Reference to Fidel V. Ramos' commentary "Asia's Emerging Community",
in Project Syndicate: A World of Ideas, 13 September 2013
So, FVR is still at it -- an ardent proponent of ASEAN regional integration. Sorry, Mr. ex-President, but this integration project will not succeed by 2015 and, importantly, its neoliberal capitalist ideas for Southeast Asian economies must be opposed.
I have argued in an article that the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) 2015 project is anti-development and anti-democratization in political-economic and socio-ecological terms at both domestic and regional levels. Here's my article's abstract:
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Understanding the ‘AEC’ project appears to be more important now than making prognosis about the ‘2015’ target. The year 2015 is only symbolic, at best, of a much deeper ideology being used by particular sections of the elite class and social forces to advance their specific worldview for the preservation and promotion of their material interests. To complement existing debates, it is thus a worthwhile analytical endeavour to examine the ideas and interests behind the AEC. In doing so, the task is to address the problematique: What does the AEC project mean for socio-economic development and democratization, particularly for the general well-being of the peoples and environment from society to society in the region of Southeast Asia?
In this paper, I attempt to unpack the AEC Blueprint to reveal the project’s neoliberal capitalist strategy of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ whereby the drive for the acquisition of more wealth and power by the economically wealthy and politically powerful necessitates the deprivation of the peoples’ collective rights and access to the economic, political, social, and ecological commons. I therefore offer a critical reading of the AEC project in the analysis, specifically its agenda for the establishment of a competitive single market, and conclude with some important pointers on forging an alternative regionalism process for Southeast Asia’s development and democratization.
Unfortunately, FVR has to wait until December to read it when the article is published in Germany.
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