Page 26 - The Ethics of ASEAN

The Ethics of ASEAN

Figure 2: Contemporary map of ASEAN Member States (Wikipedia creative commons)

More than fifty years later, the ethic of merdeka persists as ASEAN carries out an
ambiguous dance of non-alignment with China, as it expands its influence through the Belt
and Road strategy, opposed by the American Indo-Pacific strategy supported militarily by
the Quad powers of USA, India, Japan and Australia.

Three Ethical Pillars
Many ethical dilemmas in ASEAN stem from the diverse political mix of its member states
today. They represent the widest possible variety of political systems: you have military
regimes, a Sultanate, Communist governments, one-party systems and a couple of multi-
party democracies.
Added to the political diversity are huge economic differences between, say,
Singapore with a per capita income of 59,797 USD according to World Bank figures
for 2020, compared to Cambodia’s 1,512 USD figure or the Indonesian part of Borneo,
Kalimantan, with its 583 USD per capita -- representing less than 1% of the income of
Singaporeans.
As ASEAN evolved, its activities broadened and so did its ethics, eventually separating
into three pillars 3 :
1. The ethics of security and political cooperation belong to the first pillar, called
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the ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC). ASEAN declared itself a
nuclear weapon-free region in 1995 affirming its ethic of peace.

7 A description of the APSC can be found on the ASEAN website https://asean.org/our-communities/asean-
political-security-community/ downloaded 30 January 2022

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