ASEAN's New Challenges

wEW would dispute that ASEAN has emerged as the most successful case of l regionalism outside Europe. When it was formed on 8 August 1967, however, its future appeared uncertain against a backdrop of regional conflict and confrontation. Communism and, in particular, the threat posed by a united Vietnam after 1975, was an external challenge which galvanized ASEAN and strengthened its cohesion. Singapore's minister of Information and Arts, George Yeo, once declared that without the Vietnamese threat, it is doubtful that ASEAN would have become the regional grouping it is today.' The organization developed characteristics that were associated with successful regionalism including, above all, a consensus decision-making mechanism which in the most critical issues gave priority to the collective interest over the individual interests of members. The maintenance of the collective interest in the face of the external challenge of communism was a major success for ASEAN which strengthened its diplomatic cohesion accordingly.2 Today ASEAN faces new challenges that will test its cohesion in other ways, and which will demand changes in the way Southeast Asian regionalism has been habitually viewed. In theoretical terms the pressures that ASEAN faces today could be depicted as a clash between the old and new regionalism. Old regionalism has been characterized as a product of the cold war, as inward-looking, exclusive and created by governments for specific security or economic purposes. New regionalism, in contrast, is outward-looking, nonexclusive and multidimensional in function. In the new regionalism, transnational and overlapping linkages are established with other organizations or groups of states which endow it with a complex and multilevel character. The new regionalism is the product of the demands of state as well as nonstate actors, such as business groups and NGOs, whose needs have expanded well