Recent crises, particularly the on-going sovereign debt crisis in the euro area economies, has provided momentum to greater regional financial cooperation in the region. Through the establishment of the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation (CMIM) and the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) in March 2010 and May 2011, respectively, substantial headway has been made in this regard. The role of AMRO as a surveillance office for the CMIM is vital to the overall success of regional financial cooperation; without a credible and qualified surveillance capacity, it is difficult to envision an effective CMIM.

RECENT COMMITMENTS

The CMIM

During the Annual AFMGM+3 Meeting in May 2012, several other major new commitments were announced. Responding to the potential need for a larger swap facility, the CMIM Executive Committee announced the doubling of the swap facility to $240 billion in May 2012. Given the adjusted contribution, while keeping the “purchasing multiples” unchanged, major ASEAN economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore) now have access to approximately $22.76 billion each, an increase from $4.55 billion previously.

At the same meeting, an increase in the IMF de-linked portion from 20% to 30% was also announced. A number of ASEAN+3 economies in fact proposed a higher de-link portion, but as a group eventually agreed to review the issue again in 2014, with the intention of further increasing the de-linked portion to 40%. During their deliberations, it was acknowledged that one of the key factors behind the doubling of the total swap facility and the rise in the de-linked portion is the recognition of the speedy establishment of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) and the timely delivery of well-received AMRO surveillance reports by the Executive Committee during the Deputies Meeting in Sendai, Japan in December 2011 and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in March 2012. Furthermore, reflecting their appreciation of the urgency in anticipating and preventing future financial crisis, the ASEAN+3 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors approved the establishment of an additional function for the CMIM — a crisis prevention function, in addition to the crisis resolution function.

Under the current framework of the CMIM, a detailed set of operational guidelines was established, which would enable any swap requests to be processed efficiently and in a timely manner, typically within seven days of a request being made.

The US and China are groping towards a new equilibrium in their relationship with each other and with other countries in East Asia. Since the Second World War, East Asia has been very largely an American creation because it was the US that created conditions that facilitated the growth that is the most salient common characteristic of an otherwise very diverse region. China's rapid growth and re-emergence as a major regional and potentially global actor would not have been possible without the Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s and 1980s. But the US and China are now both freed of the constraints of the de facto anti-Soviet alliance of that period and China's transformation is transforming East Asia.

There is now a consensus across the region that while the US is still and will remain a necessary condition for the stability that is vital for continued growth, it is no longer a sufficient condition and needs to be supplemented — supplemented not supplanted — by some new architecture.

This is a consensus shared by US friends and allies and implicitly by China as well, at least for the present.

No one really knows what this new architecture will look like, but US-China relations will certainly be its central pillar. Neither does anyone know how long Washington and Beijing will take to reach a new accommodation with each other, although this will probably be a work of decades and not just a few years. In the meantime, we will all have to endure the trials and tribulations that inevitably arise when strategic adjustments of this scale are underway between major powers.

China is certainly rising. But America is not obviously in decline. I concede that if one were to assess the US solely by what is going on in its capital, one could be forgiven for coming to such a bleak conclusion. But it would be a mistake to forget that the most important developments in the US do not always occur in Washington DC. Equally if not more important are what happen in the fifty states of the United States, in the boardrooms of major American corporations, on Wall Street, and in American universities and research laboratories.

Four years since the 10th ASEAN Summit in Vientiane in 2004, the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) — one of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community — has remained as elusive as ever. The ASCC, as articulated in the Vientiane Action Programme (VAP), embodies the ultimate ASEAN aspiration to improve the quality of life of its peoples, promote equity in sharing the benefits of growth, and foster a shared cultural identity. To be sure, the VAP was unequivocal in specifying the strategies to fulfil these aspirations — building a community of caring societies that address the issues of poverty and equity, promoting sustainable management of the environment and natural resources, managing the social impacts of economic integration, and promoting an ASEAN identity. But the ASEAN process that would implement these strategies has not been easy to put in place.

From the outset, it was envisaged that each of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community — political, economic and socio- cultural — would be guided by a blueprint that would set concrete and time-bound targets. While the blueprint of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) has been completed, that of the ASCC is still a work-in-progress, and ASEAN countries have yet to agree on its structure and implementation modality. Some countries have expressed unease about having to commit to specific milestones; others have suggested that an update of the VAP would be sufficient in lieu of having a blueprint.

The unease about having an ASCC blueprint, which implies some degree of precision in terms of targets and timing, is rooted in a number of reasons. Social sector initiatives have been carried out primarily through project-based (functional) cooperation since the early years of ASEAN. In many cases, functional cooperation projects have been designed without the benefit of rigorous sector analysis, often resulting in poorly designed projects with limited and largely unsustainable benefits. Countries realize that a blueprint that would simply compile or aggregate these projects will not be meaningful. Furthermore, the number of ASEAN functional cooperation areas (sectors) has increased considerably, making it difficult to prioritize projects. The lack of a unifying sector framework in most cases has diminished the coherence and focus needed to plan for a strategic trajectory of cooperation.

