ASEAN and Suu Kyi: credit or no credit?

Ernie Bower chimes in on the question of whether ASEAN has played any productive role on Burma and should get some credit for Aung San Suu Kyi’s recent release: Yes, I believe it does.  ASEAN matters to Burma – if it didn’t, they wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t be asking to chair in 2014 after ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Ernie Bower chimes in on the question of whether ASEAN has played any productive role on Burma and should get some credit for Aung San Suu Kyi's recent release:

Ernie Bower chimes in on the question of whether ASEAN has played any productive role on Burma and should get some credit for Aung San Suu Kyi’s recent release:

Yes, I believe it does.  ASEAN matters to Burma – if it didn’t, they wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t be asking to chair in 2014 after Indonesia, Brunei and Cambodia have their turns, and they wouldn’t be so upset with the Vietnamese – the outgoing chair for 2010 – for allowing so much discussion of the political situation in ASEAN meetings this year. ASEAN is feeling the reputational cost of dragging Burma around like a ball and chain when it wants to move ahead on diplomatic and trade issues with most of the world….[snip] So ASEAN has pushed Burma quietly but perhaps somewhat effectively, to begin to conform to norms of behavior that are more befitting off the aspirational goal of an “ASEAN Community” by 2015.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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