The Tragedy of the Southeast Asian Commons
Ritualism in ASEAN’s Response to the South China Sea Maritime Dispute
In: European Journal of East Asian StudiesThe South China Sea disputes have proven to be the most divisive issue in ASEAN. The collective decision-making of the ten member states towards the issue remains ineffective and this has often been attributed to their disunity. However, disunity in the ASEAN maritime commons is symptomatic of the underlying political culture in Southeast Asia. Using Lucian Pye’s analysis of power as ritual in Southeast Asian political culture, we can surmise that the disjuncture between the hopes for a definitive Code of Conduct and the resulting lack of consensus in the 2012 biannual ASEAN summit chaired by Cambodia concretised ritualism. This paper’s analysis focuses on how intra-ASEAN disagreement in resolving the South China Sea maritime dispute was compounded by Cambodia’s 2012 ASEAN chairmanship. It revealed that power as ritual reduces ASEAN integration into a temple in support of the secularised version of the cosmic order and thus tolerating its lack of pragmatic utility and efficiency.
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1
Garrett Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, Vol. 162 (December 1968), p. 1245.
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3
Jose T. Almonte, Toward One Southeast Asia (Quezon City, Philippines: Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, 2004), p. 197.
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4
Lucian Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (London: Belknap, 1985).
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32
Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
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40
Amitav Acharya, ‘Imagined proximities: the making and unmasking of Southeast Asia as a region’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol. 27 (1999), pp. 58–62.
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48
In the 1990s, the ASEAN Regional Forum was initiated by the ASEAN. It was formed in the context of the end of the Cold War which ‘left the Asia-Pacific searching for a new organizing principle for security’; Sheldon W. Simon, ‘Southeast Asian international relations: is there institutional traction?’ in Narayanan Ganesan, and Ramses Amer (eds), International Relations in Southeast Asia: Between Bilateralism and Multilateralism (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012), p. 50.
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50
De Castro, Decision Making in Regional Organization, p. 107. See also Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 55.
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The Tragedy of the Southeast Asian Commons
Ritualism in ASEAN’s Response to the South China Sea Maritime Dispute
In: European Journal of East Asian StudiesThe South China Sea disputes have proven to be the most divisive issue in ASEAN. The collective decision-making of the ten member states towards the issue remains ineffective and this has often been attributed to their disunity. However, disunity in the ASEAN maritime commons is symptomatic of the underlying political culture in Southeast Asia. Using Lucian Pye’s analysis of power as ritual in Southeast Asian political culture, we can surmise that the disjuncture between the hopes for a definitive Code of Conduct and the resulting lack of consensus in the 2012 biannual ASEAN summit chaired by Cambodia concretised ritualism. This paper’s analysis focuses on how intra-ASEAN disagreement in resolving the South China Sea maritime dispute was compounded by Cambodia’s 2012 ASEAN chairmanship. It revealed that power as ritual reduces ASEAN integration into a temple in support of the secularised version of the cosmic order and thus tolerating its lack of pragmatic utility and efficiency.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 416 | 92 | 4 |
| Full Text Views | 235 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 67 | 7 | 0 |