In order to understand the roots of the current crisis under King Vajiralongkorn (also styled as Rama X), it is necessary to go back nearly a century in time to 1932, when a small group of officers and civilians launched a coup and forced the absolute monarch King Prajadhipok, or Rama VII, who reigned from 1925 to 1935, to accept a constitution. For the last ninety years, Thailand has been a nominal constitutional monarchy, but its evolution has been complex and significantly different from any other comparable regime. The decades of an often-tortuous relationship between the two core institutions—constitution and monarchy—and particularly the reign of the late King Bhumibol (Rama IX) from 1946 to 2016, have created the system that is now being directly and publicly challenged for the first time since 1932.

Historical Background

The history of the Thai constitutional monarchy can be periodized in various ways, but at least five important stages or phases can be identified. The first stage, lasting from the June 1932 coup until Prajadhipok’s abdication in March 1935, witnessed a prolonged tussle between the new regime led by the commoners of the People’s Party and the royalists loyal to the king and the ancien régime. Although the overthrow of the absolute monarchy had little to do with Siamese public sentiment and there was no significant current of republicanism, the People’s Party represented a critical mass of middle- and lower-ranking officers and officials who resented royal privileges and princely domination of the military and the government. The policy of sending large numbers of Siamese overseas (mainly to Europe) for education, which dated back to the reign of King Chulalongkorn from 1868 to 1910, had produced two generations of well-educated and cosmopolitan officers and civil servants of both royal and non-royal backgrounds. When the two groups returned to Siam and entered government service, the princes generally outranked the commoners, regardless of individual merit, and this unmeritocratic system sowed the seeds of dissent.

Although the 1932 coup occurred without bloodshed and Prajadhipok verbally accepted his new status as a constitutional ruler, the next three years were a tug of war for power between himself and the new regime. In 1933, a “parliamentary coup” by conservative royalists and an anti-government rebellion were both suppressed by the regime.

Vietnam was officially reunified in 1976, and in December that year the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) held its 4th National Congress. Since then the VCP has held national party congresses every five years. The 13th National Congress was held in early 2021 and its deliberations shaped domestic politics in Vietnam in the years to come.

The national party congress has seven main duties: (1) to approve the Political Report of the outgoing Central Committee; (2) to adopt short and long-term socioeconomic development plans; (3) to revise the party’s platform; (4) to amend the party’s statutes; (5) to elect a new Central Committee, which will then elect a new Politburo; (6) to decide on any other matters put before the congress; and (7) to issue a final resolution on the proceedings.

This chapter provides an overview of the 13th National Congress and the resulting turnover in party and state leadership in Vietnam. This chapter is divided into four parts: leadership transition, party-building, combating COVID-19 and a conclusion.

Leadership Transition

Leadership transition in Vietnam is a carefully orchestrated process that culminates every five years in a national party congress that elects new leaders and holds elections for the National Assembly, which in turn selects new government officials. Preparations for a national party congress generally start during the second half of the incumbent Central Committee’s five-year term; this includes the often-contentious task of determining the general composition of the new Central Committee and selecting who is qualified to stand for election. The Central Committee is composed of sectoral groups that are given bloc representation, including local party and government officials, the military, officials who hold senior positions in the government, officials who hold senior posts in the party, and members of the Politburo.

Quotas are set for three age groups: under fifty, fifty to sixty, and sixty-one and over. This is to ensure an orderly generational transition. Party rules also stipulate that Central Committee members should retire at sixty-five years of age and that they cannot serve more than two consecutive terms in the same office. Party rules also provide for a limited number of exemptions to these stipulations based on exemplary performance. In the final year of its term, the outgoing Central Committee often holds a series of plenary sessions where straw polls are conducted before confirming the final list of candidates.

According to the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), human-induced climate change is affecting weather and climate extremes in every region, evidenced by the increasing number of adverse weather events around the globe in the past few years. There is no single inhabitable region of earth that has not been affected by climate change, but its impacts differ across regions. For Southeast Asia, the prediction is for more extreme cyclones, uneven increases in temperatures and rainfall, and attendant flooding and inundation in some parts of the mainland.

