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2 ASEAN
stumbles in Phnom Penh By
Donald K Emmerson
Never in 45 years of
regular meetings faithfully followed by bland
communiques have the foreign ministers of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
failed to agree on a statement for public
consumption summarizing their private
deliberations. Not, that is, until now.
At
the end of their just-concluded gathering in Phnom
Penh, the silence was deafening. The
proximate cause was their inability to reach a
consensus on whether the statement should mention
Scarborough Shoal, the site of a tense stand-off
that began in April between China and the
Philippines, whose governments both claim that
land feature in the South China Sea. The
Philippines wanted to include such a reference. Cambodia
objected. Neither gave
in. The "ASEAN way" of consensus failed.
The details of what went on so recently
behind closed doors in Phnom Penh are still
unclear. The repercussions are not yet known. But
it is not too early to speculate that, for China,
the outcome amounts to an immediate victory that
could prove tenuous in the longer run.
Cambodia and China The
underlying cause of the breakdown deeply
implicates Beijing and its effort to defend its
claim to possess exclusive sovereign rights over
nearly the entire South China Sea. That claim is
embodied in the cryptic nine-dash line on Chinese
maps that calls to mind a gigantic cow's tongue
lapping deeply into the maritime heart of
Southeast Asia.
Whatever else the tongue
may mean, it denies the overlapping rights of
sovereignty asserted by Brunei, Malaysia, the
Philippines, and Vietnam, which together with
Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, and
Thailand make up the membership of ASEAN.
As the 2012 chair of ASEAN, Cambodia
hosted the group's foreign ministers in Phnom
Penh, and would have read out their final
communique had there been one. Cambodian Prime
Minister Hun Sen has never, to my knowledge,
endorsed China's claim to the South China Sea. But
no ASEAN leader is more sensitive than he is to
China's views and demands. By refusing to read a
statement that mentions Scarborough Shoal, he
acted in a manner consistent with China's
positions on the sovereignty conflict.
In
Beijing's view, ASEAN has no business trying to
resolve the disputes over the South China Sea,
which can only be settled bilaterally between
China and each of the four Southeast Asian
claimants, and only when the time has come for
that to occur. In this context, by refusing to
issue a communique, Cambodia appears to have done
what China would have wanted it to do.
China is Cambodia's largest foreign
investor. Beijing has lavished money on
high-profile aid projects in the country,
including paying for the Peace Palace in Phnom
Penh where the ASEAN ministers met. Almost
immediately before the start of an ASEAN summit in
Phnom Penh in April 2012, President Hu Jintao
arrived on a four-day visit, the first by a
Chinese head of state to Cambodia in 12 years. It
is hard to believe that Hu's timing was
coincidental.
Beijing had already thanked
Cambodia for supporting China's core interests,
[1] which arguably include China's controversial
claim to most of the South China Sea. And even if
China's expression of gratitude exaggerated
Cambodia's loyalty, there is no question that Hun
Sen has tried to use his country's chairmanship of
ASEAN in 2012 to keep the South China Sea off the
group's agenda.
An observer might conclude
that China has effectively hired the Cambodian
government to do its bidding, including preventing
the ASEAN ministers from adopting a joint
statement on the South China Sea. China can now
point to that failure as proof of its own
position: "We're not against ASEAN, but if the
group can't even agree on words in a communique,
how can they be expected to negotiate questions of
sovereignty over the South China Sea? Leave the
matter to us, in bilateral talks only with the
states directly concerned, when the time is
finally ripe." Or words to that effect.
In
fairness to Beijing and Phnom Penh, we do not yet
know, if we ever will, the extent to which Manila
may have shared responsibility for the infighting
in - irony alert - the Peace Palace. Manila did
press for a reference to Scarborough Shoal in the
communique [2]. Why was it so vital to mention
that incident at sea? Why couldn't the shoal have
been obliquely alluded to? Did Hun Sen simply lose
his temper, as he has in the past, and scuttle the
statement rather than compromise on its wording?
A more critical uncertainty is this: How
badly has the rift in Phnom Penh damaged ASEAN's
ability to sponsor a binding code governing state
behavior in the South China Sea?
