ABSTRACT
The main issue attributes of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are distrust among members (and with other states) and lack of agreement over economic cooperation. The main organizational attribute is its informality. ASEAN, established in 1967, is known as a regional organization that is barely bureaucratic, given the salience of “Asian values” and the consensus-oriented “ASEAN way of working.” It is described as “a loosely structured association rather than a formal organization” (Thambipillai 1994: 105). Others even claim that “informal integration” is the major form of regional cooperation in Asia (Eliassen and Monsen 2001: 121). Because ASEAN’s member states, or “principals,” are dominant and have adequate means for overseeing the actions of their “agent,” the ASEAN secretariat and its secretary-general are considered weak and scarcely present. Given these issue and organizational attributes it is difficult to expect the ASEAN secretariat to play a role of its own, either externally by being a recognizable entity with initiatives or organizational preferences, or internally by pursuing its own interests in terms of functions or careers. This chapter will explore whether ASEAN is as informal as is
claimed. Formal organizations in international relations are purposive entities, capable of monitoring activity and of reacting to it, deliberately set up and designed by states. They are bureaucratic, with explicit rules and the specific assignment of rules to individuals and groups (Keohane 1989: 3-4). The article will first look at ASEAN’s two major
regimes (security and economics) to see to what extent governments have built a formal organization. It does so from a perspective that focuses first on governments and their cooperation. The article then includes the internal workings of ASEAN in its perspective, by tracing the emergence and evolution of its secretariat in order to find out what role it has played in the regimes described earlier and to see to what degree ASEAN is bureaucratic and has (potential) agency through its secretariat. While regimes are characterized by explicit rules agreed upon by governments, the term institutionalization is used as an indication of organization building, in particular by providing continuity and assigning this task to a specific body, which in international organizations (IOs) is usually the permanent secretariat. The conclusion is that the informality claim is no longer valid, as by now ASEAN has a clearly described organizational set-up and the ASEAN secretariat has shown (unforeseen) agency as a global negotiator representing ASEAN. This article presents empirical data needed to understand how
ASEAN slowly, and hardly noticed, grew into a regional security and economic organization with an active international secretariat without which the 10 Asian member states can no longer manage all important issues in international relations. Various developments resulted in a window of opportunity in which the secretariat, on its own volition, created for itself a function that member states had not originally intended. For this analysis official documents and literature on ASEAN are used (see Appendix 1 for the agreements on the ASEAN secretariat concluded between 1967 and 2007; all ASEAN documents are in English and available at www.aseansec.org).
