ABSTRACT
In the time-honoured fashion, Asean has sought to fill its commercial emptiness with purposeful activity elsewhere. In particular it has puffed out its diplomatic agenda to fill the economic void. Enticed for several years into aiding ostensibly Asean-wide projects, such as a forestry project involving nationals from all the region, foreign donors quickly concluded that the individual Asean countries had no real intention of regionalising the projects. Asean’s most tangible achievement in trade has been the creation of ‘preferential trading arrangements’, covering an impressively long list of traded items attracting reduced tariff charges. A secret memo prepared for Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bali in May 1986 predicted that, ‘unless economic growth can be nurtured and developed, Asean support for democratic ideals and institutions may be undermined and can cause it to be vulnerable to external and internal threats’. In other words, regionalism may depend entirely on continuing founts of wealth flowing in from outside donors and outside markets.
