previous coups, such as those in Thailand in 2006 and 2014, ASEAN remained largely silent and refrained from condemning or sanctioning the coup leaders.Footnote 44
Yet it would not be accurate to label it a clear-cut norm resister either, and at times ASEAN has shown signs that it is susceptible to pro-norm pressures from both outside and within the organisation. In 2007, as it sought to draft a new charter, the organisation briefly considered incorporating language on democratic norms, including references to unconstitutional changes of government. However, the proposal was made by an Eminent Persons Group tasked with offering suggestions for the charter’s content, and it found little favour with the sitting governments of ASEAN’s member states. The final charter included none of the provisions for responding to unconstitutional changes of government that had been proposed.Footnote 45
ASEAN had previously demonstrated its limited commitment to democracy promotion in its historical dealings with Myanmar. Myanmar was admitted to the organisation in 1997 despite its sustained record of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. At various points since its admission, Myanmar has provoked international outrage for its treatment of political opposition leaders (especially Aung San Suu Kyi), peaceful protestors (for example, during the 2007 ‘Saffron Revolution’), and minority groups (especially the Rohingya crisis). ASEAN has often struggled to develop a clear position vis-à-vis Myanmar during and after these episodes, and although it has criticised the regime, it has refrained from direct democracy promotion efforts and has always sought to keep Myanmar within the ASEAN fold.Footnote 46 As a result, ASEAN itself has sometime become the target of intense international scrutiny for its position and has been heavily criticised by international partners for its Myanmar policies.Footnote 47 Some of ASEAN’s most forceful condemnations of Myanmar, for example over the house arrest and trial of Aung San Suu Kyi in the early 2000s, have been partly a response to the rise of this international pressure. Yet internal divisions and a desire to keep Myanmar within the ASEAN fold has limited the extent to which ASEAN was willing to push the military authorities in Myanmar.Footnote 48
After the 2021 Myanmar coup, ASEAN again quickly found itself in a diplomatically challenging position, buffeted by other international actors who fell clearly within either the pro- or anti-norm camps.Footnote 49 The response from democratic states to the coup was swift and clear. In the first month, the new regime faced a slew of sanctions from the United States, Britain, and Canada as well as condemnation by the Quad alliance (United States, India, Japan, Australia), European Nordic countries, the European Union, G7, Singapore and the UN Secretary General.Footnote 50 These actors demanded an immediate return to democracy in Myanmar, demonstrating the continuing role of democratic states as norm promoters of the anti-coup norm.
By contrast, Russia and China blocked efforts to enforce the anti-coup norm and offered diplomatic and material support to the new authorities in Myanmar. China and Russia both prevented the UN Security Council (UNSC) from taking action on both 1 and 30 April 2021 and cautioned against the use of strong condemnation of the new regime within the UNSC press releases from these meetings.Footnote 51 China was the first state to officially recognise Min Aung Hlaing as the leader of Myanmar in June 2021.Footnote 52 Russia also invited Min Aung Hlaing for his first official international trip abroad to Russia to meet with the secretary of Russia’s Security Council and attend an international military technology and arms expo.Footnote 53 Russia also offered military training and banking services to a government that was being increasingly isolated on the international stage.Footnote 54
For ASEAN, finding a clear and stable position in this fragmented international environment was a challenge. As an intergovernmental organisation with 10 members who have often held divergent views on how to deal with Myanmar, it struggled to articulate a common position in the wake of the coup.Footnote 55 As a result, it quickly came under international pressure from Western, pro-norm actors to join the international coalition opposed to the new military leadership. It also faced pressure from powerful anti-norm actors to treat the government in Myanmar as any other member state. ASEAN struggled to develop a clear and consistent position in the face of its own internal divisions and the competing international pressures. Its most significant response in the months after the coup was to convene a special summit on the crisis in late April 2021, where ASEAN and Myanmar’s new military leadership agreed on a Five-Point Consensus that called for an immediate cessation of violence, a peaceful solution through constructive dialogue with all parties, humanitarian assistance from ASEAN, and the deployment of a special envoy to meet all parties and mediate the political dialogue.Footnote 56 In October 2021, it took an even bigger step by announcing that it would disinvite the Myanmar authorities from major ASEAN summits. However, as explored below, these initiatives were slow in coming and fell well short of reflecting a sustained commitment to the anti-coup norm. In the following discussions, we outline how ASEAN’s response exemplified the three key characteristics of norm-wavering behaviour: prevarication, incoherence in statements and actions, and regular backtracking from stated positions.
