Page 23 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Founding Ethical Enterprise

religions and politics of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
Further expansion reaching today’s ten nations significantly added further political
complexity with the communist states, military regimes and an absolute monarchy in
th
admitting Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. An 11 nation, Timor-
Leste, is on a fast track for official inclusion at this writing.
These additions made ASEAN less like the European Union and more like the United
Nations in terms of ethical diversity. We shall explore the strengths and weakness of this
diversity in describing the ethics of ASEAN and its ability to make decisions and take
action.
These eleven nations constitute both a geographical region called Southeast Asia as
well as a fully regional community of nations, ASEAN. In this book, I shall use “the region” to
mean Southeast Asia and ASEAN to refer to the organisation.
There is another dimension to the ethical mix of ASEAN which was predominant at
its founding and which has recently resurfaced as a major dilemma. That is the political
relationship of Southeast Asia to Cold War superpowers whose ethics are different and
compete in bidding for ASEAN to take sides.
Before the 20th century the experience of colonisation by European powers, going
back to the 16 century, had a strong influence on today’s ethics. The map below is a 19th
th
century snapshot of the mosaic of Southeast Asian colonies: you have British Burma,
Borneo, Malaya and Singapore (red), French Indochina (blue), Dutch East Indies (orange),
Spanish East Indies (yellow) and Portuguese Timor (green). Only Thailand (dark grey) had
3
avoided becoming the colony of a European power.

Figure 1: European colonisation of Southeast Asia (Wikipedia creative commons)

3 The Spanish East Indies was the name given to the Spanish Empire in Asia and Oceania, governed from Manila
from 1565 to 1901.

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