: ASEAN in the Global Power Structure
A study of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) provides an excellent window into the interrelationships between the United States (U.S.), Japan, and the ASEANÆs member countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. As the history of the organization unfolds, the complex interplay of political ideologies and hidden national agendas reveals that the U.S. and Japan had a substantially different purpose for their involvement in ASEAN than it at first appeared. ASEAN was superficially intended to be an organization that upholds Asian regionalism and reduces dependence on foreign powers and markets, but instead it has been used as a pawn in neoliberal globalization to expand JapanÆs industrialization and to serve as a strategic hedge against communist expansion for the hegemon, the U.S.
When ASEAN was first formed, the ASEAN member nations intended it to draw them together into a unified regionalist entity that would reduce dependence on foreign powers, particularly economically:
While the goal of the ASEAN member countries has been acquiring an ôAsian identityö and achieving regional economic cooperation, the objective of the United States has been largely strategic in nature (Mahapatra 1990: 6).
That strategic objective of the U.S., hidden from view, was to halt the spread of Communism. The U.S.Æs discreet involvement meant that ôASEAN is not purely an indigenous Asian regional organizationö (Mahapatra 1990: 76). The member nations were third world countries that had up to that time relied heavily on foreign markets, and one of the goals of regionalism was to combine the resources of the countries and convert them from five individual weak entities into one strong entity capable of standing on its own. This was an ambitious task, because
The economies of the individual ASEAN member countries were closely integrated with a world econo...