Page 33 - The Ethics of ASEAN

A Model of ASEAN Ethics

historical research describes Southeast Asian ethics historically as multicultural, open
and autonomous. The ASEAN Way, he claims, is a political ethic of dialogue and peace in
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managing regional power politics rooted in the Southeast Asian experience.
Regional ethics as a system becomes possible when a group of nations agree to
define together what is right and wrong, good and bad for themselves. With ASEAN, the
cultures of a geographical region are defined as a community and ethics becomes an
institutional enterprise. In using the word “enterprise” I underline that systematic ethics
constitutes an initiative that the ethical stakeholders of the region are in continuing
dialogue as ethical issues emerge.
Historically, Southeast Asian ethics were fragmented along the boundaries of
colonisation and ethics were alienated because Western powers halfway across the world
defined what was right and wrong, good and bad. Under colonial regimes, ethical dialogue
with locals as equals was eliminated and in some ASEAN colonies it was even forbidden to
speak the language of the Western masters.
Fighting for freedom from colonial domination became a shared experience in
establishing the virtue ethics of the new nations. But defining a common virtue ethics for
ASEAN was difficult.

The Debate over Asian Values

In the 1990s, at a time when membership of the ASEAN community reached ten countries,
the region was experiencing high economic growth. Some ASEAN leaders, notably
Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew and Malaysia’s Mahatir Mohammed, proclaimed a form of virtue
ethics by arguing that their economic success was due to “Asian Values.” These values
were supposedly different from the West and assumed to be consistent across Asia’s
diverse cultures, religions and political systems.
In order to portray these values as especially virtuous, it was also claimed that the
West was in decline due to excessive individualism and lack of moral discipline. The Asian
ethic, they claimed, was more effective for developing prosperity and social harmony. In
1993, Tommy Koh, Singapore’s former ambassador to the USA, wrote in the New York Times
that East Asians in particular valued the virtues of frugality and hard work. 6
He further claimed that East Asians had a different social contract from the West: they
accept that ethics should be “ensured” by the state and that freedom of the press should
not be an “absolute right.”

5 Wang Gu Wu was active in the first ASEAN think tank established in 1968, the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute where
he served as Director, then Chairman from 1997-2019. In his keynote lecture for the 50th year celebration of the
Institute’s founding, Wang explains why no regional structure was set up before the twentieth century and how
the ethical characteristics of Southeast Asia evolved into a regional construction: https://www.iseas.edu.sg/
media/video-gallery/50th-anniversary-public-lecture-before-southeast-asia-passages-and-terrains-by-prof-
wang-gungwu-2/ downloaded 2 February 2022 downloaded 2 February 2022
6 Tommy Koh described 10 East Asian values in an article for the New York Times published 11 December 1993:
“East Asians do not believe in the extreme form of individualism practiced in the West; East Asians believe in
strong families; East Asians revere education; East Asians believe in the virtues of saving and frugality; East
Asians consider hard work a virtue; East Asians practice national teamwork; there is an Asian version of a social
contract between the people and the state; In some Asian countries, governments have sought to make every
citizen a stakeholder in the country; East Asians want their governments to maintain a morally wholesome
environment in which to bring up their children; good governments in East Asia want a free press but, unlike the
West, they do not believe that such freedom is an absolute right.”

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