Climate change is not an anticipated threat but a present and real crisis that has already been affecting Southeast Asia. Tropical cyclones, extreme rainfall, floods, loss of biodiversity, temperature increases and rising sea levels are happening with increasing frequency and high intensity. Some are slow-onset events that take place over extended periods of time (such as temperature increases, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification), while others are fast-onset events (such as tropical cyclones, extreme flooding, and landslides).

The prevailing advice from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is to retire the names of tropical cyclones that were particularly deadly or costly. In the list of fifty-four tropical cyclone names that have been retired, twenty-four of them are associated with countries in Southeast Asia; namely, the Philippines and Vietnam. Names of super typhoons like Haiyan and Mangkhut, familiar to millions of residents in the region, are no longer in use because of the massive casualty numbers and extensive economic damage they have caused.

Southeast Asia suffers disproportionately from climate change. Disproportionality comes from two aspects. First is the region’s disproportionate exposure to the number of climate disasters and extreme weather events. Southeast Asia is already predisposed to natural hazards, with high exposure to multiple geophysical hazards that are not related to climate change. It is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, such as the 2004 Aceh-Andaman earthquake. It is also one of the most volcanically active regions. Climate change will compound these hazards. Three countries in Southeast Asia—Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand—suffer the greatest long-term risks of climate change and, according to the Global Climate Risk Index 2021, were listed among the top ten most affected countries from 2000 to 2019. The burden on Southeast Asian countries to adapt to climate change is therefore exceptionally high.

At the close of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, we look back at how his centrality in almost all aspects of policymaking and sustained populist appeal has shaped Philippine politics. With its official script and actual actions closely aligned, his government has put in danger many democratic precepts that were painstakingly created after 1986. International indices classify the Philippines under the Duterte government as being in a state of democratic backsliding and an electoral autocracy. Its abysmal human rights record on the war on drugs is the subject of a United Nations report and an International Criminal Court inquiry. Despite the stringent COVID-19 pandemic measures imposed, it has been one of the worst performing governments in the world in reducing the infection rate among its population.

On civil-military relations, three things were evident: (1) the enhanced control of the military by the president; (2) the president’s reliance on the police and the military as preferred policy implementors; and (3) the broadening and institutionalization of the military’s reach into civilian affairs at the subnational level. The balance of civil-military relations was firmly tipped in favour of the presidency, under whose authority the military has been mobilized and deployed domestically on many occasions. President Duterte has deployed (or in local legal parlance, “called out”) the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to wage war against the ISIS-linked terrorists in Marawi, implement martial law in Mindanao, enforce the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and support the police in the war on drugs. The tasks given to the military in these call-outs do not match their supposed warfighting skillset, or they extend beyond them, and encroach upon domains better performed by government civilian agents. Without contest or opposition from Congress or the Supreme Court, President Duterte successfully instrumentalized the armed forces to carry out controversial government policies. The AFP’s influence in internal security operations was enhanced with a commander-in-chief who trusted and relied on the armed forces more than their civilian counterparts. The domestic deployments of the military expanded and deepened its involvement in local affairs, enabling the armed forces to arrogate for itself tasks previously under the care of civilian agencies, such as provisioning direct humanitarian assistance, gaining it a formal foothold in decisions to end rebellion beyond kinetic operations and to acquire more leverage vis-à-vis local authorities to accomplish their internal security missions.

One of the objectives of Suharto’s foreign policy was to make Indonesia the leader of the Southeast Asian region and beyond. Although Indonesia’s leadership position was more in form than in substance, there was no doubt that Suharto’s Indonesia had played a leading role, at least in Southeast Asia, if not in Asia-Africa.

However, with the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of Suharto in May 1998, Indonesia’s leadership position in Southeast Asia has also declined. In addition, the President is no longer the sole foreign policy maker. The role of parliament becomes important. This postscript examines Indonesia’s foreign policy from the final years of the Suharto period until the early years of Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s second-term presidency. The discussion in this postscript will follow the general structure of the book, i.e., it begins with Indonesia and ASEAN, followed by Jakarta’s relations with the six other ASEAN states, especially with Malaysia and Singapore. Its relations with other medium powers and superpowers such as Australia, Japan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States are also examined. The last section deals with the Middle East, in which Islam in Indonesia’s foreign policy is addressed. This order is mainly followed in accordance with the geographical proximity to Indonesia, which simultaneously reflects Indonesian geopolitical concerns.

