Professor Jörn Dosch

Professor Jörn Dosch in discussions about donor support for regional integration in Southeast Asia, Yogyakarta, December 2008.

Few realise that foreign donors currently disburse funds of at least $50 million annually on behalf of the integration of the Southeast Asian region. This amount is more than the triple the size of ASEAN’s official annual budget of US$14 million. Goals of this foreign support include speeding the establishment of a customs unit, strengthening regional intellectual-property regimes, and empowering civil society to further ASEAN’s plan to create a fully integrated regional community by 2015. For example, between 1996 and 2007 the EC disbursed nearly €100 million in ODA for several major projects to promote and foster ASEAN integration, ranging from capacity building programmes at the ASEAN Secretariat to the standardisation of national Intellectually Property Rights (IPR) regimes in ASEAN member states and harmonisation of customs procedures throughout Southeast Asia. In a similar vein, the “ASEAN-US Technical Assistance and Training Facility” alone has a budget of US$20 million for the period 2008-2012.

Few also realise the extent to which ASEAN’s far-reaching dependence on donor support - financial help and expert advice - has diminished the organisation’s ownership of the regional integration process. Foreign donors have begun to steer Southeast Asian regionalism.  

What motivations and assumptions inform the support of Southeast Asian integration by foreign donors? Do they cooperate - or compete - in pursuit of this goal? Do the projects they favor reflect one-size-fits-all formulas that neglect the extreme political and economic diversity of Southeast Asia? The project addresses these and other rarely asked questions that challenge the conventional image of ASEAN as a model of successful external diplomacy for regional development. It also challenges the dominant social constructivist view in the analysis of ASEAN that regional governance (the process of managing regional integration) in Southeast Asian is guided by a set of distinct regional norms (‘the ASEAN Way’).