JULY 17 — So it happened, a small island in the North Sea left a regional trade block.
Doesn’t sound like too big a deal but the island was the United Kingdom and the trade block was the EU — the largest single market in the world.
The exit of the EU’s second largest economy sent political and financial shockwaves throughout the world with markets tumbling, the pound shedding more than 10 per cent of its value and the British Prime Minister resigning.
A fragile, barely extant global economic recovery following years of slow growth is now threatened by the fear that other EU nations — including key members like Italy and France, Sweden — might follow suit mortally wounding a US$16 trillion (RM64 trillion) market.
The final extent of the damage might include a return to global recession and the break-up of the EU. Yet all this appears to be the result of the fact that a large number of British people were angry about essentially domestic problems — immigration, wealth disparities between London and parts of the prosperous South of England when compared to the rest of the nation.
The other key factor being general ignorance about the EU, its benefits and functions among large segments of the British public.
Rather famously and terrifyingly, “What is the EU” quickly became one of the UK’s most popular online search terms — after citizens had already voted in favour of Brexit.
There is a serious lesson to be learned here and it isn’t the overly simplified pooh-poohing of democracy or the condescending conclusion that the masses are stupid and need constant supervision by technocratic elites.
Rather the lesson is that a lack of transparency and a failure to communicate doesn’t work and this can have devastating consequences.
This lesson is a lesson not just for Europe but the world’s leaders and is very pertinent to our region. While Asean doesn’t face an imminent threat of a Brexit equivalent, there are more than a few parallels.
Asean is an economic and political association committed to increasing trade, free movement and cultural interaction between the nations of South-east Asia.
While the organisation is far looser and less complex than the highly sophisticated, post national, pan-regional authority in Brussels, Asean has clearly modelled several aspects of itself on the EU.
The association is committed to free movement and free trade across the region, and an eventual evolution into a single market or a single currency. Like the EU, Asean suffers from enormous economic disparities between member states, internal divisions over elements of policy domestic and foreign, but it also doesn’t suffer from an excess of transparency.
The meetings and committees are more and more frequent — most ordinary citizens know very little about what goes on at Asean summits beyond photo-ops for our leaders.
However, the benefits of trade agreements, exchanges and treaties are often not made clear to the general public. As with the EU, across Asean states the advantages of regional cooperation and its very real achievements today are not being made clear which leaves space for narrow and parochially nationalistic arguments to emerge.
This is quite evident in the regions of wealthier members with citizens in Singapore and Malaysia increasingly anti-immigrant and highly ignorant of the benefits of Asean, while surveys indicate residents of poorer newer member states like Cambodia and Laos are much more aware of the positive aspects of the association.
Again there are clear parallels with the EU where citizens in new member states like Poland and Latvia tend to express great enthusiasm for the project while citizens in wealthier states like England, France and Sweden seem increasingly wary.
One of the key reasons for this ambivalence is the failure of trade oriented groups like Asean or the EU to have a deeper cultural impact. In Asean, these failings manifest in the Asean Committee on Culture and Information (COCI) which is supposed to help foster cultural exchange and awareness between nations but is notably inactive.
Their website indicates conferences on matters like Pali manuscript reading in 2015. There seems to have been no updates for 2016. The Asean Ministers Responsible for Information (AMRI) — the block’s apex cultural body — has been, perhaps, even less in the public eye than COCI. For the most part, the body and its activities are unknown to the vast majority of South-east Asians.
Even the region’s most successful public facing event — the SEA games — is not actually officially an Asean initiative. This is a real problem. Without strong cultural engagement, we will never feel like a cohesive region. The vast majority will never truly engage with an Asean identity.
While I appreciate visa-free travel within the region, the truth is Singaporeans take visa-free access to nations for granted — so most Singaporeans struggle to answer what does Asean do for me?
I know it underpins trade flows that benefit the Singaporean economy — but that really isn’t enough to generate the enthusiasm — and frankly, love — that a regional organisation and the regional, as opposed to national, movement needs to survive and thrive.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
