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Ladies and Gentlemen,
It’s a great pleasure to be here and very nice
to see you all, especially my good friend,
George Yeo and my old colleague S. Dhanabalan.
Thank you very much for coming.
I’d like to start with a few words of thanks.
First of all, to Ambassador Tommy Koh for his
very kind welcome and to the Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies and our Brunei Economic
Development Board for inviting me here. I feel
very honoured.
Then, lastly, from all of us in Brunei, many
thanks to Singapore for the wonderful
hospitality.
After such an excellent lunch, it’s usually good
to relax. So I hope I won’t send you to sleep.
Seeing you here makes me think about how far we
have come in Southeast Asia.
As many of you will remember, back in the
nineteen fifties and sixties, it wasn’t even a
region. It was just a piece of geography and it
stood for unrest and instability. When we look
at it today, however, it stands for exciting
modern progress and great opportunity. This is
what ASEAN’s founding fathers wanted to see. It
was their vision. It is now a real one and it’s
a wonderful inheritance for my generation.
When I got your invitation to speak to you,
however, it left me with a bit of a problem. It
took me back nearly twenty five years ago. I
still remember how I was then - a very nervous,
brand-new minister. I needed a lot of help to
find my way and felt like a total beginner.
In spite of that, though, I was very lucky. I
had some of the best teachers in the region.
They were my colleagues from Southeast Asia,
particularly here in Singapore. They gave me
lots of help and advice and I’ll always be very
grateful to them.
There was one thing they never taught me,
however, and that was how to go about an
Inaugural Southeast Asian Lecture!
So as you can imagine, I spent a long time
wondering what to talk about. After all, many of
you in the Institute are experts on Southeast
Asia.
I needed something in which none of us are
experts and everyone is still a learner.
Then I thought about the beginning of ASEAN and
the vision it offered. That left me with a
question. What is our vision today? And what are
we going to pass on to our next generation? In
other words, what is our future going to be
like?
None of us are experts on that and even our
ASEAN leaders are not sure. I think that’s why
they keep on calling for “real action”.
What do they mean by this?
They obviously don’t mean what we in government
often call “action” and I’m sure you know what
this is: “Lists of Issues”, “Development Plans”,
“Roadmaps”, “Blueprints”, “Mechanisms” and so
on.
I know our leaders definitely don’t mean those
things. We give them pages and pages of that
every year. Even volumes of it!
Instead, what I think they want to see is a
different kind of action. This is the kind that
helps ordinary people directly with their
day-to-day problems, in other words, being part
of a Southeast Asian Community….. and I’m not
talking about a slogan or a piece of ASEAN
jargon. What I mean is a real community and
maybe that should be our future vision of a
“Real Southeast Asian Community”.
So that’s what I’d like to talk about and now
you can really relax. I promise I won’t speak
for too long! Nothing academic.
Just a few thoughts and ideas about what I mean
by such a community and why we need it and how
we might go about forming it.
So first of all, Ladies and Gentlemen, what
exactly is a “real community”? It is certainly
not what we call the “international community”
or the “global village”. That seems to be a very
different kind of community and, to show how it
works, I would like to share a recent story with
you. I think it describes life in the global
village quite well.
It starts out in a very small corner of the
village, not too far from our own region, in a
small state in the Pacific. The local fishermen
there had noticed that something strange was
happening. The sea was not behaving itself. Nor
were the fish. They seemed to have moved
somewhere else. Nobody knew where they’d gone to
and if they caught any of them, they got fish
poisoning when they ate them.
This was because of the “red tide” problem, of
course, and I think you all know about that. We
sometimes get it over here, but, over there it
never seems to go away.
So it made the fishermen very worried about the
future and they consulted their government.
And then what happened?
A process began.
Step one…enter the government.
“The problem,” the government said “is climate
change” and they promised to look into it.
Now, normally this would mean passing some
government laws but this didn’t seem very
sensible. They couldn’t just pass one that
banned the climate from changing or the fish
from poisoning people.
So, they made a decision. They decided that the
problem wasn’t really a “problem” at all. It was
an “issue”!
Then……
Step Two in the process.
Enter the Chamber of Commerce.
They advised the government that there was much
more to the problem. Local fishing was no longer
a profitable industry. Why? Because only
lower-income people ate local fish now. Most
people had given up because of the poisoning.
So, it was basically an “economic issue”.
Then, the government made another decision.
They decided that the fishermen’s problem was
even more than an “economic issue”. It was “a
major international issue” and they gave it a
name. It was called “a small states issue”.
Then the next step…..enter the Commonwealth
Heads of Government, at their meeting in Kampala
last year.
