Posted on 10 October 2012
The Academy of Global Governance has held a three-day executive training on regional integration, shining the spotlight on Latin American and Asia.
The free event, from 3 to 5 October, brought together academics and practitioners to share their experiences of Mercosur and UNASUR, economic and political unions in the Americas; and ASEAN which promotes more wide-reaching integration in South East Asia.
Among the speakers was Rodolfo Severino, head of the ASEAN Studies Centre and former secretary-general of ASEAN. Well-versed in the European model, he said examining regional bodies in Latin America was especially valuable and much could be learnt from the different approaches to integration.
Rather than sharing experiences, Severino said common practice was to wrongly compare associations such as ASEAN directly to the EU. “There’s a tendency to measure ASEAN against the EU and I think that’s both flattery and being unfair,” he said, “Flattery because it seems that ASEAN has gotten to such an advanced stage that it’s capable of being compared to the EU, but unfair because South East Asia will never be like Europe or the ASEAN Secretariat like the EU Commission.”
The organiser of the training, Carlos Closa from the CSIC Institute for Public Goods and Policies in Madrid, agreed that while Latin America and Asia were strong in terms of regionalism, they were vastly different to Europe in terms of their starting points and development levels.
Severino said comparisons should not detract from ASEANs main accomplishments: “Even today I think that the political peace and stability and the political relationships are the supreme achievement of ASEAN and it should be on that that ASEAN should be judged rather than on whether it has achieved economic integration.”
Although economic policy is now firmly on the agenda at ASEAN, Severino maintained that peace and stability remain the association’s main concerns. “The main threat [to ASEAN] is territorial disputes which affect the ability of countries to integrate their economies with one another. In order for economies to be integrated you need mutual trust to some extent, because you cannot depend on laws all of the time,” he said. The region remains rife with clashes over land and sea borders, from the Malaysia/Singapore dispute which was taken to the International Court of Justice to tensions over the South China Sea between ASEAN’s northern neighbours.
Severino advocated an informal approach to overcoming regional difficulties, based on personal contact and friendships. While leaders within ASEAN have much to learn from the EU and Mercosur, such as dealing with transnational crime and infrastructure, it is the value of informality he hoped could be replicated outside of South East Asia.
For Closa, who is currently a research project coordinator at the Global Governance Programme, the aim of the training was to have participants draw ideas such as these from each other, rather than create an ideal model for regional integration. “We are making it easier for people to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and look at the world through the lenses of different actors,” he said.
In 2013 he intends to broaden the range of perspectives further by including African schemes, such as West African ECOWAS and the East African Community.
(Text by Rosie Scammell)