The 2 ASEANs must meet

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Mar 11, 2013

Are we, ASEAN citizens, and are the states of ASEAN, ready for multiple citizenship?

Farish A. Noor, Rappler

During my student days in England, I saw an advertising campaign by a certain commercial airline. The slogan read: “XYZ Airlines, Bringing the World Together.” It was accompanied by images of people from all over the world, who were presumably now connected thanks to the wonder of modern aviation technology: There was an image of an American farmer, and next to him an Indian farmer.

I recall how I reacted to this image with a combination of bemusement and cynicism. For it struck me there and then that the promise of globalization was a delicious lie. The farmer from America could perhaps afford to fly to India to have a cup of tea with some Indian agriculturalists, but it would be a long time before an Indian farmer could afford to fly to Texas to share some tacos with his American counterparts. And even if he could afford it, he probably would have been denied a tourist visa, on the grounds that he may have been an economic migrant.

That’s the reality of capital-driven globalization, and it sucks.

It ain’t new, this Globalization Thingy.

As a lecturer of Southeast Asian politics and history I constantly find myself warning my students not to use trendy terms. Among the terms I loathe the most is “globalization” because it is such a prissy, self-conscious, oh-am-I-not-too-sexy-for-my-shirt sort of term. The word has been bandied about so much by now that it is old hat, and yet for so many people it sells itself as something novel and exciting, when in fact it is not.

When people talk about globalization in Southeast Asia today, they seem to have conveniently forgotten the facts of 2,000 years of recorded history. We talk about globalization as if it is only now – today – that we realize that we live in a crowded Southeast Asia with neighbors all around us.

But this impression merely underscores the fact that our consciousness, epistemologies and vocabularies have been so deeply marked and shaped by the colonial encounter and the regime of the political border. It is only because we – the ASEAN citizens of the postcolonial era – have no tactile memory of the precolonial past of our region that we think that being able to hop on a plane from Manila to Singapore, to Kuala Lumpur, to Jakarta, to Bali is such a funky experience.

Well, let the historians remind you that centuries ago our ancestors were a million times funkier than we are today, as they lived in a world without passports. (Yes, Bob Marley’s Utopian world can be backdated that far.)

Oosokan Bay Borneo as depicted in this illustration from F. Marryat’s Borneo and the East Indian Archipelago (1848)

If we were really honest with ourselves, and comfortable and confident enough to accept our mottled past, most of us would admit to having such mixed, multiple origins too. Scratch the skin of any Southeast Asian and one would find the multiple, overlapping bloodlines and personal narratives of all of Asia beneath. Yet the impact of Empire, and the advent of the modern (post)colonial state, has rendered us boxed-in, compartmentalized, classified and registered subjectivities.

Living as we do in the postcolonial age as both modern citizen-subjects and inheritors of a premodern fluid past, no wonder these tensions come to the surface once in a while. And recently it did so with a vengeance.

More Sulus to come

What the Sulu-Sabah debacle has done is bring to the fore what can only be described as the growing gap between two virtual ASEANs: On the one hand an ASEAN that is connected via the modern communicative infrastructure that is used by the region’s technocrats, business elites, middle-class professionals and globe-trotters who can afford to fly; and, on the other hand, an ASEAN that is populated by hundreds of millions of other ASEAN citizens who may feel that the capital-driven march towards globalization has left them behind.

In the case of the former, we see the emergence of a new generation of ASEAN-minded citizens whose sense of belonging across the region is rendered all the more comfortable by the poolside bar and their sushi power-lunches; in the case of the latter their dreams of becoming global citizens extend only as far as the gated compounds of the rich which they cannot ever penetrate, and the cold glass window of the shopping malls brimming with luxury goods they can never afford.

Somehow, the nation-states of ASEAN need to bring these two communities together, lest we end up living in a bifurcated ASEAN divided against itself.

I am not condemning ASEAN here, for I consider myself a committed ASEAN-ist. And while there are those who think that ASEAN has gone past its sell-by date and has nothing left to offer, I would beg to differ. For all of ASEAN’s failings, weaknesses and internal contradictions; it did do what it set out to do, which is to prevent wars between states from 1967 until today.

Look across the globe today and we will see that ASEAN and the European Union are perhaps the only multi-national bodies that have managed to prevent conflict when so many other regions were blighted.

But unlike the EU, the convoy of states that make up the ASEAN flotilla is a diverse one indeed. For a start, there remain enormous differentials in terms of GDP and income levels across the region. Then there remains the fact that structurally the nation-states that make up the ASEAN flotilla are so very different too, ranging from republics with centralised rule, monarchies, constitutional monarchies and federations.

The very fact that the ships of the ASEAN flotilla have managed in sail in more or less the same direction for more than four and a half decades is, for me, an achievement in itself.

But from the very beginning until now, ASEAN has been made up of nation-states whose cordial relations were maintained only because these were states that were interacting with each other according to well-established norms of diplomacy and statecraft.