That’s how I learned about it.
I was there at the time and we all discussed
this “major international issue”. We also made a
decision. We decided that the “small states
issue” was far more than just a “major
international issue”. It was a “global issue”!
So we moved the process on again.
And then the final step.
Enter the World Economic Forum in Davos last
month.
I couldn’t go myself but I watched it on
television. All the global issues were on show.
The greatest economic thinkers on earth. Great
debates. Brilliant speakers. And lots of charts
and graphs.
And there my story ends. Far away in
Switzerland, where of course, they don’t even
have any sea but they do hold good discussions!
The result? No real action.
And back in the small corner of the Pacific
where it all started, the fishermen still get up
in the morning and the weather is still changing
and the fish are still poisoning people.
And that, I fear, is the global village at work.
The whole process takes even longer than I’ve
taken to tell my story!
Now, of course this may be a little unfair on
the global village. None of it, however, adds up
to a “real” community in action and it’s not
just me who thinks that. Most of our ordinary
citizens often feel the same. Not just in the
Pacific but here in Southeast Asia as well.
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is probably why
our leaders keep calling for “real action”.
That’s also why I hope our region can somehow
find another way of doing things by all of us
becoming a new kind of community.
By this, I mean one that forces us to focus on
the real problems of day-to-day life faced every
new morning by ordinary people in our region.
Not turning them into “issues” and debating them
all over the world.
Not like the so-called global village.
Not split into sectors.
A government one.
A business one.
And an academic one.
Now, I know what many people would say, maybe
even some of you here.
“An interesting story and also quite a sad one”.
But surely it doesn’t apply to our modern
Southeast Asia. After all, we now have an ASEAN
Charter. That means that we are aware of the
“issues”. And we have gone far beyond a
beginners’ stage. We are a dynamic, go-ahead
region. We know what’s needed.
Our governments are busy doing what our
government officials call “facilitating”.
Our business men and women are equally busy
doing what their business officials call
“implementing,” and it all involves some of the
finest minds in our region.
Therefore, some may say, we already have an
official community and we can confidently leave
everything to a combination of the new ASEAN
Charter; market forces; government laws; our
dialogue partners; and all our experts.
Well, all I can say is this:
If that’s the answer we give to our leaders,
when they call for real action, I don’t think
they are going to be very satisfied. Nor are the
people we all represent.
What they want to feel part of is the kind of
community which all five hundred million of our
people understand and believe in, with everyone
respecting each other and everyone helping one
another and no one excluded.
Those were the things I most appreciated when I
was first an ASEAN Minister. I didn’t have an
“issue” back then. I had a real human problem. I
was young and nervous and feeling a little
excluded and wondering how to cope.
I remember what gave me confidence. It was quite
simple. I found myself in a small real-life
community of colleagues and friends and they
helped me, even though we came from different
countries with many different special interests.
That’s what I would like to see us trying to do
for everyone in our region.
But …. now for the difficult part.
How do we go about forming such a community?
It won’t be easy, of course. We are ten members
with ten different ways of life, several
different faiths and at least half a dozen
different systems of government. But I just hope
that ASEAN will find the way. To do this, I
think that somehow we have to discover what I
would like to call the “Common Ground” which any
community shares.
And where is this “common ground”?
Again, I’m not really sure but, yet again, I
know where it doesn’t exist. It’s not in the
government conference hall nor the executive
boardroom nor the university library.
I suggest that it is the sum of all these places
plus, even more importantly, the places where my
fishermen live and work and their friends and
colleagues and all their families and local
communities in our cities, towns and villages;
our mosques, churches and temples; our homes and
our schools.
That is to say, I believe that the common ground
we have to find is where our actual, real
community works, lives and studies and prays for
a confident future.
That’s the common ground and that’s what I hope
our post-charter ASEAN and all its ministers,
its businessmen and women and its experts and
officials will try to discover together.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
All I can end with is to repeat what I said at
the start. When it comes to forming the
community we need, I think we are all still
learners. We have to find new ways and enter the
common ground.
It will be very hard and it will take a long
time and maybe another generation or even two.
It will need a vision like the one ASEAN’s
founders had over forty years ago. But if we can
find out how to do it, I believe we will have a
very good future indeed.
More than that, we will pass on to our children
and grandchildren even more than we have
received ourselves. They will be part of a
region that gives them a deep identity.
They will be more than just Singaporean, or
Malaysian, or Cambodian or even Bruneian! They
will also be Southeast Asian!
They will be part of a community that solves
real-life problems together and they will come
from a place that will never again be described
as “just a piece of geography”.
Thank you. |