On the political and foreign policy fronts, the last decade in the Philippines has shown powerful continuities nationally and in relation to ASEAN with the preceding decade and the ones before that. These reinforce the widespread view that little changes in the Philippines and hence it is not worthy of as much attention as the more dynamic ‘core states’ of ASEAN and Southeast Asia.

Yet economically, the last decade has been one of significant and positive discontinuity nationally and in relation to Southeast Asia that challenges this engrained and often dismissive view of the region's second most populous country. This mixture of continuities and discontinuities is likely to persist in the coming decade, reaffirming the growing separation of the internationalizing Philippine private sector from national political travails and the need to revise the comfortable conventional wisdom about the Philippines.

POLITICAL CONTINUITIES

Despite an article in the 1987 Constitution requiring a law ending political dynasties in the country, the Philippines remains the regional pinnacle of dynastic democracy. As noted in the letter introducing the 2013 House and Senate anti-political dynasty bills aiming to satisfy this constitutional requirement, the 2010 election saw 18 of the 23 senators elected hailing from political dynasties and three-quarters of those elected to the House of Representatives being of similar political lineage. All post-Marcos presidents have come from political dynasties, as have all elected vice-presidents except for the popular newscaster Noli de Castro.

The last fifteen years has seen the rise and quick entrenchment of new national dynasties based in Metro Manila and Luzon, including the Estradas, Binays, Poes, Villars and Revillas. Vice President Binay is the clear front-runner for the presidency in 2016 while the neophyte senator and top vote-getter in 2013, Grace Poe, the daughter of failed presidential candidate and movie superstar Fernando Poe Jr., is the clear front-runner for the vice-presidency. Their closest rivals also all come from new or long-established dynasties.

Despite early signs that the Aquino administration would break the pattern of scandal, legislative lethargy and the early onset of lame-duck presidencies, this oft-repeated pattern that characterized the nine-year term of President Macapagal-Arroyo is proving resilient.

If there is anything consistent about Southeast Asia it must certainly be its diversity. The varied levels of economic development, differing systems of governance and politics, and the myriad of demographic and cultural complexions ensure that any comparative analysis must be performed and presented in a modest and heavily nuanced manner. With approximately 620 million people covering 4.5 million square kilometres, not to mention the multitude of languages, and the layers of historical kingdoms, the scope for comparative analysis beyond national boundaries is wide indeed.

This is because much of Southeast Asia has been studied through the lens of area studies. Area studies is broadly premised on the understanding that: firstly, regions with common characteristics can be identified and examined collectively; and, secondly, that regions should be studied in situ on the basis of detailed local knowledge. In truth, the concepts of the nation, state boundaries, ethnic and religious communities are essentially problematic.

However, while diversity must always remain a defining feature, there are several ideological and political experiences shared by many states in the region. Colonialization, whether by the British, Dutch, French or Spanish, is a deeply ingrained experience across many Southeast Asian countries. The region has been argued to be a construction by the colonial British as a specific area of military operations against the Japanese, while others have demonstrated that historical events like the Japanese invasion and the later nationalist-separatist movements during the period of decolonialization were markers of national and intra-regional identification.

This section, divided into three parts, offers excerpts from leading experts to demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of the region. Clearly the division is arbitrary not least because it is impossible to untangle societies from the economy and politics, and the dynamics of one must surely impact the others. However, for the sake of easy reference, comparative work on civil society, contestation of citizenship, national education, religion and the middle class come under the sub-section Southeast Asian Societies. Comparative work on urbanization, development and tourism come under The Southeast Asian Economy. Finally, the sub-section Southeast Asian Politics carries comparative work on democracy, ideology and accountability, and regional geopolitics.

Southeast Asia has secured over the past half century both a large measure of interstate peace and cooperation and a degree of autonomy from great powers outside the region that few observers had hoped for and scarcely any anticipated. Those have been coupled with a measure of economic and social development that, though far from equitable in its coverage and set back by a major crisis in the late 1990s, also indicated a remarkable transformation. A region of revolt had become a region that invited investment, though also speculation. To that the work of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) has made a substantial contribution. Many were disappointed with its slow progress towards the cooperative economic projects that it set out as its priority. What was achieved was what that vaunted priority in fact, by design or otherwise, tended to conceal, a practice of political collaboration that in the event was to open up much wider economic prospects.

By contrast to the European regional project, ASEAN was avowedly based on the nation-state. That was the prime source of its success, though some would also say its ultimate limitation. The region had come almost entirely under the formal rule of Western powers and been segmented into parts of their empires. Within the frontiers they had created or affirmed, however, their rule had come to be contested by a nationalism that they had also helped to create. Within the colonial states they built up, an alternative leadership offered the way to modernity. The destruction of the Western empires by the Japanese gave it, rather unwittingly, an opportunity it would not otherwise have had so soon or perhaps so amply. But its achievement, the winning of independence, was won piece-by-piece, colony by colony, and the new states, though claiming as modern states now did, to be nation-states, inherited the colonial frontiers. Just as the colonial states had little in common but their colonialism, those that replaced them had little in common but their nationalism. Any attempt to build regionalism had to take that into account.

Politically, the outside powers rather stood back from the region-building of the 1960s and 1970s, though the Soviet Union (SU) thought ASEAN was a US plot and it was indeed often presented as anti-communist, to some extent another piece of its own camouflage.