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This article explores the impact of democratic transitions in Southeast Asia on regional co-operation, and the relationship between this process and the development of a non-official regionalism. Until now, regionalism in Southeast Asia has been essentially elite-centred and politically illiberal. The emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was founded upon the common desire of its members, which had by then retreated significantly from their postcolonial experiments in liberal democracy, to ensure regime survival. This orientation was further institutionalised by asean's doctrine of non-interference, which helped to shield its members from outside pressures towards democratisation. But with democratisation in the Philippines, Thailand and more recently Indonesia, the asean model of elite-centric regional socialisation has been challenged. The civil society in the region demands greater openness in Southeast Asian regionalism. The article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between democratisation and regionalism, with the key argument being that the displacement of traditional patterns of regional elite socialisation has been offset by potential gains such as advances in regional conflict management, transparency and rule-based interactions. But the realisation of a more 'participatory regionalism' in Southeast Asia faces a number of barriers, including obstacles to further democratisation, the continued salience of the non-interference doctrine and the diminished space for civil society in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regional economic crisis of 1997–98 placed a large question mark over the advocacy, much proclaimed between 1990 and 1997, that ASEAN was at the centre of a shift in the global order toward a Pacific Century premised on the Association's practices of multilateral cooperation, dialogue, consensus, and non-interference. Does the aftermath of the crisis, and the new agenda posed by the forces of economic globalization and the seemingly irresolvable low intensity conflicts that bedevil Southeast Asia, require radical re-thinking of the relevance of security arrangements in Pacific Asia that are essentially the product of the Cold War era? This study examines this question by considering the curious external conditions in which ASEAN rose to international prominence, how ASEAN erroneously came to be seen in the 1990s as an apparently new form of security cooperation, and how rising levels of violent internal challenges generated by the forces of globalization threaten Southeast Asia's stability. The conclusion is that these forces have exposed ASEAN's constituting incoherence as an imitation community and that consequently it is ill equipped to contend with the pressures exerted by the global information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]