Brexit and the EU: Lessons for ASEAN

Newspapers on the day of the Brexit Referendum [Credit: Comment Central]

The British public went to the polls on June 23 to answer a straightforward question: Should the UK remain a member of the EU or leave? Despite the question’s simplicity, the seismic ramifications of how the UK answered were anything but.

Within hours of the results becoming clear — 51.9 percent in favor of Brexit — Prime Minister David Cameron announced his resignation, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn faced an internal challenge to remove him from party leadership, financial markets were rocked, the pound sterling tumbled to a 35-year low against the US dollar, and there were calls by some in Scotland and Northern Ireland to consider separating from the UK.

There have also been worrying reports of an increase in anti-immigrant incidents in recent days that are suspected to be linked to the referendum result.

The Remain camp was accused of running a Project Fear campaign in the run-up to the referendum, and it would appear that such concerns have indeed been realized as the UK grapples with a political, constitutional, economic and sociocultural crisis.

The consequences of Brexit are not limited to the UK and the EU, with the decision of the British public focusing people’s attention on the plight of another regional integration project: ASEAN.

Of course there are important and crucial differences between ASEAN and the EU, with the former being an intergovernmental regional association whereby member states retain their sovereignty, while the latter is a supranational organization with a powerful bureaucracy based in Brussels and a commitment to an ever-closer union.

Despite this, deputy chairman of House of Representatives Commission I overseeing foreign affairs, Hanafi Rais, has warned that a similar phenomenon could take place in Southeast Asia.

While such alarm may be dismissed as a personal view, it cannot be denied that Indonesia’s commitment to ASEAN has been under scrutiny for some time now.

The current government’s view that ASEAN is only “a cornerstone” of Indonesia’s foreign policy rather than “the cornerstone” sparked concerns among Jakarta’s regional neighbors coupled with President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s apparent disinterest in ASEAN.

In this sense, one wonders how the Indonesian public would answer if a similar question of Indonesia’s membership in ASEAN was put to a referendum. Certainly some of the determinant factors that pushed 17.4 million Britons to vote “Leave” are, to an extent, relevant to Indonesia and the ASEAN region.

The free movement of people that resulted in unrestricted immigration, elitist officials and bureaucrats making decisions that did not serve the interests of the people and the feeling that the country would do better alone rather than tied to an unwieldy regional grouping are arguably just as applicable to Indonesia as to the UK.

The concerns of the Indonesian public in the run-up to the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) earlier this year — that the country would be flooded by labor from neighboring countries as a result of the AEC’s “freer movement of skilled labor” — should not be forgotten.

Similarly, ASEAN has long been accused of being an elitist entity, unrepresentative of the public and their concerns.

For example, critics have decried the lack of civil society input in the ASEAN decision-making process on important matters such as free trade agreements.

President Jokowi’s former foreign policy advisor and, coincidentally, the current Indonesian Ambassador to the UK famously opined that Indonesia had imprisoned itself in the “golden cage of ASEAN”.

The lack of progress with regard to China’s claims in the South China Sea on account of ASEAN’s deep divisions attest to the difficulties Indonesia faces in getting the regional grouping to achieve a common position, despite the Bali Concord III specifically introduced under Jakarta’s chairmanship of ASEAN to reach common positions on issues of global concern.

One suspects, however, that many in Indonesia would instead express ignorance of ASEAN, what it stands for and what it is striving to achieve.

Despite ASEAN’s supposed emphasis on a people-orientated and people-centered region, the sense of an ASEAN “we” feeling and regional identity have thus far failed to trickle down to the grassroots to any significant extent.

This is true not only in the remotest areas of the country but even in Jakarta, home to the ASEAN Secretariat, and the self-proclaimed capital of ASEAN. What, then, are the lessons that Brexit offers ASEAN?

Clearly ASEAN must ensure that the rhetoric of “people-orientated” and “people-centered” plans are translated into reality.

This was evidently not the case for the British public who came to see the EU as a regional integration project that was not focused on the people but instead benefited bureaucrats, big businesses and vested interests.

As Leave campaigner Nigel Farage declared, Brexit was a victory “for ordinary, decent people who’ve taken on the establishment and won”. In relation to this, ASEAN must seriously consider addressing its elitist label by reforming its top-down nature of decision-making.

“Take Back Control” was the Leave campaign’s slogan during the referendum and Michael Gove, the pro-Brexit Justice Secretary memorably argued, “people in this country have had enough of experts”. ASEAN must therefore provide greater space for the public to participate in the decision-making process, especially on matters that directly affect them.

Similarly, ASEAN should avoid the mistakes of the EU by listening to the genuine concerns of the public. The flow of immigrants from the EU, which was seen as impacting the British people’s access to jobs, healthcare and education services, was no doubt a major factor that led to Brexit.

As such, Indonesians’ own concerns — even if rather unfounded — that the AEC would result in a similar fate need to be properly addressed by effectively explaining the crucial differences between ASEAN’s “freer movement of skilled labor” and the EU’s “free movement of people”.

While a Brexit phenomenon in ASEAN is unlikely in the foreseeable future, the Southeast Asian region cannot rest on its laurels. ASEAN should heed the lessons of Brexit in order to avoid the multiperspective crisis facing the UK.

[This article was first published in The Jakarta Post on 1st July 2016 and can be found at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2016/07/01/brexit-and-the-eu-lessons-for-asean.html]