Tying together a rope of sand

Southeast Asia is where India meets China. More recently, parts of the region have experienced a phenomenal economic flowering. The title of Amitav Acharya's slim volume suggests that the ten sharply divergent countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) are now also on a unique quest for unity.

Happily, instead of pursuing this chimera, he treats it as a peg on which to hang a perceptive study of "the symbol of a dynamic, prosperous and peaceful region". In spite of the 1997 crash, Asean remains Asia's showpiece. Europe and America are anxious to remain engaged with it, seeing the group as their gateway to the opportunities of the Asia-Pacific region. Its anatomy will therefore interest students and strategists everywhere. But Southeast Asia is different from Europe, South Asia or the Middle East, each of which can claim some common denominator. With Singapore's per capita gross domestic product of $26,041 against Cambodia's less than $298, even the fashionable substitution of economics for politics and culture leaves the region with a rope of sand.

If, nevertheless, Asean's core countries managed heroically to imagine themselves in Benedict Anderson's sense to be an entity, it was mainly because of the cold war and the conflict in Vietnam. In the process, they developed cohesion, confidence and a sense of purpose. Acharya also exposes the hype: intra-Asean trade is modest; flourishing in the dragon's breath of superpower rivalry and local insurgencies, Asean failed to anticipate the slump, and failed again to muster the resolve and resources needed to recover. Now, it presents a bickering front to the challenge of globalisation that Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad denounces and Brigadier-General Lee Hsien Loong in neighbouring Singapore extols.

Interaction with China is similarly divisive. When Zhu Rongji recently offered Asean a free-trade pact that would create a huge market to compete with Nafta and the European Union, only Singapore's ethnic Chinese premier, Goh Chok Tong, welcomed it as "a challenge, not a threat". The silence of his colleagues recalled Vietnam's warning of the "common fear of Chinese policy in the South China Sea".

Like most Asians, Acharya is not sufficiently generous to benevolent (if unwittingly so) colonialism. There would have been no Asean to applaud if Europeans had not created sovereign national entities that straddle ethnic lines. Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Malaysia and the Indochina states are to some extent colonial inventions.

Colonialism also imported capitalist institutions that are not indigenous to Asia, as Max Weber wrote. But Southeast Asians drew the line at attempts to introduce democracy, human rights and other liberal notions that clashed with Confucianism, Islam or communism. When Asean defied Europe over Burma, it was acting in its traditional character. Acharya suggests that this authoritarianism helped to promote regionalism.

Maybe. But will authoritarianism help recovery? Or, having recovered, will the peoples of Southeast Asia be content with leaders who dole out only what they think is good for hoi polloi? Events in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines suggest otherwise. Asean is poised for change. By opting for growth with democracy, it might combine the principles that China and India, its two ancestors, have come to symbolise, and confound Hegelians who hold that liberty is alien to Asia.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is visiting fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was formerly editorial consultant, The Straits Times , Singapore.