Coding
conduct In 2002, China and the ASEAN states
signed a non-binding Declaration on the Conduct of
Parties in the South China Sea. Some of ASEAN's
leaders hoped to commemorate the document's 10th
anniversary this year by drafting, among
themselves, a binding code of conduct. The plan
was to finish the task in time for the ASEAN
ministers to announce the draft at their meeting
in Phnom Penh.
The good news is that the
draft code exists, although its contents have not
been announced. It is apparently not a polished
text, but it lists the points that, in ASEAN's
collective judgment, a final text should make.
There is even reason to believe that the draft
includes provisions for the settlement of
disputes. If that is true, it will please analysts
who doubted that ASEAN would be willing or able to
go beyond the usual pieties: be nice, be helpful,
and don't make things worse.
It is the
impunity with which claimants have repeatedly
violated the hopeful terms of the 2002 document
that has rendered so urgent the need for a code
that explicitly opens the door to enforcement. One
can be cautiously encouraged in this context that
in Phnom Penh, largely ignored by journalists
focused on the ministers' kerfuffle, ASEAN did
give the draft code to China to review.
The bad news is that a communique noting
what the ministers had accomplished would likely
have mentioned their success in preparing a draft
code and described it as an important step
forward. Absent that recognition, the text could
languish in limbo, without a clear status and
vulnerable to being dismissed as a mere wish list.
Intentionally or not, when Hun Sen cancelled the
communique, he prevented ASEAN from publicly and
prominently validating the draft as the group's
official basis for negotiation.
If China
really does want to avoid being bound by a code,
what happened in Phnom Penh evokes divide et
impera with Chinese characteristics - divide
ASEAN and rule the waves. In fairness to Beijing,
however, one must note that China did not
manufacture from scratch the division inside
ASEAN.
Beijing was hardly responsible for
ASEAN's unwillingness or inability either to
persuade four of its own members to compromise
their claims, or to stop some of them from making
destabilizing moves on and in the water. Had the
four first resolved the contradictions among their
own positions, ASEAN could have presented a
unified front in its negotiations with China. [3]
Discussions between ASEAN and China on the
draft code are scheduled for September. Because
the draft is an ASEAN product, those talks will be
multilateral in character. If China takes part, it
will have to leave its bilateralist preference at
the door. ASEAN's plan is to join China in signing
a final text at the next round of ASEAN-related
summits this November.
If the talks for
some reason do not to take place in Cambodia, the
summits certainly will. In Phnom Penh in November,
as mercurial as Hun Sen is, things could again go
badly. Beijing, however, will think twice before
it allows itself to be implicated in yet another
public embarrassment of ASEAN, especially in the
presence of the foreign heads of state who will
have gathered for the East Asia Summit. More
likely, between now and then, if China really
wishes to impede the code, it will have worked
hard in discussions with ASEAN either to postpone
its completion or, failing that, to ensure that
its contents are banal.
If this happens,
ASEAN could face a Hobson's choice in November: to
admit failing to co-author a text with China, or
to unveil and hail a toothless edition. In
calculating what (not) to do and when (not) to do
it, China will also be looking at the calendar,
knowing that on January 1, 2013 Cambodia, which is
not a claimant, will cede the role of ASEAN chair
to Brunei, which is.
ASEAN's draft is
unlikely to stay hidden for long. If it does
remain secret, no one but the governments directly
involved will be able to identify China as the
cause of any changes, including concessions made
to satisfy Beijing. But if the draft is circulated
in its current form, and China demands that
changes be made, and they are made, these
deviations from the original will eventually be
public knowledge. ASEAN's diplomats will risk
being charged with having given in to the dragon.
The chance of this happening will depend
on the extent to which Beijing has already been
privy to the drafting of the would-be code inside
ASEAN, and has used such access to influence the
wording to its satisfaction. And if China did not
play a role in that internal ASEAN process, a
Southeast Asian with access to the draft who
wishes to inhibit Beijing's ability to amend it
will have an incentive to leak it.
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