Page 153 - The Ethics of ASEAN

How to build a positive ethical future for ASEAN

Nations who held office for a record two terms. In the turbulent world of the 1960s Thant
facilitated negotiations to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, helped end the Arab-Israeli Six
Day War and worked to end the Vietnam War, even publicly criticising American unethical
conduct.
Ethical leadership in the early ASEAN period is not limited to politicians. It also
includes cultural leaders. One of the most important is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the
Indonesian novelist who wrote his Buru Quartet while imprisoned under Suharto on the
island of Buru. Thanks to the that epic novel of conscience, which was banned in Indonesia
until recently, Toer remained Southeast Asia’s author most often considered for the Nobel
Prize in Literature until his death in 2006. Ethical leaders from that period with careers in
academia, religion, business and civil society are too numerous to mention.
My point is that ASEAN’s next generation of leaders are standing on the shoulders of
giants, as the expression goes. These men and women went beyond the confines of their
nation and profession to embrace a broader vision and scope of action. What can we say
about the next generation of leaders?
With ASEAN’s growing importance in the world, ethical leaders will have ASEAN as
their ethical foundation on the world stage. It is no longer an aspiration although it is still
a work in progress. There are three reasons to be hopeful that ASEAN will produce a truly
world-class generation of ethical leaders in government, academia, religion, business
and civil society. First, ASEAN has more university students today as a percentage of the
ASEAN population and many of them will have studied and worked across ASEAN. Their
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ethics will be better informed and more cosmopolitan. Second, as today’s student leaders
show, the next generation will communicate across borders on social media platforms
and will be media savvy about bias and hate, falsification of facts and manipulation of
social values. As we saw in Part Two youth are aware and they want to take ethical action.
Remember that a third of ASEAN’s population is under the age of 20! Third, as these youth
enter the workforce, they will experience the rise in ethics in companies and professions
that we described in the dialogues, which means that leaders in organisations will be
trained and have codes of conduct in ethics.

Already today, we can see the shift towards rules-based ethics. In the ISEAS 2023
“State of Southeast Asia” survey, in answer to the question “Who do you have the most
confidence in to provide leadership to maintain the rules-based order and uphold
international law?” the rank of ASEAN increased from 16.8% in 2022 to 21% in 2023, in third
position after the USA and Europe.
While demographics and value trends are favourable, it is impossible to be really sure
of ASEAN’s ethical future. Uncertainty is higher today that at any time in ASEAN’s history.
In 2020 the International Monetary Fund created the first “uncertainty index” and tracked
uncertainty back through the previous 60 years of economic and political change by using
text analysis and other methods.
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4 State of Higher Education in Southeast Asia 2023 SHARE EU Support to Higher Education in the ASEAN Region,
Project Management Office Report https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/HE-in-SEA-FINAL.pdf
Retrieved 7 August 2023
5 60 years of Uncertainty by Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri, published March 2020 by the
International Monetary Fund https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2020/03/imf-launches-world-
uncertainty-index-wui-furceri retrieved 8 August 2023.

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