A Southeast Asian Community: More than a Matter of Geography 9789812308146

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A Southeast Asian Community

The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional centre dedicated to the study of socio-political, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia and its wider geostrategic and economic environment. The Institute’s research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES, including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS), and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS). ISEAS Publishing, an established academic press, has issued almost 2,000 books and journals. It is the largest scholarly publisher of research about Southeast Asia from within the region. ISEAS Publishing works with many other academic and trade publishers and distributors to disseminate important research and analyses from and about Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.

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INAUGURAL SOUTHEAST ASIA LECTURE

Mohamed Bolkiah A Southeast Asian Community More than a Matter of Geography

I5EI5 INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

Singapore

Published in Singapore in 2008 by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang Singapore 119614 E-mail: [email protected] World Wide Web: http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. © 2008 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively with the authors, and their interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policy of the Institute or its supporters. ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Mohamed Bolkiah, Prince, 1947– . A Southeast Asian community : more than a matter of geography / Mohamed Bolkiah. 1. Southeast Asia. I. Title. DS525 M69 2008 ISBN 978-981-230-786-6 (soft cover) ISBN 978-981-230-814-6 (PDF) Typeset by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd Printed and bound in Singapore by Seng Lee Press Pte Ltd

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CONTENTS

I Opening Remarks Tommy Koh Ambassador-At-Large 1 II A Southeast Asian Community: More than a Matter of Geography HRH Prince Mohamed Bolkiah Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Brunei Darussalam 6 III Closing Remarks K. Kesavapany Director, ISEAS 18

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This paper was delivered by HRH Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, at the Inaugural Southeast Asia Lecture organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in conjunction with the Brunei Forum in Singapore on 19 February 2008.

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I Opening Remarks Tommy Koh Ambassador-At-Large

Your Royal Highness Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Negara Brunei Darussalam Ministers and friends from Brunei Darussalam Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore, Mr George Yeo Ladies and Gentlemen •

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It gives me great pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker for the Inaugural Southeast Asia Lecture of ISEAS. This Lecture is being held in conjunction with The Brunei Forum. Our speaker today is an old and good 1

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friend of Singapore. At a personal level, I am happy to say that we have been friends for 25 years. Since 1970, His Royal Highness Prince Mohamed Bolkiah has been serving as the Perdana Wazir, the foremost chief of the traditional advisors to His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Negara Brunei Darussalam. When Negara Brunei Darussalam became independent in 1984, His Royal Highness Prince Mohamed Bolkiah was appointed the Foreign Minister, a post he has held ever since. His Royal Highness is now the longest serving Foreign Minister in ASEAN. I suppose we could call him the Dean of ASEAN Foreign Ministers. His Royal Highness had the challenging task of building up a diplomatic corps from scratch; developing policies that would promote Brunei’s international personality and expanding its diplomatic, security and economic space. In his memoir Time and the River published in 2000, His Royal Highness gave an insight into the early days of the Brunei Foreign Ministry. I quote from the

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memoirs: “We were young, inexperienced and new to international affairs. In any meeting, we could sense colleagues eyeing us … They were probably wondering precisely where this new addition to the world community stood. In truth, though we tried not to let on, we stood very nervously!” unquote (p. 146). Looking back, Brunei can be justifiably proud of its record of successful diplomacy. Because of his diplomatic skills, his sincerity, kindness and courtesy, His Royal Highness has succeeded in helping His Majesty to put Brunei on the world map and earn the respect and friendship of the international community. His Royal Highness has also helped to position Brunei as a pillar of stability within ASEAN. He strongly believes in consensus and plays a helpful role in forging the spirit of dialogue and consultation. His officials follow his example. Thus, in the HLTF on the ASEAN Charter, Brunei’s representative, Pengiran Osman, played a positive and constructive role and helped me to negotiate several compromises. Bilaterally, the longstanding and special 3

