ASEAN is close to my heart. My first trip out of the country was to visit ASEAN universities as part of a delegation from the UP Student Council in the summer of 1969.
Led by the late Jerry Barican, who became Student Council chairman, our group witnessed firsthand the growing pains of ASEAN.
When we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, the Philippines didn’t have diplomatic ties with Malaysia. But we received the warmest welcome in the entire trip from our counterparts at the Universiti Malaya.
We spent ten days there and traveled all the way to Penang with Malaysian student leaders. I vaguely remember that one of the Malaysian student leaders at that time was Anwar Ibrahim, the current Prime Minister.
ASEAN was formally organized on Aug. 8, 1967 with the signing of the ASEAN Declaration, born during a turbulent time in the region marked by severe distrust among the Southeast Asian nations.
There was the Indonesia-Malaysia conflict or Konfrontasi, Indonesian president Sukarno’s undeclared war against Malaysia.
Then there was the toxic relationship between the Philippines and Malaysia over Sabah.
Before ASEAN, there were two failed attempts at regional groupings.
By 1964, the region was on the brink of total war. Then the geopolitical landscape changed dramatically between 1965 and 1966. In Indonesia, Sukarno was pushed aside, and General Suharto took control and ended Konfrontasi.
In the Philippines, president Ferdinand Marcos agreed to temporarily shelve the Sabah claim to rebuild relations with Kuala Lumpur.
By 1967, ASEAN’s five founding foreign ministers — Adam Malik (Indonesia), Narciso Ramos (Philippines), Tun Abdul Razak (Malaysia), S. Rajaratnam (Singapore) and Thanat Khoman (Thailand) met in Thailand and agreed they had bigger problems that needed regional cooperation.
First was fear of communism or the Domino Theory. The Vietnam War was escalating rapidly right on their doorstep. All five founding regimes were staunchly anti-communist. They feared that domestic communist insurgencies would swallow their newly independent nations if they remained fractured.
They formed ASEAN as a neutral venue where they could sit together peacefully. Thus, ASEAN has vague, benign goals like “economic, social and cultural cooperation.”
ASEAN’s historical trauma explains why the “ASEAN Way” of strict non-interference and consensus-seeking exists today. In 1967, it was the only way to get bitter adversaries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines into the same room.
To keep the peace, they agreed never to comment on each other’s domestic issues or push a neighbor into a corner. The ASEAN Way prevented war but it resulted in the frustrating institutional paralysis we see today.
ASEAN’s formation did not thaw the diplomatic freeze between the Philippines and Malaysia. By November 1968, both countries closed their respective embassies.
The ice finally broke at the Third ASEAN Ministerial Meeting held in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, in mid-December 1969. The two men who got them talking again were Malaysian prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and Philippine foreign secretary Carlos Romulo.
They agreed to a modus vivendi: they would restore ambassadors and cooperate on regional matters, but the Philippines would not explicitly drop its legal claim to Sabah and Malaysia would simply ignore it.
After about 60 years, has ASEAN proven its worth?
For nationals of ASEAN countries, they can now travel visa-free to other member countries.
Tariffs have been virtually eliminated. Customs integration under the ASEAN Single Window has reduced cargo clearance times from days to mere hours, saving cross-border logistics companies millions of dollars annually in administrative and storage costs.
To facilitate professional mobility, ASEAN has established Mutual Recognition Arrangements in engineering, nursing, architectural, medical, dental and tourism sectors. It is however, not a completely open labor market like the EU.
Then there is the Open Skies Policy creating an ASEAN Single Aviation Market, effectively deregulating regional air travel. This legal framework allowed home-grown budget airlines like AirAsia and Cebu Pacific to rapidly expand across borders, dramatically dropping the cost of flights for ordinary travelers.
But on some really important matters, the ASEAN Way has failed to resolve persistent problems like the annual haze crisis in Indonesia that affects Singapore and Malaysia.
It didn’t help that ASEAN actually has a specific treaty for this: the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution. However, the treaty is structurally flawed because it is built entirely on the “ASEAN Way.”
This crisis proves that ASEAN is an arena of convenience. When shared interests align (like reducing tariffs to build regional supply chains), the bloc functions effectively. But when a crisis forces a choice between national economic interests and regional harmony, national sovereignty wins every time.
ASEAN’s most significant failure is its inability to negotiate a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea. This process has languished for decades. Yet, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam share the Philippines’ frustrations with China’s nine-dash line.
Even today, as the Philippines wraps up its 2026 ASEAN chairmanship in Manila, negotiators admit that the bloc and China will miss their self-imposed end-of-year deadline to finalize the pact. Officials report that roughly 70 percent of the text is agreed upon, leaving the hardest 30 percent stalled.
Strangely, the world seems to be taking ASEAN seriously. The United States, China, Japan, India and the European Union come to Southeast Asia every year and engage ASEAN.
By keeping ten diverse nations talking instead of fighting, ASEAN has provided the essential baseline of peace that allowed Southeast Asia to prosper.
So, ASEAN remains something nice to have but don’t expect too much. The ASEAN Way sees to that.
Boo Chanco’s email address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on X @boochanco