Development gaps and how to get people involved present major challenges to Southeast Asia' s integration process. Realizing that solutions to the problems lie at the core of ASEAN's aspiration to establish a community, the bloc's leaders spelled out concrete measures at their 14th summit in efforts to cope with them.

Narrowing development divides

Given that ASEAN has advanced its community building schedule from 2020 to 2015, bridging development gaps among ASEAN members has become even more urgent.

According to the signed declaration on roadmap for ASEAN community issued after the summit, the ASEAN leaders emphasized "narrowing the development gap shall remain an important task to ensure the benefits of ASEAN integration are fully realized through effective implementation of the Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI) and other sub-regional framework."

The IAI is a mechanism announced in 2000 for ASEAN's six more developed countries (ASEAN-6) to help the other four less developed ones, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV). During the first IAI period from 2002 to 2008, 191 million U.S. dollars of investment were attracted from ASEAN-6 as well as 20 million from dialogue partners and other agencies.

For the second IAI period from 2009 to 2015, the leaders pledged to be more responsive to CLMV's needs and to make intensified efforts to help the CLMV in intra-ASEAN trade expansion, competition policy, intellectual property rights protection and infrastructure development.

"Each country's leader must be aware that the cooperation of 10 countries will boost the region's economies... It's much difficult for each country to grow by itself, so we need to turn it into action as soon as possible," Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Korbsak Sabhavasu, whose country currently holds the rotating ASEAN chair, said at the ASEAN Business and Investment Summit in Bangkok on Friday.

Analysts said with their more developed status, the ASEAN-6 countries are in a comparatively advantaged position to attract investment from dialogue partners and other organizations. By encouraging ASEAN-6 to help those less developed members, ASEAN could present to the outside world an image of doing something for itself and of ASEAN members helping each other, and therefore attract more support and aid. This would help the bloc speed up its integration process and ensure all ASEAN members to move forward in a unified manner and all benefits from the process to be shared.

Getting people involved

Under this summit's theme of "ASEAN Charter for ASEAN People", the newly-effective ASEAN Charter envisages to reinvent the grouping into a people-centered bloc by forging a common identity, which, as ASEAN leaders stressed, forms the basis of Southeast Asia's regional interests.

An "ASEAN citizen" was among the most frequently used words in Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's address to the summit's opening ceremony, but some analysts showed concerns that the vast majority of the so-called ASEAN citizens neither had any meaningful participation in the charter-drafting process nor were they in a position to endorse or reject the document, which, they said, would lead to a lack of ownership feeling as they were not given opportunities to be involved from the beginning.

To disperse such doubts, ASEAN leaders agreed to establish a special platform where representatives from various social fields can engage in ASEAN's community building. To begin with, ASEAN took this year's summit as an opportunity to gradually depart from being a grouping whose work revolves only around government officials. It reached out to people from various sectors of the society. On the sidelines of the summit, ASEAN leaders met with representatives from parliaments, youth groups, civil society organizations and the private sectors, inviting them to input wisdom to the bloc's integration process.

Analysts said promoting a common identity would help ASEAN get more support from grassroots levels. With the bonding power of an ASEAN citizenship, ASEAN would keep itself relevant among average people, which would in turn help the grouping transform its aspirations into concrete activities.

(Xinhua News Agency March 2, 2009)