Prevarication
The first norm-wavering behaviour we identify is that of prevarication in responding to the norm-violating behaviour. While ASEAN ultimately sought to enforce punitive measures on Myanmar for its violations, we argue this position was regularly delayed and came in response to international pressure rather than to the norm violation itself. We identify three instances of prevarication within the ASEAN response. The first was in the initial response to the coup itself, the second came with the struggle to implement the Five-Point Consensus, and the third concerned delays in ASEAN’s willingness to enforce punitive measures.
In the early post-coup period, ASEAN showed little indication of supporting, let alone enforcing, the anti-coup norm. The new military regime in Myanmar met with representatives from Thailand and Indonesia, and Malaysia deported over 1,000 Myanmar nationals who had fled the coup back to Myanmar in late February.Footnote 57 Despite the call from several ASEAN members to see Aung San Suu Kyi released, the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing was able to join ASEAN’s virtual meetings in March 2021, and some ASEAN states attended Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day celebrations the same month.Footnote 58 Over the first few months after the coup, ASEAN leaders met with several of the coup government’s representatives and ministers. This willingness to engage in diplomatic relations with the military government suggested, in keeping with the historical trend, that ASEAN was not inclined to play any role in promoting the anti-coup norm.
However, as conditions worsened within Myanmar amid a post-coup wave of brutal repression, international attention and pressure mounted not just on the military regime within Myanmar, but also on ASEAN itself. In April, the former UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, intervened to argue that the coup breached the provisions of the ASEAN charter and urged ASEAN to make clear to Myanmar that the situation could not be considered an internal matter.Footnote 59 Myanmar’s government in exile, the newly established National Unity Government (NUG), also urged ASEAN to exclude the coup authorities from ASEAN meetings and to recognise the NUG instead.Footnote 60
As a result of this mounting pressure, ASEAN organised an emergency meeting on the crisis on 24 April 2021. The meeting came more than 80 days after the crisis had started; by comparison, the UNSC held its first emergency meeting on the crisis on 2 February, one day after the coup. Further, the meeting was announced on 5 April, but disagreements between member states on where and when to hold it led to delays in its organisation.Footnote 61 Thus, the first example of prevarication is in the timing and universality of response to Myanmar’s norm-violating behaviour in the immediate period after the coup.
The second instance of prevarication came in relation to the implementation of the Five-Point Consensus that was agreed at the emergency summit in April 2021. The consensus stipulated that ASEAN would appoint a special envoy, but in the weeks afterwards it struggled to agree on who to appoint amid reports of internal disagreements and horse-trading between member states.Footnote 62 In the meantime, the military junta in Myanmar continued its repressive practices, with little sign of implementation of its obligations under the Five-Point Consensus.
ASEAN’s slow movement led to international frustration and pressure. In May 2021, the United States urged ASEAN to hold the military junta accountable to the Five-Point Consensus that had been agreed the previous month.Footnote 63 By July, with still no progress on appointing an ASEAN envoy (and still no progress within Myanmar), US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken pointedly called on ASEAN to appoint its special envoy. He also urged ASEAN to take joint action to end the violence and restore democracy and reiterated the call for ASEAN to hold the regime in Myanmar accountable to the Five-Point Consensus.Footnote 64 In early August, the United States signalled its frustration with ASEAN when a senior State Department official made an off-the-record call for ASEAN to ‘step up its effort’ and engage more with the Myanmar issue, as the military regime continued to renege on its commitments and postponed elections that it had promised to hold.Footnote 65 ASEAN finally appointed its special envoy the same week, naming Brunei’s second minister for foreign affairs, Erywan Yusof, to the post.Footnote 66 Thus the appointment of the special envoy occurred almost four months after the agreement of the Five-Point Consensus, demonstrating the limited nature of ASEAN’s response in the first seven months of the crisis.
The third example of prevarication relates to ASEAN’s slow response in bringing about any meaningfully punitive action against Myanmar. It was not until October 2021, nearly eight months after the coup, that ASEAN took any steps to sanction the new authorities in Myanmar in any significant way. On 15 October 2021, ASEAN announced a decision to disinvite Myanmar’s new leadership to the upcoming annual ASEAN summit (and future summits), a move that immediately denied them high-level access to ASEAN.Footnote 67 In place of the regime leadership, ASEAN invited a non-political actor not tied to the regime.
