If
the main foreign policy objective of Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte was
to make his archipelagic nation the centre of international relations concerns
in the Asia Pacific, he has succeeded beyond expectations. Coined a ‘popularly
elected despot’ by Chito Gascon of the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights,
Duterte’s diplomatic flurries within Asia have sparked conversations among
international observers, many of which have concentrated on their implications
for the US pivot to Asia and US–China rivalry.
Ironically,
the election of another loud-mouthed ‘boy-man’ demagogue, Donald Trump, may
have changed the equation. If ‘The Donald’ applies his user-pay principle to
the US security umbrella, it is conceivable that a divorce between the two
countries by mutual consent could become possible.
This seems
unlikely, not only because of the popularity of the US–Philippines alliance on
both sides of the Pacific, but also because there appears to be a blooming
‘bromance’ between the Filipino president and the US president-elect. Duterte
has already appointed José E.B. Antonio, a Filipino business partner of the US
president-elect and builder of Manila’s own Trump Tower, as his special trade
envoy to the United States.
Seen from
Hanoi, the challenge of Duterte is not a weakening United States presence in
the Pacific but the deleterious effects of his presidency on ASEAN. Vietnam was
set to benefit greatly from the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling in The
Hague on China’s nine-dash line claims in the South China Sea.
While some
Vietnamese claims in the Paracel and Spratley Islands are now legally
questionable, the legal standing of the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone from
the Vietnamese coastline has been reinforced. Hanoi is thus perplexed why
Duterte has seemingly discarded the South China Sea ruling bargaining chip when
dealing multilaterally with China within the ASEAN context. By acceding to the
long-standing Chinese demand for bilateral negotiations Duterte has effectively
jettisoned several decades worth of effort to build a modicum of ASEAN
solidarity.
The previous
Aquino administration, even prior to the court case in The Hague, advocated
involving ASEAN as a bloc for negotiating with China. This was the approach of
all previous Filipino administrations. While in practice it was impossible to
have a clear declaration on the South China Sea, the multilateral principle
remained intact.
At his first
ASEAN Summit in Vientiane
in July 2016, Duterte claimed ‘the Philippines does not need cooperation with
ASEAN’. Previous Filipino governments and civil society groups have invested
considerable effort into the ASEAN process. For Vietnam — a country that
has made ASEAN crucial to foreign relations in a post-Cold War environment —
the Philippines’ actions are cause for concern.
Duterte’s
attitude towards ASEAN suggests a distancing from the general practice of
Southeast Asian political leaderships — the soft-hedging strategies described
by Evelyn Goh in her
recent seminal study of regional order in East Asia. To simplify, these
strategies involve three elements: forms of flexible aligned nonalignment, an
unwillingness to have to choose in a situation of Sino–US rivalry and the
nonrepudiation of existing linkages while creating new ones. Myanmar’s
post-junta foreign relations trajectory since 2010 displays these attributes.
But in the ostensible Manichean outlook of Duterte, a rapprochement with China
requires necessarily a separation — at least rhetorically — from the United
States.
Most
tragically, Duterte’s domestic policies challenge a fundamental norm within
ASEAN, namely that of rule by law instead of rule of law. Some
4,700 people have been killed extra-judicially
since he came to office. Even before toying with the idea of suspending habeas
corpus, Duterte had abandoned due process, allowing State-controlled vigilantes
and other goons to act with impunity. Other Southeast Asian countries are
hardly paragons of the rule of law but generally there is a concern that at
least some symbolic legal procedures should be respected.
How can
Duterte’s belittling of ASEAN be explained? A clue can be found in Lee Jones’ illuminating study of the
importance of sovereignty for Southeast Asian political elites. The notion of
sovereignty is Janus-faced — it relates to both dealing with external actors
and having unhindered control of domestic affairs. Unlike his predecessors,
Duterte sees ASEAN as useless in strengthening Filipino sovereignty in relation
to an external power, namely China.
The
literature on ASEAN suggests that membership has served to legitimise regimes
in relation to their domestic constituencies by reinforcing a sense of
sovereignty over internal affairs. In the Philippines, this was the case until
recently. Duterte is different. Like Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed xenophobic
outsider defying political conventions, ASEAN is irrelevant (and perhaps even
detrimental) to strengthening his grip on domestic political power.
The
Philippines’ descent into authoritarianism
30 years after the end of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos is a tragedy,
not only for the Philippines, but also for the region. This profound
regression effectively sabotages the ability of ASEAN as a whole to respect, or
at least advance, the terms of its own Charter. It also undermines the role of
regional integration in Southeast Asia in contributing to democratic
consolidation at the national level.
David
Camroux is Honorary Associate Professor and Senior Associate Researcher in the
Centre for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris and Professorial Fellow at
the Vietnam National University, Hanoi
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