ASEAN shows the limits, not the success, of multicultural regional organizations

Evidence

ASEAN is often cited as an example of an effective multicultural organization. It is, however, an example of the limits of such organizations. It is not a military alliance. While its members at times cooperate militarily on a bilateral basis, they are also all expanding their military budgets and engaged in military buildups, in striking contrast to the reductions West European and Latin American countries are making. On the economic front, ASEAN was from the beginning designed to achieve “economic cooperation rather than economic integration,” and as a result regionalism has developed at a “modest pace,” and even a free trade area is not contemplated until the twenty-first century. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s work on institutional prerequisites for regional cooperation — ASEAN fails precisely because it lacks the common norms/institutions that made West European and Latin American organization work.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘Multicultural cooperation is mostly talk — the organizations that actually work share a civilizational substrate.’ Uses ASEAN as the counter-example to bust the multiculturalism-plus-regionalism assumption.