The move reflected increasing frustration within ASEAN about the policies of Myanmar’s new military leaders and lack of progress in implementing the Five-Point Consensus.Footnote 68 ASEAN was also frustrated by the extent to which the military authorities in Myanmar were obstructing the work of its newly appointed special envoy. Yusof had been planning a trip to Myanmar in October before the ASEAN summit but cancelled the plans after the military junta refused his requests to meet with opposition groups and Aung San Suu Kyi. ASEAN leaders cited the lack of progress and political obstruction to explain the new ban.Footnote 69
The new policy marked a serious change in ASEAN’s position, and it also marked a new chapter in ASEAN–Myanmar relations. We do not argue that ASEAN’s decision to exclude the junta was driven purely by a new embrace of the anti-coup norm, but there is clear evidence that it played a key role alongside other factors. ASEAN’s change of position was partly driven by a concern with the scale of violence within Myanmar as well as frustration at the lack of cooperation with the Five-Point Consensus.Footnote 70 Yet statements by ASEAN leaders suggest that considerations of democracy and constitutional order played an important role. The final Chairman’s Statement of the summit declared that ‘while respecting the principle of noninterference, we reaffirmed our adherence to the rule of law, good governance, the principles of democracy and constitutional government, as well as the need to strike an appropriate balance to the application of ASEAN principles on the situation in Myanmar’.Footnote 71 This indicated a clear link between ASEAN’s decision and the unconstitutional nature of the military government. Malaysia’s prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob explicitly linked the decision to the absence of democracy and suggested that a return to democratic rule would lead to a return to normal ASEAN–Myanmar relations: ‘Myanmar remains a valued member of the ASEAN family. Malaysia looks forward to the return to democracy in Myanmar and participation of Myanmar at the highest level in future summits.’Footnote 72 Indonesia’s foreign minister echoed this line of thinking, stating that Myanmar ‘should not be represented at the political level’ at ASEAN summits until it restores ‘its democracy through an inclusive process’.Footnote 73
The October decision was thus clearly and explicitly tied to a normative commitment to constitutional rule that reflects the content of the anti-coup norm. Yet this explicit pro-democracy stance was not universally shared within ASEAN, and, as we discuss below, ASEAN’s subsequent actions also suggested that the organisation was not fully committed to its new pro-norm policy.
Inconsistent statements
The second wavering behaviour we identify is that of inconsistent or incoherent statements about the norm violation and the waverer’s response. If ASEAN were acting consistently and coherently, we would expect to see its increasingly robust and critical policies on Myanmar accompanied by language that reflected the severity of the underlying norm violation. Yet when it introduced its summit ban on Myanmar in October 2021, its stated rationale had little in common with its earlier comments on the coup and the language of the Five-Point Consensus.
When the suspension on Myanmar was introduced, ASEAN issued a statement acknowledging ‘the importance of upholding the principles enshrined in the ASEAN Charter’ but also pointed to the implications of the situation in Myanmar for ‘regional security as well as the unity, credibility and centrality of ASEAN as a rules-based organisation’.Footnote 74 Several ASEAN member states made similar statements at the time, making clear that much of the concern within the organisation was with ASEAN’s credibility as an international actor rather than any underlying normative commitment. Singapore’s foreign ministry described the adoption of the new policy as a ‘difficult but necessary decision to uphold ASEAN’s credibility’.Footnote 75 The prime minister of Thailand, Prayuth Chan-o-cha, framed the decision in similar terms, suggesting that ASEAN’s Myanmar policy was crucial for its reputation as a regional organisation and that ‘our action on this matter shall have a bearing on ASEAN’s credibility in the eyes of the international community’.Footnote 76
The framing and language used in the official ASEAN statement, as well as accompanying statements by individual member states, reflected the mix of internal politics and external pressure that buffeted the organisation. Internally, ASEAN’s member states held divergent positions on how firm the organisation should be in its policy towards Myanmar. Since the late 1990s, several of ASEAN’s more democratic member states such as Indonesia and the Philippines had been pushing the organisation to take a stronger role in promoting democratic norms, especially in Myanmar, yet its more authoritarian members were resistant to adopting new normative commitments.Footnote 77 In 2021, member states again struggled to reach consensus on how to respond to a crisis in Myanmar. The most vocal advocates of suspending Myanmar from ASEAN summits included the bloc’s most democratic states, including Indonesia and Malaysia, while Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos aligned themselves more closely with the junta in Myanmar.Footnote 78 The lack of consensus raised the risk that ASEAN would fail to adopt a common policy on the issue at a time of international scrutiny, thus undermining its position as a central regional organisation. The need to balance competing audiences (both externally and internally) increased the probability of protracted compromise and policy contradictions.Footnote 79
The language in the October 2021 policy announcement strongly suggests that ASEAN’s new position was less a reflection of a new or enhanced commitment to the anti-coup norm among its member states, and more a response to external political pressures and its own desire to avoid institutional irrelevance. In the absence of a normative consensus within the organisation, but in the presence of international pressure, ASEAN needed a policy that could show it was at least responding ‘as one’ to the situation and that its internal divisions were not paralysing the organisation.