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relationship Singapore and Brunei share is due in no small part to the personal commitment and efforts by His Majesty and His Royal Highness. His Royal Highness has also been playing a prominent role in the economic development of the country. His Royal Highness now oversees the Brunei EDB. His Royal Highness also chairs the Council for Long-Term Development Plan which has recently drawn up the national vision for 2035 and outlined concrete developmental policies and strategies to bring this vision to reality. His Royal Highness has approached his economic tasks with a pragmatic approach. Explaining the moves for his ministry to take over the international economic policy functions, he has said that this is because trade and investment are part of the day-to-day lives of the people; “if we cannot compete successfully with the outside world, foreign affairs can become frightening affairs. So our work today is not just about protecting ourselves against the outside world; it is also about helping our people play a successful part in it”. (source: Interview with HRH Mohamed Bolkiah,

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published in “The Report on Brunei Darussalam 2007”, Oxford Business Group, 2007) The challenges Brunei faces today, and the role played by Prince Mohamed, were summed up in a foreword written by our Minister Mentor, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, to the book Time and the River in 2000. In the foreword, Minister Mentor said that “The past cannot be changed. The future is not preordained. Brunei will need careful, steady and clear-sighted ministers like Prince Mohamed to help the Sultan in charting his way forward as the geopolitical landscape changes.” May I now invite His Royal Highness Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade of Brunei Darussalam, to deliver the keynote address for the Inaugural Southeast Asia Lecture. Your Royal Highness, please. *****

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II A Southeast Asian Community: More than a Matter of Geography HRH Prince Mohamed Bolkiah Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Brunei Darussalam Ladies and Gentlemen, It’s a great pleasure to be here and very nice to see you all, especially my good friend, George Yeo and my old colleague S. Dhanabalan. Thank you very much for coming. I’d like to start with a few words of thanks. First of all, to Ambassador Tommy Koh for his very kind welcome and to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and our Brunei Economic Development Board for inviting me here. I feel very honoured. Then, lastly, from all of us in Brunei, many thanks to Singapore for the wonderful hospitality. 6

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After such an excellent lunch, it’s usually good to relax. So I hope I won’t send you to sleep. Seeing you here makes me think about how far we have come in Southeast Asia. As many of you will remember, back in the nineteen fifties and sixties, it wasn’t even a region. It was just a piece of geography and it stood for unrest and instability. When we look at it today, however, it stands for exciting modern progress and great opportunity. This is what ASEAN’s founding fathers wanted to see. It was their vision. It is now a real one and it’s a wonderful inheritance for my generation. When I got your invitation to speak to you, however, it left me with a bit of a problem. It took me back nearly twenty five years ago. I still remember how I was then — a very nervous, brand-new minister. I needed a lot of help to find my way and felt like a total beginner. In spite of that, though, I was very lucky. I had some of the best teachers in the region. They were my colleagues from Southeast Asia, particularly here in Singapore. They gave me lots of help and advice and I’ll always be very grateful to them. 7

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There was one thing they never taught me, however, and that was how to go about an Inaugural Southeast Asia Lecture! So as you can imagine, I spent a long time wondering what to talk about. After all, many of you in the Institute are expects on Southeast Asia. I needed something in which none of us are experts and everyone is still a learner. Then I thought about the beginning of ASEAN and the vision it offered. That left me with a question. What is our vision today? And what are we going to pass on to our next generation? In other words, what is our future going to be like? None of us are experts on that and even our ASEAN leaders are not sure. I think that’s why they keep on calling for “real action”. What do they mean by this? They obviously don’t mean what we in government often call “action” and I’m sure you know what this is: “Lists of Issues”, “Development Plans”, “Roadmaps”, “Blueprints”, “Mechanisms” and so on. I know our leaders definitely don’t mean those things. We give them pages and pages of that every year. Even volumes of it! Instead, what I think they want to see is a different kind of action. This is the kind 8

