4 results
Foreword
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- By Dr Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN
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- Book:
- ASEAN
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 12 May 2010, pp vii-viii
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Summary
ASEAN is at an exciting phase of its development. It has started to grapple with the meaning, implications and the implementation issues pertaining to the newly adopted ASEAN Charter. Concurrently, ASEAN is working intensively on integrationrelated economic issues for the creation of the ASEAN Economic Community by 2015. This is the first book which contains an indepth analysis of aspects of the new ASEAN Charter and the trade in goods and the comprehensive investment agreements ASEAN has recently completed. The book deals with the key areas of legal personality conferred on ASEAN by the Charter; the legislation and other measures required by ASEAN member states to comply with the Charter; and the plan, progress and related issues relating to ASEAN's new trade in goods and comprehensive investment agreements. The book also highlights policy issues for consideration by ASEAN policy-makers. The book is edited by S. Tiwari, the former Head of the International Law Division in Singapore's Attorney-General's Chambers and currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ISEAS. He was extensively involved in many aspects of ASEAN-related work, including negotiating and drafting of its key trade, investment and dispute settlement-related instruments.
2 - Perspectives on Korea's Role in ASEAN
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- By H.E. Surin Pitsuwan, Thammasat University
- Edited by David I. Steinberg
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- Book:
- Korea's Changing Roles in Southeast Asia
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 12 February 2010, pp 24-30
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Summary
Thank you very much, Prime Minister Lee Hong-Koo. I am surprised that you remember all those things that I have done. Even I forget them sometimes. Good morning, Dr Reed, the representative of The Asia Foundation here in Korea, and Professor Kim Woo-sang of the Institute of East and West Studies, Yonsei University.
Certainly, thank you very much, Vice Minister Kwon Jong-rak of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Republic of Korea. Distinguished guests, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is, indeed, a great privilege for me to be in Seoul as the Secretary-General of ASEAN, and it is my first visit here in this capacity.
Korea is a very, very important Dialogue Partner, one of the three in the ASEAN+3, which is a very unique group of countries and peoples who have decided to come together as a result of the financial crisis back in 1997. Former Prime Minister Lee introduced me as taking the helm of the Foreign Ministry in late 1997, but I do not want you to have the wrong impression that I engineered the financial crisis. We came into government as a result of the crisis because the previous government who caused it gave up. But we realized from that crisis, which occurred in early July 1997, that really we were more integrated, we were more connected than we realized, than we were aware of. Because it first occurred in Bangkok. The next day it was Malaysia. The next week it was Indonesia, and the next week it was the Philippines and not very long after that it was South Korea.
Japan was large enough to absorb the impact. China was big enough to sustain the blow. But South Korea was very much affected. So a sense of community really emerged then. It was the first time that Former Prime Minister Mahathir called a meeting of his initiative. If you recall, this was the EAEC [East Asia Economic Community], which had been opposed quite actively by other powers outside the region.
Foreword
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- By Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN
- Edited by Michael G. Plummer, Siow Yue Chia
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- Book:
- Realizing the ASEAN Economic Community
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2009, pp xiii-xiv
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Summary
It has always been my cherished belief that if ASEAN succeeds, it will bring about positive consequences for ASEAN and the entire global community.
The ASEAN Economic Community is one of the three pillars of the envisaged ASEAN Community by 2015, which also comprises the ASEAN Political-Security Community and the ASEAN Socio- Cultural Community. Using the analogy of interlocking threads which hold a piece of fabric together, building an ASEAN Economic Community that provides economic stability and ensures continued economic growth will contribute towards peace, security and social progress, and thereby connect the region together.
ASEAN is weaving this piece of fabric based on the design of the ASEAN Charter and the Roadmap for an ASEAN Community (2009–2015). This book Realizing the ASEAN Economic Community: A Comprehensive Assessment attempts to communicate potentials, opportunities and challenges of community building to our people. It brings the vision of an ASEAN Economic Community to life by expressing it in concrete terms so that stakeholders such as the private sector and the consumers can identify with it and see the impacts that it can potentially make. More importantly, I hope that each stakeholder will assist in weaving this tapestry of the ASEAN Economic Community together.
For this, I am grateful to the US Agency for International Development and the US Department of State sponsored ASEAN-US Technical Assistance and Training Facility, and the various contributors who responded to the ASEAN Secretariat's request and made this book possible. This book reveals that the ASEAN Economic Community, if realized, will bring about an increase in economic welfare and real income in ASEAN and all member states will stand to benefit. While regional economic integration can create short-term adjustment costs, these costs should be more than offset by the benefits generated by well-targeted reforms in the longer term.
I hope that this book will strengthen our conviction that the ASEAN Economic Community will bring about a more prosperous, stable, competitive and equitable ASEAN.
Foreword
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- By Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General, Association of Southeast Asian Nations
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- Book:
- Hard Choices
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 21 October 2015
- Print publication:
- 30 December 2008, pp xix-xxii
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Summary
In writing this preface I feel as if I were briefly back in a previous life, the life of an academic with the luxury of time—time to read and think and write books like Hard Choices.
In the first seven months of my term as ASEAN Secretary-General, I have been constantly in motion, trying to meet numerous commitments in ASEAN and elsewhere. Cyclone Nargis, which devastated Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta in early May 2008, suddenly thrust both ASEAN and me into the international spotlight. We have had to help the government of Myanmar help the cyclone survivors in a massive humanitarian operation that is unprecedented in the more than forty years of ASEAN's history to date. The Nargis operation constituted yet another challenge to ASEAN's lengthening agenda. It has also multiplied the flights I have to take, the meetings and negotiations I pursue, and the new commitments to request and to make. In addition to the region's economic plans and challenges, it is as if I have been living, on a daily basis, the topics of this book-security, democracy, and regionalism in Southeast Asia.
I am glad that the authors of Hard Choices pay major attention to nontraditional security (NTS). The new regionalism in Southeast Asia is not only about free trade and economic engagements with external trading partners. This new regionalism is about community-building in ASEAN. It is about narrowing the development gaps and removing pockets of poverty. It also involves mobilizing regional efforts and international support to cope with new and NTS challenges.
The nature of insecurity in Southeast Asia has undergone great changes in recent decades. New kinds of dangers have arisen that cannot be solved by governments alone. These threats have taken root in the cracks between sovereignties, the spaces between states. Major natural disasters, global warming, cross-border pollution, infectious disease, and international crime are just a few examples.