June 3, 2025
JAKARTA – ASEAN has set its sights on strengthening economic cooperation in an attempt to navigate regional security challenges, though analysts warn that such ambitions may fall short without meaningful institutional reform.
At the summit in Kuala Lumpur last week, Southeast Asian leaders convened to discuss the region’s most pressing issues, while also unveiling the long-anticipated ASEAN Community Vision 2045, a blueprint outlining the group’s goals for deeper integration, resilience and global relevance over the next two decades.
The blueprint’s conception was first introduced by Indonesia in 2023 during its ASEAN chairmanship, after which leaders began drafting the long-term roadmap widely hoped to offer clarity and direction for a region increasingly strained by great power rivalry, as well as ongoing efforts to strengthen internal unity.
The final 155-page document highlighted plans that included boosting economic integration and its global competitiveness, institutional strengthening and sustainable development.
Among its most spotlighted plans was the call to create greater financial integration across the region, including by harmonizing trade standards. Malaysia, leading the bloc this year, has previously expressed that it would focus on strengthening economic cooperation, with its officials having referenced the European Union as the best example in how a multilateral regional grouping could facilitate cross-border economic cooperation.
Geo-economic shockwaves sent by Washington’s recent trade tariff policies have further fueled the bloc’s ambitions to boost intra-ASEAN trade.
By 2045, ASEAN would be a “major player in the global economy and the fourth largest economy in the world”, the blueprint said, by being a “seamlessly integrated single market and production center with a significant increase in intra-ASEAN trade and investment”.
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The document identified several challenges for economic integration, ranging from geopolitical tensions stemming from major power rivalries and in the South China Sea to natural disasters and climate change.
Money first
With the document providing no new geopolitical or security dimensions regarding how the group would respond to its contemporary challenges, including details on how breaches would be dealt with, analysts suggest the group will likely rely on its economic cooperation to navigate geopolitical hurdles.
“ASEAN in this context has [viewed] social and economic matters from a lens of security. The economy has become a security issue,” international relations expert Ahmad Rizky M. Umar from Aberystwyth University said on Saturday.
The idea of ASEAN as an integrated market, Umar said, is a beneficial ambition for the region long-term as it could in fact increase ASEAN’s resilience. Yet, the blueprint still lacked anything beyond the normative to address the bloc’s procedural challenges, such as in how exactly the group could act when a timely challenge occurs with no consensus, or any innovative re-interpretation or revisit of the ASEAN Charter.
“This integrated market plan will be a mess if it is not mitigated,” Umar said. “ASEAN as a single production base will not be a smooth-sailing plan, as the current ASEAN mechanism is not strong enough to make this happen. This is an important ambition, but without institutional reform, the jury is still out on whether it will ever happen.”
Analyst Andrew Mantong from the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) predicted it would also be difficult for ASEAN member states to reach a consensus on a single trade procedure given its differing economic reliance on both the United States and China.
Ideally, the ASEAN Charter should be reviewed to override the group’s most frequent internal challenges, he said, before taking on any further ambitions.
“This is the best we can get without reviewing the ASEAN Charter,” Andrew said. “I am concerned that this could perhaps be another document that will go by without any real bite.”
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On Sunday, The ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) criticized the blueprint for confronting little in regard to the region’s most pressing human rights challenges and impunity of its member states’ breaches.
“The document projects an image of unity that belies the region’s political realities. [It] remains a bloc of ten member states with diverging priorities, institutional asymmetries and a deeply embedded norm of non-interference,” APHR said.
There was no mention of accountability for countries which had broken the group’s principles, such as in the case of Myanmar, APHR said.