Foreign Policy Decision-Making in Post-Suharto Indonesia

Let us look briefly at foreign policy decision-makers in Indonesia. During the New Order period (March 1966 to May 1998), foreign policy was initially in the hands of the military and President Suharto, and over time came to be concentrated in the hands of the president. The parliament was more a rubber stamp than the real decision-maker. Suharto often used his presidential power to decide on foreign policy issues, and his appointed ambassadors did not have to be endorsed by the parliament. However, during the post-Suharto period, especially after the fall of President Habibie, the presidential power was curtailed and ambassadors have to be endorsed by the parliament. This implies that the parliament began to play a role in foreign policy-making. The parliament could also refuse to rectify a treaty signed with a foreign country by the president. This context should be borne in mind when discussing post-Suharto Indonesia’s foreign policy.

There was some optimism that 2021 would mark a turn in the region’s fortunes and offer some respite after what was arguably the worst start to a new decade in living memory. Those hopes did not last long. As it turned out, 2021 was significantly much more of the same. The challenges of the previous year did not so much abate as intensify, putting the region’s resilience to the test.

Plans for a year of strong post-pandemic recovery were dashed as the region was engulfed by new waves of COVID-19 infections as a result of the more contagious Delta and Omicron variants. The reopening of borders and economies had to be delayed, as many Southeast Asian countries resorted once again to lockdowns and tried to quickly inoculate as much of their populations as possible amidst scarce global vaccine supply, especially in the first part of the year.

Meanwhile, it could have been a triumphant year for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The grouping made significant headway with its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP), the world’s largest trade pact. Final ratifications by Australia and New Zealand in November 2021 meant that the RCEP would go live on the first day of 2022. However, any satisfaction over this feat was overshadowed by the coup d’état in Myanmar, which sparked a violent civil conflict and caused strategic and diplomatic ripples beyond Naypyidaw. The military coup put ASEAN at a protracted impasse as the junta resisted the organization’s entreaties to resolve the crisis, including forbidding the ASEAN special envoy to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi. At the same time, ASEAN redeemed a measure of credibility for itself with the bold decision to exclude the Myanmar military leader from its year-end summit, in what Joseph Chinyong Liow views as an indication that “ASEAN was not about to allow the Myanmar crisis to paralyse the organization” (p. 16).

Furthermore, the region was subjected to more strategic headwinds, as the contest between the United States and China for influence in Southeast Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region showed little sign of letting up.

COVID-19, combined with intensive security operations and changing international dynamics, kept most local terrorist organizations off balance in 2021. In Indonesia, arrests were high and fatalities low, with terrorists responsible for five deaths, all in Poso, Central Sulawesi. Several attempts at attacks elsewhere, including the March 2021 bombing of Makassar cathedral, resulted in injuries to bystanders, but no deaths, other than the suicide bombers themselves. Almost no one tried to go overseas to join a jihad, and no one came back from Syria or was deported from Turkey.

Malaysia continued to patrol the coast of Sabah, occasionally deporting or killing Abu Sayyaf Group suspects, but no arrests of Malysians on terrorism charges took place during the year, either in Sabah or the rest of the country. In the Philippines, the military continued to try and “neutralize” top leaders, with top pro-ISIS leaders among those killed. Singapore arrested a few citizens with violent extremist sympathies. A Singaporean teenager arrested in December 2020 remains the only Southeast Asian detained for far-right sympathies. He reportedly wanted to attack two mosques in Singapore on the anniversary of the Christchurch, New Zealand shootings.

The return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan raised concerns of possible renewed activity of al-Qaeda in the region or of a blowback to Southeast Asia of heightened activity from ISIS–Khorasan, the so-called province of Islamic State in Afghanistan. At least in the short term, these were probably overdrawn. While many Muslims celebrated the victory of a Muslim army over the United States, there were no immediate candidates for a partnership with al-Qaeda, even if the Taliban return gave the latter state protection. Its old partner, Jemaah Islamiyah, had no interest in resuming an affiliation and in any case since 2019 had become the target of a major crackdown by police. Its immediate aim was organizational survival, not global jihad. Pro-ISIS groups in Indonesia, as elsewhere, saw al-Qaeda as the enemy. Indeed, if Indonesian authorities were worried about outside influence serving as inspiration for violence at home, the source was more likely to be ISIS–Khorasan attacks on the Taliban rather than anything al-Qaeda was doing.

