“Dialogue Partnerships” in ASEAN’s External Relations

The association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is one of the oldest integration institutions in the world focused on the regional political, economic and socio-cultural issues. From 1999 onwards ASEAN has united under its auspices all ten countries of Southeast Asia. Theoretically speaking, this fact creates necessary preconditions for productive discussions of all regional cooperation issues because no regional actor is left outside regional interaction and can voice concerns at the regional level. The Association has no plans to expand its membership further, beyond Southeast Asia. However since 1970s “functional expansion” has become a distinguishing feature of ASEAN. Nowadays it envisages that the Association, not expanding formally, nevertheless establishes special frameworks (dialogue partnerships) for interaction with a number of important macroregional and extraregional players. This article analyzes the phenomena of “functional expansion” in ASEAN activities and the significance of dialogue partnerships for ASEAN today. ASEAN’s fiftieth anniversary thus provides a good opportunity, on one hand, to perform a retrospective analysis and, on the other hand, to appraise ASEAN’s current policy in the region in the context of its interaction with other major international players. Referring to the extensive ASEAN-focused research literature and official documents, this article argues that for the past five decades ASEAN member states have passed through several periods of interaction with these kind of players. ASEAN started by mastering the ability to neutralize external leadership impulses towards the region and gradually moved towards working out its own institutional and normative instruments of managing its external relationships. This system of management, however, is not without its own limitations. Structurally the article refers to the historical retrospective of ASEAN’s relations with external players at various stages of the Association’s own development, analyses the current state of these relations and their functions for ASEAN external policy and finally focuses on the ways ASEAN is trying to manage and influence these relations in the way beneficial for the Association.

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