By NNN-Bernama
Singapore : Asean will not be able to meet the 2015 deadline to turn itself into a regional security community if some of its members are still not democratic, a security roundtable was told Thursday.
Prof Sorpong Peou of Tokyo Sophia University said to build a regional security community member states must be willing and able to demilitarise their national borders, institutionalise their dispute settlement mechanisms and build a strong sense of collective identity.
In order to take these three steps, the states involved in this process must be democratic states, and looking at the situation now, Asean still had a long way to go before it could realise the vision.
Sorpong was speaking at the Second Sentosa Roundtable on Asian Security 2008 organised by S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Singapore at the Sentosa Island resort here.
During the Asean Summit in Cebu, the Philippines, last year, Asean leaders agreed to embark on a project to turn themselves into a regional security community and had set 2015 as the deadline.
Sorpong said Asean must seek to promote democracy in non-democratic members or patiently wait until they become democratic as this was the key pillar for it to be a successful regional security grouping.
He said democratic states were better suited to comply with the norms of peaceful resolution than autocracies and could more easily see themselves as sharing a collective identity.
Sorpong urged Asean to be a pluralistic security community rather than an amalgamated one and learn from the Canadian-American experience of a pluralistic security community, which might prove to be far more realistic and pragmatic than the European Union’s (EU) amalgamated model
Asean should not seek to uncritically emulate the EU by doing things simultaneously such as building a security community, an economic community, a socio-cultural community and an East Asian community as the latter had succeeded in doing, Sorpong said.
Asean should not push too hard and too fast to harmonise or integrate their national policies, quickly coordinate their national activities and build a regional community in a matter of years when the proper conditions does not even exist yet, he said.