ASEAN centrality is interesting and necessary, first of all, for ASEAN itself as a condition for self-preservation as an independent centre of power amid rapidly changing international configurations. However, it is also necessary for those countries that will find themselves in a more difficult situation without institutional formats in the region. These include, first of all, is Russia, but also many other countries, including China and India – all those for whom economic development is of vital importance, and regional multilateral institutions, albeit in their soft version, perform a stabilising function, writes Ekaterina Koldunova, Director of the ASEAN Centre, Associate Professor of the Oriental Studies Department at MGIMO University of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Today, the central role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) within the institutional structures of the Asia-Pacific is widely regarded as a political and diplomatic reality. Diplomatically, all of ASEAN’s dialogue partners – now numerous and including major players such as the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, and a range of other countries, as well as international organizations – consistently emphasize their commitment to upholding this centrality. The Association’s prominent position is a relatively recent phenomenon, yet it paradoxically echoes an earlier historical era when economic interdependence and trade liberalization were seen as remedies for major geopolitical conflicts. Today, this very combination renders ASEAN’s centrality in macro-regional institutional formats vulnerable, necessitating ongoing efforts to ensure its genuine, rather than merely symbolic, preservation.
ASEAN Centrality in Politics and Economics
The idea of leveraging ASEAN centrality for macro-regional institutional cooperation began to emerge in the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, as the Association sought new frameworks for development. The anti-communist rationale that initially united its founding members faded into the past, and the organization systematically integrated former adversaries – Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar – into its ranks, while formulating new tasks for regional integration. Simultaneously, ASEAN actively expanded its external network of partnerships with larger global players.
The logic behind these actions was twofold: to prevent a power vacuum in the region amid a sharp (though, as later events revealed, temporary) decline in global conflicts, and to sustain the interest of external actors in Southeast Asia at a sufficient level. These external players were expected to fulfil a dual role – stimulating regional development by competing for economic influence while maintaining the necessary political balance, thereby tempering each other’s ambitions for dominance. Crucially, these external actors were not to undermine ASEAN’s prerogative to address regional issues independently or with only the level of external involvement deemed acceptable by its members. This marked a departure from the Cold War era, when Southeast Asia was often treated as an object of geopolitical rivalry and constrained by the rigid logic of bipolarity.
The successful integration of all Southeast Asian nations into a single regional organization marked a significant breakthrough for the Asia-Pacific, a region where bilateral relations had long dominated and where persistent divisions had impeded the institutionalization of macro-regional cooperation. Extending ASEAN’s model to broader regional frameworks – on the condition that these institutions adopted ASEAN’s “rules of the game,” such as consensus-based decision-making and soft institutionalism without pursuing supranationality – became the cornerstone of the concept of ASEAN centrality.
During the second half of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21stcentury, the family of ASEAN-centric institutions expanded to include the ASEAN Regional Forum on Security (ARF), the East Asia Summit (EAS), the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting with Dialogue Partners (ADMM+), the Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum (EAMF), and several others. As a result, the Association gradually evolved into the primary platform for macro-regional dialogue, and the concept of ASEAN centrality began to acquire new significance. ASEAN started positioning itself as the “steering wheel” of macro-regional processes. It became established diplomatic practice and a mark of good form to draft the final documents of these summits and forums based on proposals put forward by ASEAN . For a time, ASEAN-centric institutions held a near-monopoly on multilateral interaction in the Asia-Pacific.
However, this centrality did not extend de facto to the economic sphere . The ASEAN countries remained in the position of weaker partners. Nevertheless, at the beginning of this century, broader economic growth trends in the Asia-Pacific region, driven largely by cooperation between the United States and China, created favourable conditions from which most countries in the region, including ASEAN members, were able to benefit.
Minilateralism: Beyond ASEAN and not only
In the 2010s, US-China relations started to worsen into a confrontation. In 2013, economically rising China proposed its own macro-regional project – the Belt and Road Initiative. The US began to revise its strategy towards China in favour of increasing its containment instruments. In a situation of growing conflict, the United States was much less interested in multilateral ASEAN-centric institutions, since they were not coping with the international “socialisation” of China in a direction which favoured the US. In 2017, during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, the United States officially adopted the idea of the Indo-Pacific, which had previously been developed primarily by regional players – India and Japan.