I am delighted that my book Indonesia’s Foreign Policy under Suharto: Aspiring to International Leadership (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1996) is now reissued with a postscript.

When the original edition of the book was published, I received feedback from many Indonesian scholars. I was pleasantly surprised. Not long after that Lembaga Penelitian, Pendidikan dan Penerangan Ekonomi dan Sosial (LP3ES), a leading academic publisher in Jakarta, asked for my permission to translate the book into Bahasa Indonesia. I gladly consented. The Indonesian version (Politik Luar Negeri: Indonesia di Bawah Soeharto) was to be published in early May 1998, a few weeks before the downfall of President Suharto. Therefore, I included a short postscript for the Indonesian edition, covering the last two to three years of his rule. I was informed that Politik Luar Negeri had become a major reference book for the politics and international relations courses at least at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta and Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. I was so pleased that when I met some lecturers and graduates from these universities, they often discussed the book with me. I felt very honoured and encouraged.

In 2019, I received an unexpected request from an editor of the LP3ES in Jakarta that they wanted to reissue the Indonesian version of the book. He told me that there were still demands on the book. Students and scholars are still looking for the book. They asked me to write a new postscript for the book, but I did not have the time to do so as I was busy with my projects. I proposed to write a new preface, explaining briefly why the book, without revision, is still relevant to the present situation. The LP3ES agreed and the book was eventually republished in October 2019.

The reissuing of Politik Luar Negeri made me re-read the original version of Indonesia’s Foreign Policy under Suharto. The book was published when I was still teaching in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). It took me several years to complete writing the book. Two chapters had been published in Asian Survey before the book was published. I benefited from the discussions with friends and colleagues in writing the manuscript.

China’s Foreign Policy and Security Strategy

China’s continuing growth in power and influence is arguably the single most important question unfolding in international security and politics. By most measures, China has already completed a regional power transition, with the regional distribution of its capabilities and wealth changing rapidly over the past generation. For instance, China’s share of the Asia-Pacific’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew from 7 per cent in 1988 to 46 per cent in 2014, while Japan’s share fell from 72 per cent in 1988 to 24 per cent today. During this period, China’s GDP saw a thirty-fold increase to more than US$10 trillion and it is now the second-largest economy in the world. Its GDP per capita hovers at $10,000 and its military spending currently accounts for nearly 10 per cent of total global military expenditures.

A delicate balance of continuity and change in the Chinese leadership’s priorities appears to undergird its broader and longer-term foreign and security policy strategy. The regime continues to be guided by the overarching tenet that maintaining a peaceful and stable external security environment is essential for continued structural reforms, domestic growth and development. This core idea builds from Deng Xiaoping’s vision in the early 1980s where he concluded that the world was tending towards peace and development, that the likelihood for major, global wars were diminishing, and as such China could expect and benefit from a stable international environment to carry out its much-needed domestic reform and development. This basic principle was continued under Deng’s successors with such principles as the “new security concept” and “China’s peaceful development”.

Reaffirming these preceding strategic concepts, the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, presented the “Chinese dream” upon taking the helm. The concept has been linked to Xi’s call for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, achieved through “good external conditions for China’s reform, development, and stability”. The vision promotes two major aspirations that are of significance to the regime: first, the vision to build a “moderately well-off society” by this year, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party; and, second, the vision of becoming a fully industrialized nation in under three decades, by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

An eventful twelve months saw Southeast Asia beset by a number of familiar challenges. In some respects, the year began where the previous left off, with the COVID-19 pandemic threatening to take more lives and cause further damage to regional economies as new variants of the virus circulated. Not unlike the preceding year, the pandemic hampered hopes for a return to a more normal diplomatic schedule comprising in-person meetings, with many having to continue being conducted over sub-optimal virtual platforms. Indeed, this state of affairs was used to explain the delay in the completion of the much-awaited Code of Conduct on the South China Sea between China and ASEAN, which was originally targeted for 2021.