This approach reflected a long-standing pattern in which ASEAN’s response to domestic events in Myanmar (and other member states) was framed in terms of protecting its credibility and managing its international reputation.Footnote 80 In 2003, after Aung San Suu Kyi’s convoy was violently attacked by a government-backed mob, the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad stated that, ‘We don’t criticise member states unless what one state does embarrasses us, causes a problem for us. We are thinking about ourselves as ASEAN … what they [Myanmar] have done has affected us, our credibility.’Footnote 81 In 2007, after Myanmar violently supressed peaceful protests, the chair of ASEAN declared the organisation’s ‘revulsion’ over the events but also expressed concern to Myanmar that the developments were having ‘a serious impact on the reputation and credibility of ASEAN’.Footnote 82 The return of this language of credibility and centrality in 2021 sent mixed signals about ASEAN’s response to the coup, suggesting its policies were driven less by a concern with events taking place within Myanmar and more by its need to protect its international reputation.
Backtracking from commitments
The final norm-wavering behaviour we identify is that of backtracking from its commitments. At a number of points since the coup, ASEAN has backtracked from its initial stated goals in its response to the Myanmar coup, contributing to an uncertain and shifting stance.
One instance took place in May 2022, when ASEAN briefly moved from emphasising the Five-Point Consensus to prioritising only three ‘core’ points that focus on stability. When Cambodia took over the chairmanship of ASEAN in January 2022, it appeared to water down the organisation’s commitment to the Consensus. On the 2 May 2022, the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen, held a video call with Min Aung Hlaing where he expressed ‘aspiration from all quarters to see more speedy progress on achieving three immediate priorities of the 5PC, namely, (1) cessation of violence, (2) unhindered humanitarian delivery to all the people in most need and (3) building trust and confidence to engender an inclusive political dialogue’.Footnote 83 The lack of reference to the role of ASEAN’s special envoy and his role in visiting Myanmar and working with all parties seemed designed to sidestep one of the most contentious issues of the consensus, where the military junta had repeatedly obstructed the special envoy’s plans to visit Myanmar and meet a wide range of stakeholders.
ASEAN subsequently reaffirmed its commitment to the full Five-Point Consensus at its annual summits but in its statements seemed to backtrack from its initial commitment to principles of democracy and constitutional rule in its dealings with Myanmar. At its annual summit in 2022, ASEAN leaders reviewed implementation of the Five-Point Consensus and lamented the lack of progress. However, its brief review omitted any reference to good governance, democracy, or constitutional government, which had been was included in the 2021 summit agreement.Footnote 84 The 2023 review included a reference to the ‘objective of restoring peace, stability, democracy and a Myanmar-owned and led comprehensive political settlement’ but otherwise failed to mention the principles of the rule of law, good governance, and constitutional government that ASEAN had referred to in 2021 to justify its summit ban.Footnote 85
Other actions taken by ASEAN also seemed to undermine the message of its ban on Myanmar’s representation at ASEAN meetings. After the October 2021 ban was introduced, Myanmar’s military leadership was banned from a range of meetings including foreign ministers’ meetings and several summits with external states.Footnote 86 Yet, when taken in the context of all diplomatic interactions between the member states of ASEAN, it became clear that ASEAN was willing to continue business as usual on many fronts. In the months following this disinvitation, Myanmar’s military junta continued its diplomatic interactions with other ASEAN states, albeit in a limited manner. Whilst unable to attend the defence chief’s meeting in person in March 2022, the junta leadership were able to attend online. Junta leadership have also attended the ASEAN economic ministers’ meeting (May 2022), the defence ministers’ meeting (June 2022), the ASEAN armies rifle meet, and the ASEAN-parties against corruption (November 2022).Footnote 87 ASEAN members have continued to have bilateral relations with Myanmar throughout this period. Though ASEAN has taken punitive action against Myanmar’s junta at the summit level, it has undermined its own position in significant ways by continuing a wide range of other diplomatic relations with the post-coup authorities.
By tracing these three forms of behaviour, we have demonstrated how ASEAN has acted as a norm waverer in the wake of Myanmar’s coup d’état. We have shown how it has prevaricated over decision-making, how the organisation has made inconsistent statements, and finally how it has backtracked on its commitments in periods of implementation. While it has engaged in unprecedented steps to resolve the crisis, these have come as the result of concerns beyond that of the anti-coup norm. ASEAN was more interested in signalling its resolve and credibility to its (pro-norm) international partners than in embracing a norm-driven policy that was aimed at changing Myanmar’s behaviour.
