Ineffectual Laos Shows ASEAN’s Limits On Myanmar Conflict – Analysis

By David Hutt

When Laos took over the ASEAN chairmanship this year, it was predictable that it would steer the 10-member regional bloc away from controversy, doing and saying very little about the ongoing Myanmar conflict or China’s attacks on ASEAN members in the South China Sea, to focus on the economic and technology agreements that members prefer.

Part of this predictability was because Laos is one of the few states in the region that accepts its own diplomatic limitationsandthose of ASEAN.

It may indeed be parochial, but there is a degree of honesty in Vientiane’s intimation that the regional bloc really just wants to get the Myanmar crisis off the agenda and shouldn’t be involving itself in national crises or regional disputes that it was never designed to resolve.

Laos’ message may also have been that If others within ASEAN want the bloc to become more interventionist, they shouldn’t have expected that transformation during the revolving one-year chairmanship of the region’s most hermetic state.

If there is one purpose of the bloc beyond its internal markets, it is to communicate Southeast Asia’s viewpoint to outside powers and to allow outside powers to explain theirs to the region.

This is ever more important as international consensus narrows and the means for international disputation move closer to the violent and further away from the diplomatic.

At least for a few days each year, senior officials from China, the U.S., Russia and Japan attend the annual ASEAN and East Asia Summits, meetings where those powers do not set the agenda.

Lip service

However, ASEAN’s strengths do not lie in making black-and-white calls over issues that none of its members can agree on. It is a gentlemen's club wrapped up in geopolitical finery; it functions because of the strength of its individual members and not the organization's institutional capacity.

Take the Myanmar crisis.

ASEAN became the convenient fall guy for the rest of the world as soon as it was apparent the Myanmar coup leaders couldn’t consolidate power after their February 2021 putsch.

Neither the U.S. nor China wanted to intervene in the Myanmar crisis, aware that there would be no quick fix to multiple political, ethnic, and national conflicts all happening at the same time. Washington and Beijing have opposing objectives and, as it turns out, not as much leverage within Myanmar as they might have hoped for.

Yet the rest of the world knew it neededsome response, so it looked around in 2021 and saw a two-birds-one-stone opportunity: the response would be to support an ASEAN-led solution. This not only allowed outside powers to pay lip service to ASEAN centrality; it also meant that they could disguise inaction with multilateralism.

ASEAN was happy to occupy this role at first. Three years on, there is now an audible lament, including by many within the bloc, that much more should have been done.

Some of that lament sounds a lot like self-pity.

ASEAN-plus response

Yes, a tyranny was wrought upon the Burmese people – by a junta that most Southeast Asian governments would have happily gotten along with had it managed to consolidate power within a few days of its coup.

But there was also an opportunity for Southeast Asian governments to flex their muscles on the world stage; an opportunity to show the United States and China that they could keep their own house in order.

ASEAN’s mistake was to confuse flummery for fortitude. If more humble, it would have been aware of its limitations and stated from the outset that it would spearhead a response to the Myanmar crisisonly ifthe United States, China, the EU, Japan and India were co-signatories and jointly responsible for its implementation.

Such an “ASEAN-plus” response would have given measures like the 2021 Five-Point Plan more credence in Naypyidaw and compelled the outside powers to lift a finger and share the burden and blame.

It would be honest and perhaps a little courageous if ASEAN were now to say out loud that it lacks the ability to take the lead on the Myanmar situation, and it will only attempt a new approach if outside powers are co-signatories and co-enforcers.

This might prevent China from being the one external country that is influencing events on the ground. It could also force the U.S., EU, Japan and Australia to more strongly make the case for a democratic alternative in Myanmar.

And it might spare the Myanmar people from eventually being thrown under the bus when ASEAN embraces the junta, and then vicariously declares their revolution to be over.

• David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. He writes the Watching Europe In Southeast Asia newsletter. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.