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that helps ordinary people directly with their day-to-day problems, in other words, being part of a Southeast Asian Community..... and I’m not talking about a slogan or a piece of ASEAN jargon. What I mean is a real community and maybe that should be our future vision of a “Real Southeast Asian Community”. So that’s what I’d like to talk about and now you can really relax. I promise I won’t speak for too long! Nothing academic. Just a few thoughts and ideas about what I mean by such a community and why we need it and how we might go about forming it. So first of all, Ladies and Gentlemen, what exactly is a “real community”? It is certainty not what we call the “international community” or the “global village”. That seems to be a very different kind of community and, to show how it works, I would like to share a recent story with you. I think it describes life in the global village quite well. It starts out in a very small corner of the village, not too far from our region, in a small state in the Pacific. The local fishermen there had noticed that something strange was happening. The sea was not behaving itself. 9

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Nor were the fish. They seemed to have moved somewhere else. Nobody knew where they’d gone to and if they caught any of them, they got fish poisoning when they ate them. This was because of the “red tide” problem, of course, and I think you all know about that. We sometimes get it over here, but, over there it never seems to go away. So it made the fishermen very worried about the future and they consulted their government. And then what happened? A process began. Step one…enter the government. “The problem,” the government said “is climate change” and they promised to look into it. Now, normally this would mean passing some government laws but this didn’t seem very sensible. They couldn’t just pass one that banned the climate from changing or the fish from poisoning people. So, they made a decision. They decided that the problem wasn’t really a “problem” at all. It was an “issue”! Then…… Step Two in the process. Enter the Chamber of Commerce. 10

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They advised the government that there was much more to the problem. Local fishing was no longer a profitable industry. Why? Because only low-income people ate local fish now. Most people had given up because of the poisoning. So, it was basically an “economic issue”. Then, the government made another decision. They decided that the fishermen’s problem was even more than an “economic issue”. It was “a major international issue” and they gave it a name. It was called “a small states issue”. Then the next step. . . . .enter the Commonwealth Heads of Government, at their meeting in Kampala last year. That’s how I learned about it. I was there at the time and we all discussed this “major international issue”. We also made a decision. We decided that the “small states issue” was far more than just a “major international issue”. It was a “global issue”! So we moved the process on again. And then the final step. Enter the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. I couldn’t go myself but I watched it on television. All the global issues were on show. 11

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The greatest economic thinkers on earth. Great debates. Brillant speakers. And lots of charts and graphs. And there my story ends. Far away in Switzerland, where of course, they don’t even have any sea but they do hold good discussions! The result? No real action. And back in the small corner of the Pacific where it all started, the fishermen still get up in the morning and the weather is still changing and the fish are still poisoning people. And that, I fear, is the global village at work. The whole process takes even longer than I’ve taken to tell my story! Now, of course this may be a little unfair on the global village. None of it, however, adds up to a “real” community in action and it’s not just me who thinks that. Most of our ordinary citizens often feel the same. Not just in the Pacific but here in Southeast Asia as well. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is probably why our leaders keep calling for “real action”. That’s also why I hope our region can somehow find another way of doing things by all of us becoming a new kind of community. 12

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By this, I mean one that forces us to focus on the real problems of day-to-day life faced every new morning by ordinary people in our region. Not turning them into “issues” and debating them all over the world. Not like the so-called global village. Not split into sectors. A government one. A business one. And an academic one. Now, I know what many people would say, maybe even some of you here. “An interesting story and also quite a sad one”. But surely it doesn’t apply to our modern Southeast Asia. After all, we now have an ASEAN Charter. That means that we are aware of the “issues”. And we have gone far beyond a beginners’ stage. We are a dynamic, go-ahead region. We know what’s needed. Our governments are busy doing what our government officials call “facilitating”. Our businessmen and women are equally busy doing what their business officials call “implementing”, and it all involves some of the finest minds in our region. Therefore, some may say, we already 13

