ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia.

• Author: Cook, Malcolm
• Position: Book review

ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia. By Lee Jones. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Hardcover: 262pp.

Lee Jones' new book on ASEAN and the states of Southeast Asia is refreshingly iconoclastic. It tackles one of the core tenets of ASEANology that has been intellectually reinforced by the Constructivist turn in the analysis of this regional organization. The icon that Jones' book takes aim at is the scholarly near consensus "on the absolute centrality of the non-interference principle for ASEAN states" (p. 2). A consensus that Jones' correctly notes echoes the official rhetoric of ASEAN and its member states.

There are three steps to Jones' argument that this consensus is misplaced. First, he establishes that a range of Constructivist, Realist and English School scholars of ASEAN uphold this consensus despite their intellectual differences and debates over other aspects of the organization.

Second, he establishes the case that ASEAN member states have repeatedly intervened in Southeast Asia both in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods in apparent contradiction to ASEAN's commitment to non-interference. Where he sees other scholars of ASEAN as downplaying or ignoring these interventions, he makes them the empirical core of his argument.

Third, Jones posits a theoretical explanation for when member states uphold ASEAN's "cherished norm" of non-interference and when they violate it. He adopts the multi-variable critical political economy approach that Jones argues, for Southeast Asia, "was pioneered by scholars based at or linked with the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Perth" (p. x). Befitting this social conflict approach's Marxist roots, Jones focuses on state-capital relations in the different member states of ASEAN and the role of the state and state institutions in supporting powerful owners and managers of capital in their domestic conflicts and transnational expansion.

This approach sees "state managers" in the ASEAN member states invoking the non-interference norm and its purported centrality to ASEAN as a "technology of power" to hinder external interventions in favour of domestic marginalized groups such as the people of East Timor when it was under Indonesian control and communist rebels and their sympathizers in the Philippines and Thailand. These managers violate the same norm when they perceive external threats to their states such as during the invasion of Cambodia by communist Vietnam...