At the same time, the year also witnessed several new—in some cases, unexpected—developments that further complicated the conduct of regional affairs. The election of a new president in the United States was met with, in some sense, a sigh of relief from regional states as it signalled a return to a more predictable and familiar—but by no means straightforward—tone and tenor in relations with Washington. Nevertheless, American re-engagement in the Indo-Pacific has also occasioned the emergence of new Washington-led initiatives in the region that created ripples that Southeast Asian states have had to adjust to. Arguably the biggest test for ASEAN over the last year, however, must surely be developments in Myanmar; specifically, how to respond to the seizure of power by the military and creation of the State Administration Council (SAC) government, whose credibility and legitimacy were challenged both domestically and internationally. To be sure, the question of how to manage the fallout from the military coup in Myanmar exercised ASEAN tremendously as the international spotlight shone harshly on the organization.

The Persistent Cloud of COVID-19

For the governments of Southeast Asia, there is no gainsaying that COVID-19—and its impact on their respective economies and societies—persisted as a hangover from the previous year.

Despite initial success in containing the virus via prompt and strict social distancing measures in some Southeast Asian countries, the appearance of the more infectious Delta variant quickly placed the region back on the defensive as governments scrambled to reimpose lockdowns and movement controls.

I refer to the word “principle” as a concept that serves as a guide in the behaviour of a system, such as a regional organization like ASEAN. As mentioned, the need to maintain the centrality of ASEAN is enshrined in Article 1 of the ASEAN Charter. For me, this guiding principle should not just remain on paper; it has to be operationalized and employed actively in the daily conduct of ASEAN’s relations among Member States and with other partners, collectively covered by the word diplomacy.

The ultimate aim of diplomacy is to promote, defend and advance one’s own national interests in relations with other countries and at the same time, to pursue mutually beneficial ends with these countries by undertaking joint activities or championing mutually cherished values and principles. My instructions have always been clear according to this line, and I believe that my colleagues in the ASEAN family also had similar objectives. Now, in order for us to attain this objective, our brand of diplomacy requires mechanisms in which negotiations and discussions are to take place; these discussions should follow certain processes and procedures, its practitioners should employ a certain language or tone in relating with one another, and there should be a set of definite agenda and objectives to be accomplished. The permeating principle breathing into all these elements is ASEAN Centrality. As mentioned in my introduction, the mechanisms should be those led or created by ASEAN, the agenda should be that agreed upon by ASEAN, the participants should be those accepted by ASEAN, the processes and procedures should be those determined by ASEAN and the language or tone to be used should be that preferred by ASEAN. This view of ASEAN Centrality guided me in chairing ASEAN in 2017 and in participating in this Community throughout my tenure.

Conceptual Framework of the Jakarta Platform

For its conceptual framework, this book draws inspiration from proponents of analytical autoethnography, particularly that proposed by Leon Anderson (2006) who listed three characteristics of this conceptual framework whereby the researcher is a (i) a full member in the research group or setting; (ii) visible as such a member in published texts; and (iii) committed to developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena.

The year 2021 was the half-way point of the parliamentary term following the outcome of the 2019 general election, which had been (1) determined by an election formula favourable to Palang Pracharat, (2) monitored and enforced by the 2014–19 junta that Prayut had headed, (3) legitimized by an Election Commission that his junta had chosen, and (4) augmented by a junta-appointed Senate that helped select Prayut as prime minister. The cabinet was dominated by the same three personalities who had lorded over the country since the 2014 coup—Generals Prayut, Prawit Wongsuwan and Anupong Paochinda. Though Prayut was prime minister, he was not an elected member of parliament nor a member of any party. Prawit, deputy prime minister and defence minister under the junta, had taken only the deputy prime minister portfolio since 2019, though in June 2020 he also became Palang Pracharat party leader. Anupong was content with remaining only interior minister.

On 28 March, elections were held to select members of local municipal councils throughout the country. Then, on 28 November, there were elections for members of subdistrict councils within each province. The results of these elections, like those following the 20 December 2020 elections for Provincial Administrative Organization chairpersons and members, were favourable to traditional politicians connected to Palang Pracharat and Thaksin Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai, while unfavourable to the Progressive Movement of Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, a banned MP and former leader of the dissolved Future Forward party. The elections suggested that local rather than national politics were still prevalent among voters. But in March, Palang Pracharat won a by-election victory over the Democrats in a constituency considered a Democrat stronghold. Thus, Palang Pracharat seemed mostly on top of the political game.However, the party’s decision to even contest the poll—let alone its triumph—enraged the Democrats, given that the latter were Palang Pracharat’s coalition partner.