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have an official community and we can confidently leave everything to a combination of the new ASEAN Charter; market forces; government laws; our dialogue partners; and all our experts. Well, all I can say is this: If that’s the answer we give to our leaders, when they call for real action, I don’t think they are going to be very satisfied. Nor are the people we all represent. What they want to feel part of is the kind of community which all five hundred million of our people understand and believe in, with everyone representing each other and everyone helping one another and no one excluded. Those were the things I most appreciated when I was first an ASEAN Minister. I didn’t have an “issue” back then. I had a real human problem. I was young and nervous and feeling a little excluded and wondering how to cope. I remember what gave me confidence. It was quite simple. I found myself in a small real-life community of colleagues and friends and they helped me, even though we came from different countries with many different special interests. 14

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That’s what I would like to see us trying to do for everyone in our region. But …. now for the difficult part. How do we go about forming such a community? It won’t be easy, of course. We are ten members with ten different ways of life, several different faiths and at least half a dozen different systems of government. But I just hope that ASEAN will find the way. To do this, I think that somehow we have to discover what I would like to call the “Common Ground” which any community shares. And where is this “common ground”? Again, I’m not really sure but, yet again, I know where it doesn’t exist. It’s not in the government conference hall nor the executive boardroom nor the university library. I suggest that it is the sum of all these places plus, even more importantly, the places where my fishermen live and work and their friends and colleagues and all their families and local communities in our cities, towns and villages; our mosques, churches and temples; our homes and our schools. That is to say, I believe that the common ground we have to find is where our actual, 15

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real community works, lives and studies and prays for a confident future. That’s the common ground and that’s what I hope our post-charter ASEAN and all its ministers, its businessmen and women and its experts and officials will try to discover together. Ladies and Gentlemen, All I can end with is to repeat what I said at the start. When it comes to forming the community we need, I think we are all still learners. We have to find new ways and enter the common ground. It will be very hard and it will take a long time and maybe another generation or even two. It will take a vision like the one ASEAN’s founders had over forty years ago. But if we can find out how to do it, I believe we will have a very good future indeed. More than that, we will pass on to our children and grandchildren even more than we have received ourselves. They will be part of the region that gives them a deep identity. They will be more than just Singaporean, or Malaysian, or Cambodian or 16

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even Bruneian! They will also be Southeast Asian! They will be part of a community that solves real-life problems together and they will come from a place that will never again be described as “just a piece of geography”. Thank you. *****

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III Closing Remarks K. Kesavapany, Director, ISEAS

Your Royal Highness, Prince Mohamed Bolkiah; Ministers from Brunei and Singapore; The Chairman of Temasek Holdings, Mr S. Dhanabalan; The Acting Chairman of the Brunei Economic Development Board, Dato Paduka Timothy Ong; ISEAS Chairman Professor Wang Gungwu; ISEAS Professorial Fellow, Professor Saw Swee-Hock; 18

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Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, Today, we have had the pleasure of hearing from HRH Prince Mohamed Bolkiah at our inaugural ISEAS Southeast Asia Lecture Series. The title of the address – “A Southeast Asian Community: More than a Matter of Geography” – is indeed an apt topic to mark this event. The contents of HRH’s lecture offer much food for thought to the audience here today. HRH’s lecture has also set the tone for the Brunei Forum following, an event co-organized by the Brunei Economic Development Board and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. The Southeast Asia Lecture Series has been established to serve as a platform for movers and shakers in Southeast Asia. This lecture series presents an opportunity to make our regional leaders known to Singapore audiences. The series has been made possible by a generous donation by Professor Saw Swee-Hock, Professorial Fellow at ISEAS, who is here with us. We are expecting the presentations today and tomorrow to build upon the many aspects highlighted at the lecture by His Royal Highness today. 19

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The Brunei Forum will include presentations and dialogue from the Acting Chairman of the Brunei Economic Development Board, the Bruneian Minister for Education, the Minister for Energy, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade II, and the Deputy Minister for Industry and Primary Resources and Chairman of the Brunei Tourism Board. The forum will also cover in detail the current economic landscape in Brunei, the major industries present and the new industries in the offing, Brunei’s ecotourism and tourism attractions and the possibilities for developing businesses in that sector, the human resources present in the country, the management of Brunei’s energy resources, and Brunei’s role in ASEAN. We can look forward to two days of informed and useful discussions.

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