Regional diplomatic body releases communique expressing shared alarm about situation all parties acknowledged but none specified, with footnote confirming individual member states’ concerns may differ from collective concern in ways to be clarified bilaterally
ASEAN Summit Produces Strongly Worded Statement of Deep Concern All 10 States Agreed to Be Concerned About Differently
VIENTIANE — The ASEAN Summit concluded Friday with the release of a 47-page joint communique expressing “deep concern,” “serious alarm,” and “an urgent collective call for restraint” regarding a regional situation that the communique names in paragraph 12 and describes in language that all ten member states confirmed they agreed with, two of which confirmed they agreed with it because it was ambiguous enough to be consistent with their position, three of which confirmed they agreed with it while reserving their right to interpret “deep” differently from how other members might, and one of which confirmed it had agreed to the paragraph’s inclusion only after a footnote was added clarifying that individual member states’ concerns might differ in “degree, character, and specific application” from the collective concern expressed in the paragraph’s main text, which one diplomat described as “a footnote that effectively exempts the signatories from the sentence it is attached to, while preserving the sentence.”
“ASEAN speaks with one voice,” said the summit chair, Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith of Laos, at a closing press conference where he confirmed the communique had been agreed by all ten member states. When asked whether the ten member states’ concerns about the situation were identical, he said they were “unified in their expression.” When asked whether unified expression and identical concern were the same thing, he said “the communique reflects the consensus” and moved to the next question with the practiced fluency of a diplomat who has answered this question at multiple summits and has developed an efficient routing around it.
The Drafting Process
The ASEAN communique is drafted over three days by senior officials and then reviewed by foreign ministers before the summit’s final session. This year’s process, according to three diplomats who agreed to speak without attribution because “attribution in this context would create exactly the kind of bilateral complication we are all trying to avoid,” involved seventeen drafting sessions, four informal consultations at what delegates described as “the margins of the margins,” and what one diplomat called “the longest discussion of a single adjective I have participated in, in twenty-two years of multilateral diplomacy.” The adjective in question, which appears in paragraph 12, was eventually agreed to on the basis that it was strong enough to satisfy the states seeking stronger language, weak enough to not require a response from the state whose activities the paragraph addressed, and ambiguous enough that both groups could describe the outcome as satisfactory.
The footnote to paragraph 12 was added at 2:30 AM on the final drafting night, proposed by one delegation and accepted by the others with what one participant described as “the exhausted consensus of people who had been drafting for seventeen hours and had flights to catch.” The footnote reads: “Member states note that the depth, character, and specific application of the concern expressed in paragraph 12 may vary in accordance with individual member states’ national positions, bilateral relationships, and strategic circumstances.” Dr. Amara Thitirat, a Southeast Asian diplomacy researcher at Chulalongkorn University, said this footnote was “a technical instrument that ASEAN has used in various forms for thirty years and that serves the specific function of allowing the organisation to say something while accommodating the fact that its members mean different things by that something.” She said she found this “genuinely impressive as a diplomatic achievement” and “genuinely frustrating as a policy instrument,” a combination she described as “the characteristic emotional response to ASEAN diplomacy at close range.”
What the Communique Actually Says
Beyond paragraph 12, the communique covers 340 agreed points across trade, connectivity, digital integration, climate, and human development, the majority of which represent genuine policy coordination that the summit chair highlighted in his closing remarks and that the international press corps covered in a single paragraph before devoting most of their coverage to paragraph 12. Dr. Thitirat said this coverage pattern was “consistent across ASEAN summits” and reflected “a legitimate editorial judgment about where the policy stakes are highest” combined with “the human tendency to focus on disagreement over agreement, even when the agreement is doing more work.”
The agreed points on trade facilitation, for example, include a timetable for implementing the ASEAN Single Window for customs processing, which when fully operational will reduce average customs clearance times by an estimated 40 percent across the region. This represents a practical economic benefit estimated by the Asian Development Bank at several billion dollars annually in reduced logistics costs. It was announced at a side session attended by trade ministers and 23 journalists. Paragraph 12 was discussed by every journalist present, most of whom had also covered the same paragraph, differently worded, at the previous three summits.
Next Year’s Summit
Malaysia will chair ASEAN next year and host the 2025 summit. Foreign Minister Saleumxay confirmed Malaysia would inherit the chair “with the full support of all ASEAN member states,” a formulation that one veteran summit observer noted was “technically meaningless since ASEAN chair rotation is predetermined and support is not required” but that is nonetheless expressed at every transition as “a ritual acknowledgment that everyone is still speaking to everyone else, which is the most basic requirement of a consensus-based regional body and should not be undervalued.” He said next year’s summit would address “the challenges and opportunities of ASEAN’s next phase of development,” which is also what this year’s summit and the three preceding summits said they would address. The communique for next year’s summit will begin drafting in approximately eight months. Dr. Thitirat said she expected paragraph 12’s successor to be similarly worded. She said she had begun drafting her analysis of it already, “leaving a blank where the adjective goes.”
