ASEAN, the Southeast Asian regional bloc, will be 56 in August. And that is a long enough time for great things to have happened. But the 10-member grouping has very little to show for all these years.
The reasons are many, but one stands out: Asean is falling prey to big power rivalries. This is why Indonesian President Joko Widodo made the "don't use Asean as a proxy" call on Friday ahead of the Asean foreign ministers' meeting in Jakarta. He didn't name the big powers, but it is an open secret that he had China and the United States in mind.
At the centre of this proxy battle is the disputed South China Sea, a trade route that is estimated to carry US$4 trillion worth of goods a year. China wants it all. Well, almost. In what it calls a "nine-dash line" claim, Beijing wants 90 per cent of the 3.5 million km troubled waters.
This expansive claim by China intrudes into the exclusive economic zones of four Asean countries. Almost all of the Asean members dispute Beijing's extensive claim. Rightly, it must be said.
Most members of the regional bloc agree on one thing: that maritime disputes must be settled in accordance with international law, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) being one. China, a signatory to UNCLOS, has a reason to disagree.
On July 12, 2016, a five-member tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) unanimously invalidated the "nine-dash line" claim, thus handing down a much sought-after victory to the Philippines. PCA's press release issued on the same day put it thus: there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within the sea areas falling within the "nine-dash line".
China didn't take part in the arbitration, but Annex VII of UNCLOS is clear: the absence of a party or the failure of a party to defend its case shall not constitute a bar to the proceedings. China has refused to accept PCA's award.
All this bickering over the South China Sea has resulted in half a century of inertia. Consider the Code of Conduct for the South China Sea. For 27 years, Asean has been proposing a binding regional code to "foster understanding among claimant countries".
All it got from China, in 2002, was a non-binding Declaration of Conduct. If this wasn't bad enough, China began occupying islands and increasing its military activities there. Now claimant countries want nothing less than a legally binding code. Understandably so. The Asean economic community, styled along the lines of the European Union's common market, is another victim of the bloc's inertia.
Although it was supposed to have been up and running in 2015, it remains a dream. Asean's Five-Point Consensus to end the bloodshed in Myanmar is similarly doomed.
Joko is right about Asean being turned into a proxy for the big powers. We saw this play out in 2012 in Phnom Penh, when overtly China-friendly Cambodia, exploiting its chairmanship of the bloc, tried to push through Beijing's claims over the South China Sea.
This drew angry reactions from some fellow members. China isn't the only one on an Asean proxy hunt. The US, too, is on a similar chase. Asean needs to be alert. Acting as a proxy for either one will get in the way of what Asean is meant to be.