At the end of this year, the process for turning the Association of Southeast Asian Nations into a single community will begin to take shape. Yet pending community-building projects still need to be achieved and existing problems solved.
ASEAN has developed so-called scorecards for three categories of community: economic, sociocultural and political-security. Reportedly, the bloc gets a score of 92 percent as an economic community and 82 percent as a sociocultural community. However, it only earns a rating of 12 percent on political and security issues. Clearly, the ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC) represents a major hurdle in the community-building process.
There are two critical issues that could obstruct APSC's progress. First is the territorial conflict in the South China Sea. Second is the crisis over democracy in the region, as attested by the Thai military coup in 2014, which threatens to damage ASEAN's democratic agenda. ASEAN's inability to deal with contentious issues in the political and security realm derives from the lack of a realistic mission goal; and to a great extent, ASEAN's own leadership is responsible for this.