The recent Thailand-Cambodia border confrontation has become a huge test for ASEAN’s solidity. The regional organization, boasting long-lasting peaceful relations among the members, now needs to focus on ensuring effective ceasefire between the two states. The conflict involves not merely military personnel, yet it also expands to the citizens of both countries, taking social media as another battlefield. The friction at the societal level demonstrates a rooted problem within the ASEAN community. The bloc’s efforts to construct a community along with a collective identity need to be questioned.
Internet users from Thailand and Cambodia engage in various online platforms by blaming each other for the causes of fighting. Different ways employed to voice their concerns and defend their countries’ stance, such as conducting protests on an online game, building solidarity through hashtags, commenting on social media posts, and even recreating state borders on Google Maps. The spreading of disinformation and misinformation is making it worse. Both governments are involved in the cyber space battle through their own strategies, which increase people’s engagement in the feud. The fighting on the internet does not merely exist in the digital realm since it can potentially lead to chaos in society.
So far, ASEAN’s responses to the clash have been dominated by initiatives taken by the bloc’s chair, Malaysia. As a peace broker, it hosted the ceasefire agreement and organized meetings between the Thai and Cambodian government high officials in Kuala Lumpur, observed by representatives of the United States and China. Malaysia’s chairmanship deserves appraisal for its strategic engagement with conflicting parties. However, ASEAN as a whole need to consider long-term approaches in managing Thailand-Cambodia border issues and preventing similar cases that may erupt in the future. The strategies should not only mitigate problems at the elite’ level, but also at the grassroots level.
ASEAN is not merely an intergovernmental organization, as it aims to be a community for Southeast Asian people. Through its three pillars, the bloc has committed to realize society’s full potential and manage various contemporary challenges the community faces. The ASEAN Community Vision 2045, adopted at the 46th summit this year, emphasized the crucial role and position of “ASEAN peoples”. The statement on “ASEAN peoples” has proven to be significant as it is mentioned in the beginning part, i.e., number three in 42 points written in the document.
Constructing a community goes hand-in-hand with identity building. Amitav Acharya, an expert on Southeast Asian politics, underlined the importance of identity as a key to establishing a community. In the Vision 2045, ASEAN reiterates the goal to pursue “a Community with a shared ASEAN identity…”. Prior to that, at the 37th ASEAN Summit in 2020, the regional organization had embraced a Narrative of ASEAN Identity (NAI) outlining the breakdown of ASEAN identity’s definition, history, role, and goals. In short, the Southeast Asian grouping has common ground on the importance of community and identity for ASEAN citizens.
Nevertheless, the ASEAN official community and collective identity documents lacks concrete action and implementation. What happens between Thai and Cambodian social media users during the confrontation reflects the weakness of regional community and identity as well as the potential danger of ultranationalism. Scholars have long been criticizing the workability of the ASEAN identity and community notion. They argue that multiple factors contributed to the problem of its realization, such as lack of coordination and organizational mechanisms, internal division, and geopolitical competition. Critiques also pointed out how the bloc “…still barely resembles a community…” despite the establishment of the ASEAN community being declared back in 2003. In addition, observers believe that the group tends to exclude the public from its process as they claim that “…ASEAN is a community of nations, not a community of people”. Indeed, it is a massive task for the bloc to address these issues since it requires approaches at societal level.
Building a regional identity and community through formal education is one of the keys to creating a sense of “we-feeling” and “ASEAN-ness”. The significance of the national school system as a medium in popularizing ASEAN for the citizens, especially youth, was also reported in the 2021 survey on Understanding How Young People See ASEAN. As an Indonesian who went to schools from the end of 1990s to early 2000s, I found that the information regarding ASEAN was not sufficiently taught at educational institutions. What I could recall from that period was how the teacher asked the students to memorize the names of ASEAN founding members rather than learning its historical background. Nowadays, at the university level in Indonesia, state ideology and civic education are heavily emphasized as it is mandated by law. I believe that the concept of ASEAN identity and community can “accompany” the teaching of national identity as a strategy in realizing ASEAN Vision. As Acharya says that “national and regional identities co-exist and to some extent complement each other”.
