ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relationship between two trends to better understand how the reforms of ASEAN developed socialisation pressure on Myanmar. While, especially for Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the role of member states is always of central importance in explaining the actions of the regional organisation, it is possible to argue that ASEAN itself was the agent pressuring Myanmar. Constructive engagement was inaugurated at the 24th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) held in Kuala Lumpur in July 1991 in response to the failure of SLORC to recognise the 1990 election results in Myanmar. The chapter notes that Mahathir had told Myanmar’s junta that they had become ‘an embarrassment to ASEAN’ as early as 2000. Rhetorical action and social sanctioning, both construed as part of a broader rationalist account of bargaining, have, since the turn of the millennium, come to the fore as socialisation processes resting on the evolving standards that organisation-building has created.
