am reading s. rajaratnam's 1992 paper (foreword it says, but to what publication? the americanisation in the spelling makes me think it was written not for a singapore readership. i'd like a reference for this essay, could somebody?) on the survival of ASEAN. he is a very fine political writer, isn't he? low-key, conversational style, without the rhetorical flourishes that characterise some american political writing, yet maintaining the cautioning, realistic, and slightly paternal (but not paternalistic) tone, and all the same never letting anyone off the hook.

some excerpts:

~~~ The European Community, unlike ASEAN, has had far more experience with regional organization because its founding members, in particular Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and even Germany participated in the creation and management of far-flung complex global empires... But creating and managing, within a period of only 25 years, an ASEAN community of six economically and industrially under-developed peoples who had no experience of administering a modern, complex, multi-racial regional organization verges, in my view, on the miraculous.

~~~ Asian regionalism was first launched on 25 April 1955 at Bandung. It was initially a comprehensive Afro-Asian Conference presided over by Heads of Government. It included legendary figures like Sukarno, Nehru, Zhou Enlai, Kotalawela of what was then Ceylon, Sihanouk and Mohammed Ali, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. However, this regional effort did not last long... Within a few years after its founding, not only Afro-Asian solidarity but also the solidarity of individual Asian and African nation states was in disarray. The destruction of nationalism is today being brought about, not by Western imperialism, which had already grown weary, thanks to two World Wars, of holding sway over palm and pine, but by Third World nationalism.

~~~ Real regionalism requires a world-view if it is not to lose its way in the global world of modern technology and science. It must also have a rational and deep understanding of the new history which is being shaped not by heroic individuals, but through the co-operative inter-action of some 5 billion people who today live in a vastly shrunken planet and who, thanks to growing literacy and fast-as-light electronic communication, are better informed about the world we live in than earlier generations. Nobody, not even super-computers, can predict what will happen when each day the flow of history is cumulatively determined by individual decisions made by 5 billion human beings who are asserting their right to a decent and just society. Fewer and fewer people today believe that oppression, hunger and injustice is God's will to which they must meekly submit. People today know the difference between "Let us pray" and "Let us prey".

~~~There are also the distant rumbles of the possible emergence of Big Dragons but as a Chinese saying goes: "There is a lot of noise in the stairways, but nobody has so far entered the room." One fervently hopes that when a Big Dragon turns up, it would be an amiable Great Dragon and one which would know its way around the Spratly and Paracel Islands...