First, at the level of rhetoric and documents, and later in practice, the concept of the Asia-Pacific was replaced by the Indo-Pacific in US policy. The idea of the IPR seemed to imply a broad macro-regional approach, albeit driven by a different logic than the Asia-Pacific. However, the American version of the Indo-Pacific began to be implemented primarily through minilateralism, which fundamentally contradicted the very essence of the soft and inclusive institutional cooperation proposed by ASEAN and turned out to be the most acceptable format of interaction for an extremely diverse group of international players.
The first minilateral format of the Indo-Pacific was the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad (an association of the United States, Australia, Japan, and India), which did not formally include any of the ASEAN countries, but was revived in 2017 on the side-lines of the ASEAN summit in Manila. It assumed the flexible inclusion of those countries that would be ready to contribute to contain China, in one form or another. In 2020, South Korea, New Zealand, and Vietnam (which held the ASEAN chair that year) joined the Quad dialogue, forming the Quad+ format. At the same time, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore were also invited to join the Quad+ track-and-a-half dialogue. The cooperative elements of the Quad rhetoric, the emphasis on various humanitarian areas of cooperation (for example, vaccine diplomacy), as well as India’s reluctance to directly oppose China, limited the Quad’s ability to effectively operate in practice. As a result, the activation of Quad was followed in 2021 by the formation of a more ideologically cohesive bloc between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS), united by common strategic and military-technological tasks. At the same time, this format was not enough to organise effective actions against China; already in 2024, another minilateral format appeared, conditionally called Squad, this time with the direct participation of one of the ASEAN countries. The new group brought together the United States, Australia, Japan and the Philippines – formally in order to respond to China’s actions in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
Mission impossible?
In response to the active assertion of the Indo-Pacific concept in macro-regional policy, the ASEAN countries attempted to offer their own “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific” – with an emphasis on further cooperative economic development and continuing the assertion of the idea of ASEAN centrality. At the same time, numerous minilateral formats set up by the United States were by no means always perceived in the Association as problematic for maintaining the ASEAN centrality. It is interesting that in 2024, 40.9% of experts from ASEAN countries surveyed by the Singapore Institute of Southeast Asian Studies said that cooperation with the Quad would be beneficial for the region, and 32.2% viewed the Quad’s activities as complementary to ASEAN's activities. At the same time, when asked whether the Quad threatens ASEAN’s centrality and competes with ASEAN-centric formats, only 13.9% of respondents answered positively in 2023, and even fewer in 2024 – 11% . As for AUKUS, with a higher degree of alarmism, some saw the positive side of its activities in the fact that properly, the Anglo-Saxon members of the association would take on the issues of military-strategic confrontation with China. For the ASEAN countries, such a situation could create additional room for manoeuvre, since in this case they would not be forced to enter into a direct conflict with China.
The ASEAN Community Vision 2045, as well as other strategic documents of the Association, naturally contain postulates on maintaining ASEAN centrality. At the same time, in practice, in a situation of growing geopolitical conflicts, stronger players are more likely to act exactly as they deem necessary to implement their plans without much regard for the opinion of the Association. ASEAN expert circles are generally aware of this, but they also understand that ASEAN's military-strategic weight is not enough to openly oppose this line. As one of the scenarios for the development of the situation, experts even consider a potential de facto refusal of the centrality in the political sphere in exchange for maintaining economic dynamism. However, in our age of strategic uncertainty, who can guarantee that this status quo will be durable and, moreover, favourable for the Association?
Instead of a conclusion: who needs ASEAN centrality?
In the current conditions, ASEAN centrality is neither predetermined nor guaranteed. Having lost the centrality in macro-regional institutions, ASEAN risks losing the hard-won levers of influence on stronger partners, who increasingly determine the regional agenda.
ASEAN centrality is interesting and necessary, first of all, for ASEAN itself as a condition for self-preservation as an independent centre of power amid rapidly changing international configurations. However, it is also necessary for those countries that will find themselves in a more difficult situation without institutional formats in the region. These include, first of all, is Russia, but also many other countries, including China and India – all those for whom economic development is of vital importance, and regional multilateral institutions, albeit in their soft version, perform a stabilising function.
What can help strengthen the Association’s centrality? Support for other influential players, building up effective and synchronized cooperation with them, resistance to attempts to create internal divisions in ASEAN activities, as well as efforts by the Association’s countries to ensure their real, rather than discursive, autonomy in political and strategic affairs.