The case of ASEAN and its response to the Myanmar coup illustrates the impact of norm wavering on the overall process of norm enforcement. Previously, studies of contestation over norm contestation framed them in terms of a struggle between norm entrepreneurs and antipreneurs, between norm promoters and resisters. The strength of enforcement would depend on the balance of power between these camps. The case of ASEAN shows how the process is more complex, and how the presence of norm waverers can undermine the process of norm enforcement in a way that is distinct from the role of norm resisters. While norm resisters reject any efforts to enforce the norm and often seek to undermine it directly, waverers such as ASEAN can undermine the processes of norm enforcement through a more indirect route. ASEAN’s wavering behaviour resulted in what we identify as false enforcement, where apparent efforts at enforcement are driven primarily by instrumental motivations and designed to avoid the negative effects of not being seen to enforce the norm. ASEAN appeared to embrace a shift in policy towards the anti-coup norm but, by doing so in a way that was hesitant and contradictory, damaged the process of norm enforcement. In the absence of a genuine commitment to the norm itself, these half-hearted and often incoherent measures can risk hollowing out and undermining the norm itself.
Conclusion
This paper has introduced a new concept and developed new theory in order to better understanding the politics of international norm enforcement. Drawing on the norm contestation literature, we have examined the role of contestation between norm promoters and norm resisters and illustrated the competing efforts to enforce (or reject) the anti-coup norm in the case of Myanmar. Building on key works from Zimmermann and Deitelhoff and from Bloomfield, we extended existing typologies of norm contestation by identifying a new type of actor within the contestation matrix, that of international norm waverers. Unlike norm entrepreneurs who promote the anti-coup norm, or norm antripeneurs who resist this enforcement in favour of the status quo, norm waverers do not necessarily respond directly to norm-violating states. They do not sit within either of the hard-line camps who react in the aftermath of a violation and do not necessarily have a clear commitment to either position. However, when there is heightened contestation between these two camps, norm waverers can find themselves under pressure from both camps to respond to the violating behaviour.
We have also made a theoretical contribution by highlighting the link between norm wavering and the effectiveness of norm enforcement. The concept of norm waverers allows for more nuance and differentiation concerning the types of actor involved in norm contestation and helps shed more light on the factors that shape the effectiveness of international norm enforcement efforts. When norm waverers contribute to norm enforcement through half-hearted and inconsistent measures, it can damage rather than enhance the norm enforcement effort. By highlighting the role of false enforcement, when enforcement efforts take place without genuine commitment to the underlying norm, we show how waverers can play a key role in the shaping the overall pattern and outcome of norm enforcement.
The ASEAN response to Myanmar clearly illustrates these contributions. International pressure on ASEAN from the anti-coup norm camp contributed to the development and implementation of the Five-Point Consensus, as well as the new ASEAN policy to exclude Myanmar’s military leadership from ASEAN summits. These were substantial developments, but they fell short of full commitment to the anti-coup norm. Concern with institutional unity and credibility in the face of intense international and regional pressure appear to have driven ASEAN’s most important policy changes, highlighting the risk that norm waverers may actually undermine normative standards through shallow or self-interested enforcement that may lack long-term follow-through.
The complex patterns of norm contestation in the case of Myanmar have resulted in limited and asymmetrical enforcement of the anti-coup norm. Since 2021, the SAC has consolidated its position both domestically and internationally. Though the country has faced major economic constraints due to the programme of sanctions imposed by norm promoters, the regime has continued to redevelop the country’s institutions and legal frameworks to its own advantage. Internationally, the SAC is increasing its ties with a range of autocratic actors, not only Russia and China, but also Belarus, North Korea, and Iran, as it faces broader and deeper sanctions from democratic countries. If ASEAN’s key policies are to achieve any resolution or rebalancing, then it will need to move beyond a purely instrumental and self-interested approach to enforcing the anti-coup norm.
Further research is now needed on the role and impact of norm waverers. We need a greater understanding of how both norm promoters and norm resisters engage with and pressure norm waverers, and how norm waverers themselves impact the process of norm consolidation. More cross-case empirical analysis will enable stronger conclusions and generalisations about the extent and importance of wavering in the wider politics of international norm enforcement. Further research could also explore the different explanations for wavering, including the extent to which the causes of wavering differ between states and international organisation actors, and the ways in which the roots of wavering behaviour have implications for different types of enforcement.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank those who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article, including participants at an ISA panel in 2022. We are especially to Stefano Palestini, Stephan Haggard, Betcy Jose and Christoph Stefes.
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