Asean Plus

PINOY KASI


Asean Plus
By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 10:34pm (Mla time) 01/18/2007

Published on page A13 of the January 19, 2007 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

LAST Wednesday, I wrote about the need for people in the region to better understand our common legacies, so we can move forward together. But Asean has remained on my mind since then, and I thought there was room for one more column to push for greater awareness of Asean.

How many Filipinos are aware, for example, of Asean efforts to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic, or to prepare for another more deadly outbreak of SARS, or of avian flu? What about joint efforts to control Islamist terrorism? How many avail of Asean university scholarships? Are we prepared for 2020, the target date for an Asean-wide policy of free movement of labor?

Expanding

We hear more about the European Union than Asean, and the gains made behind the scenes. We don’t hear enough, either about the Filipinos working for Asean, including Rodolfo Severino Jr., one of the former secretary-generals of Asean.

Asean was set up in 1967 with five founding members: Thailand (which hosted the first meeting), Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines. More than anything else, the association was an anti-communist alliance, spurred largely by the United States, which had gotten embroiled in the Vietnam War, and was worried about the communist giant in the north, China. Asean’s founding members themselves all had to deal with internal communist insurgencies, some of which had support from China.

Asean turns 40 this year and now has 10 members. Besides the five founding members, it now includes Brunei, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma (Myanmar). No longer an anti-communist alliance, Asean is perhaps the most diverse regional bloc in the world, the majority of members being liberal democracies with free market economies but the association now includes such members as its erstwhile nemesis Vietnam, still communist with a bustling free market economy, as well as Burma which is ruled by a military dictatorship.

Not only that, there’s Asean Plus 3, the three being China, Japan and South Korea. I marvel at how the three countries are able to meet, during Asean summits, to discuss their own internal agenda. In effect, Asean, a kind of younger sibling, hosts a more formidable East Asian bloc of elder (big?) brothers, including still another erstwhile enemy that used to be referred to with trepidation as “Red China” or the “yellow peril.”

There’s more. China, Japan and South Korea are also considered dialogue partners, together with seven others: the United States (said almost incidentally), Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and the European Union. In effect, Asean has expanded its reach to much of the world and, who knows, maybe in the future it will include the African and Latin American blocs as dialogue partners.

Glocalization

Asean has matured, taking its place in “glocalization.” That’s a hybrid word that originally referred to the way individual countries (the “local”) respond to globalization. For example, McDonald’s gave rise to local imitations like Jollibee and Mang Donald’s.

We could see Asean as the hub for regional glocalization. The more radical will say Asean has effectively been co-opted, transformed into a tool for capitalist globalization. I’d agree, but would argue that Asean has also created new opportunities for a glocalization process. The tensions in East Asia, for example, will have to be resolved in our part of the world, and not in Washington.

Asean Plus provides the environment for all these developments, but the extent to which individual countries benefit will still depend on each country’s government and citizens.

Let me use the manufacturing sector as an example. Nationalists used to complain about how countries like the United States dump their products on developing countries, but lately what we’ve been seeing are “Stateside” goods stamped “Made in China” as well as the Chinese’s own brand name products.

Today we’re also being flooded with Asean goods, the result in part of member-countries gradually lifting import tariffs on products made by its members. Who’s winning here? Asean countries that had enough foresight to develop a strong manufacturing sector that could move into the international market, starting with Southeast Asia. Check our supermarkets and our malls and you’ll find, again, “Stateside” goods made in Malaysia or Indonesia, as well as homegrown products such as cheaper versions of Tupperware from Thailand, dinnerware sets and glassware from Indonesia. We’re also importing an array of food products from Asean countries, from Vietnam’s nangka (jackfruit) chips to Thai patis (fish sauce).

Who’s losing? The countries with a weak manufacturing sector, the ones content to remain consumers and importers. Is it surprising that Filipino factories making plastics, furniture or even "patis" [fish sauce] are closing down, unable to innovate and to compete with Asean imports? I will confess to an addiction to Vietnamese nangka chips, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why we can’t produce our own and export them, too.

Free labor

We should also be preparing ourselves for 2020, when we move into a free movement of labor within Asean. Being mainly a labor-exporting country, we could probably cash in on that new policy, but it could work the other way around as well. I can imagine, for example, that as Filipino nurses abandon the Philippines, we might actually end up having to import nurses from, say, Vietnam.

The free-movement-of-labor policy will be preceded by regional moves to standardize training and qualifications. We’re already seeing other countries racing to improve their education standards, from English and Chinese language skills to high-tech science. By 2020, Filipinos might face stiff competition in the regional labor market.

Ironically, this early, our neighbors recognize that the Philippines has some of the skills and expertise they don’t have so they’re still sending students over to train with us, or pirating Filipino educators to teach, for example, in Singapore.

This isn’t a bad thing per se; over at the University of the Philippines (UP), for example, I have a project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation to train Southeast Asian health professionals and social scientists for research around sexuality and health issues. It brings in money to UP, but I am aware, too, that in the long run, we might see Vietnamese and Laotians overtaking us with research skills because their governments eventually take over, providing the institutional support for these scholars to conduct their own research and to train more scholars.

The people who nurtured Asean have been a pragmatic lot, modifying the organization to keep in line with changing global realities. Asean Plus has promise, but in the long run, some members will end up reaping more of these Plus benefits than others simply because they had a vision for 2020, and beyond.