ABSTRACT
In order to assess ASEAN’s regionalist project, the book has sought to delineate the character of ASEAN, and the level of complex integration associated with it, by way of an investigation of a broad spectrum of historical considerations and contemporary challenges. As a complement to this approach, extensive fieldwork has also been undertaken involving over 150 in-depth interviews and two separate survey designs with 919 participants. The exacting nature of the critique provided in this chapter (and in the body of the work) has been invited by the relatively high and ambitious benchmarks set by ASEAN in its declaration to forge an ‘ASEAN community’ (including a ‘security community’) by 2015. Consequently, the first section of this chapter provides a concluding analysis of the material covered in previous chapters in order to assess ASEAN’s record of cooperation, the impact of different values, and the implications for supranational institutionalization. Given the continuation of a scholarly debate about the effectiveness of ASEAN, the second section also provides a concluding assessment concerning how ASEAN should be characterized and the associated level of complex integration. These considerations, moreover, also inform an analysis of the likely political-security, economic and socio-cultural trends in Southeast Asia, including the extent to which ASEAN might shape Southeast Asia’s regional order in the future. Nonetheless, based on a medium-low level of complex integration in Southeast Asia, the chapter concludes that it will be several more decades before it will be possible for ASEAN’s regionalist visions to be realized.