Meanwhile, on 17 March, nearly a year of attempts to amend the juntaenforced 2017 constitution were stopped when the draft bill to do so was rejected by parliament. This came after the Constitutional Court ruled that there needed to be a national referendum to legally amend the charter. In June parliament passed the Referendum Bill, facilitating future constitutional amendments.

Introduction

In the previous chapter Indonesia’s foreign policy under Suharto has been discussed to show the increasing role of the military and the President himself in the decision-making process. From the early 1980s, Suharto was the major foreign policy-maker. In this chapter, discussion focuses on the rise of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Indonesia’s role in this regional grouping. The role of the military and the President in Indonesia’s bilateral relations with individual ASEAN states (except Vietnam) will also be examined.

The Rise of ASEAN

It has been argued by many Indonesian leaders, at least prior to 1988, that ASEAN is the cornerstone of Indonesia’s foreign policy. In other words, the ASEAN states are crucial to Indonesia’s national interests, that is, its stability and security. It is not surprising, then, that Indonesia was instrumental in establishing this regional organization.

When Suharto came to power in 1966, he immediately ended the confrontation with Malaysia and began to show to the world, especially to the West, that he would abandon the aggressive policy of Sukarno. He was convinced that, with political stability, he would be able to develop Indonesia’s economy through foreign investment and foreign aid. The economy during the Sukarno era was seriously troubled. This partly accounted for the political instability of that time. Economic rehabilitation was perceived by the new leadership as a way to legitimize their new regime. Thus, the major concern of the new elite was to create political stability in the region, particularly among the non-Communist ASEAN states. ASEAN, as a regional organization, would serve this purpose. Only under stable conditions would Indonesia be able to develop economically.

As a matter of fact, ASEAN was not the first regional organization in Southeast Asia. As early as 1955, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) was established by the United States to combat Communism in the region. But only two (namely, the Philippines and Thailand) out of its eight members were from Southeast Asia. This military pact failed to achieve its goal because the threat posed by Communism took the form of subversive activities and could not be solved through conventional military means. In addition, most of the members were not committed to the goal. Like the Communist states, anti-colonialist Indonesia was hostile towards this organization.

Overview of Global Value Chains and GVC Participation

International trade and production are increasingly structured around global value chains (GVC). Value chains can be defined as the totality of activities involved in the production process, which includes the design, manufacture, marketing and distribution of the product, as well as the provision of after-sales support for consumers. These different activities in the value chain can be carried out by the same or different companies. With more countries involved in these different stages, value chains have become global.

A country’s exports can be differentiated by whether these goods and services are produced with domestically sourced inputs or imported (foreign) value-added inputs (Figure 1). Furthermore, these exports can head to a foreign market either for final consumption or be used as intermediate manufacturing inputs in products that will then be exported to a third country (or the original country). A GVC analysis typically considers both the foreign value-added in a country’s exports (the upstream perspective) as well as the country’s exported value-added that were incorporated in other third-country exports (the downstream perspective).

To determine a country’s level of involvement in the GVC, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has developed a methodology based on three indicators. The first indicator measures the share of foreign value-added in exports. This reflects the portion of imported inputs used in a country’s exports and that is not included in its gross domestic product (GDP). The second indicator measures the domestic value-added in exports, or the proportion of domestically produced inputs in a country’s exports. This is the share of a country’s exports that contributes to GDP (i.e., domestic value-added trade share). The third indicator, the indirect value-added (DVX), measures the portion of a country’s exports that is involved in a multi-stage trade process, which can be calculated by adding the foreign value-added used in a country’s own exports and the value-added supplied to other countries’ exports.

The participation rate is a useful indicator showing the extent to which a country’s exports are integrated into international production networks, both upstream and downstream. Moreover, measuring a country’s GVC participation rate as a share of its exports will reveal how much the country relies on the GVC.

Why This Book?

