Sources of ASEAN’s Success and Emergence of Greater Eurasia

The article aims to identify and analyze factors behind the success of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) policy during its fifty-year history. Giving insights in the ASEAN approach to Southeast Asia’s international security challenges during the Cold War, the author then turns to ASEAN’s policy towards the establishment of Asia-Pacific multilateral dialogue platforms on security issues through the prism of identifying the external and internal prerequisites for its success. The article highlights the most important global and regional challenges that ASEAN is currently encountering, and its readiness to respond appropriately. Finally, the article focuses upon the degree of ASEAN’s relevance to its partners in terms of its potential contribution to the establishment of Greater Eurasia. In the author’s view, necessary preconditions for ASEAN’s successful policy are emerging there.

The relevance of the undertaken analysis rests upon ASEAN’s eagerness to raise its competitiveness against the downward trends in relations between global actors and the upcoming projection of their contradictions on the Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asia. Among the key reasons behind ASEAN’s successes and failures during and after the Cold War, the author identifies readiness of ASEAN’s partners to regard it as a unified entity, give it the privilege to moderate multilateral cooperation, and readiness of ASEAN itself to assume this mission. These three conditions predetermined ASEAN’s international policy success, mainly manifested by the resolution of the Cambodian issue and establishment of multilateral dialogue platforms in the Asia-Pacific region. Realizing that only the multipolar world gives it chances for a decent future and encountering the rise of conflict in the current global political and economic affairs with its projection on Southeast Asia, the Association aims to develop cooperation in Greater Eurasia. This corresponds to the priorities of ASEAN’s Eurasian partners over the establishment of a continental security, cooperation and co-development system, with ASEAN as an important actor. The presence of the three basic prerequisites for ASEAN’s high international competitiveness and their synergy give ample reasons to expect new ASEAN “success stories”, this time in Greater Eurasia.

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