The current situation and future trends of ASEAN STUDIES, from Cambodian perspectives

Abstract

Historically, ASEAN has overcome many obstacles before it gets the complete 10 countries in Southeast Asia as its members; as generally known, since its inception in 1967 it was influenced and torn apart by the world ideologies; it was never believed that it could become economically and politically independent. However, in the late 90s ASEAN was able to get all Southeast Asian countries to be its members and proved many success in politics and economics, becoming one of the leading regions in international arena.With this success, ASEAN leaders also positively believe and set the determination to completely integrate ASEAN into the single community in 2015; however, recently, many challenging issues appear to go against the belief; the problem of South China Sea, as you learned from the recent meeting in Cambodia, is one of the examples to reflect that ASEAN is not ready to work as the single entity to deal with the conflict; with their national interest, they struggle against one another to claim their own rights on the islands. Furthermore, the revival of US's interest into Southeast Asia also causes the concern among the Southeast Asian leaders that the possible competition between US and Chinese influence in the region might be happened and the independent stance of ASEAN might be affected. For example, the recent debate on NASA's proposal to use Utapao in Thailand, with whatever objectives NASA has, is also one of the alarming issues seen not only by other countries but also Thai people. Furthermore, the interstate conflicts between Cambodia and Thailand, the ethnic conflicts in Myanmar and Thailand, the imbalance of interstate trade, protectionism policies so on and so forth that could not be easily solved by the bilateral mechanism ASEAN proposes might give us the idea that complet integration in 2015 could not be materialised.