On 20 March 2019, I represented the Philippines at a High-Level Dialogue on Indo-Pacific Cooperation hosted in Jakarta by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, Retno Marsudi, and which was attended by Ministers, Senior Officials and Ambassadors of the eighteen countries belonging to the East Asia Summit (EAS). At the ASEAN Summit with the United States held in Manila in November 2017, President Donald Trump had first broached the concept of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIPS). Soon after, the so-called Quad (the United States, India, Japan and Australia) also expounded on the strategy, but downplaying any adversarial implications that might be associated with it in view of the impression that it was an isolationist strategy to exclude or contain an emerging China in the regional political and security architecture. From then on, much speculation and discussion have been generated on the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) and Indonesia, projecting herself as a leader in ASEAN and always zealous to surface ASEAN Centrality in the emerging regional security architecture, took pains to host this event. High level delegations from the eighteen EAS members attended the event. At that meeting which was the first ministerial-level forum to explore ideas on this emerging area of cooperation, almost all delegates stressed the importance of and support for ASEAN Centrality in the evolving political/security and economic architecture of the region which straddles the Indian and Pacific oceans, including the Member States of ASEAN. Yet, while prefacing their interventions with support for ASEAN Centrality, non-ASEAN countries expounded on their own particular initiatives on how they understood the Indo-Pacific approach, strategy or concept, including the FOIPS of the United States, the Belt and Road Initiative of China, the Quality Infrastructure Program of Japan, the Indo-Pacific Foreign Policy of Australia, and others, giving the impression that the participants did not have the same views as myself on what ASEAN Centrality meant and how it should be implemented. The implication, of course, is that their respective Indo-Pacific strategy or concept is the norm to be followed to ensure the political stability and economic prosperity of the region. After all the participants had spoken, as the Russian Ambassador and I were the most junior in the group in terms of rank, we were the last in the speaking order, but he spoke first before I did.

Finally, the litmus test that should test the relevance and continuity of ASEAN as a regional organization is the disposition of its people to identify themselves as citizens of ASEAN. Therefore, the last dimension of my definition of ASEAN Centrality is my ardent aspiration for the peoples of ASEAN and those around the world, to increase their level of awareness about ASEAN, and concomitant to this is the need to raise their sense of identity or belongingness to ASEAN. ASEAN is an important regional organization; it should be known to those living within it and those outside. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. I have frequently lamented the lack of awareness and sense of identity by the people of ASEAN about their own regional organization despite its fifty years of existence. In a Philippine Star article I wrote for the 52nd anniversary of ASEAN (2019), I cited the following:

My advocacy has been to make people become aware of ASEAN. ASEAN is not a perfect regional organization. Indeed, the many criticisms against it have factual foundations. Its member states are not the best exemplars of what the West would consider models of human rights promotion and protection.

Analytical Framework

Before I undertook writing this book, I had never heard of the term “autoethnography”. I have, of course, read a number of memoirs and autobiographies of diplomats recounting their experiences. In fact, during a seminar on the same topic where I presented the results of my study, many in the audience, including professors, had mistaken my work as an autobiography. I took pains then, as I do now, to make a differentiation between autoethnography and other genres of reflective writing.

Auto-what? was my initial response when a professor from the University of the Philippines Open University, Dr Jean Saludadez, suggested it to me. As I read up on the research method, I came to realize that this analytical framework was the perfect way to guide me in writing this book. I also came to the conclusion that many people were like me, either ignorant of the existence of such a beautiful research method or knowing about it but dismissing it as a second-rate framework that does not merit being placed side-by-side more formal, more “academic-sounding” approaches.

Autoethnography is a valid research method. I take inspiration from Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011) who define autoethnography as a type of research that seeks to describe and systematically analyse the researcher’s personal experiences in order to understand cultural phenomena. They rationalize that autoethnography goes beyond data, but attempts to combine personal experiences with methodological tools. They popularized autoethnography as an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience as a valid method of research. There should be no shame nor guilt in using personal narratives and perspectives in the quest for truth and knowledge, they say, and instead, regard the result of such a method as one that best approximates the truth, being based on personal experiences.

The Handbook of Autoethnography by Jones, Adams and Ellis (2016) distinguishes autoethnography from ordinary emotive writing by citing four of its characteristics, namely: (i) purposefully commenting on/ critiquing culture and cultural practices; (ii) making contributions to existing research; (iii) embracing vulnerability and purpose; and (iv) creating a reciprocal relation with the audience.

Careful not to be dismissed as another boring memoir of a retired diplomat, I take pains to incorporate the above-mentioned characteristics and goals into my book.