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Kuala Lumpur, November 22: ASEAN leaders on Sunday declared the establishment of a European Union (EU)-style regional economic bloc, ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), a single market with a free flow of goods, capital and skilled labour in the region.
The Kuala Lumpur declaration on the establishment of the AEC was today signed by the leaders of 10-nation grouping in front of world leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The AEC envisages a single market with a free flow of goods, capital and skilled labour across borders in the highly competitive economic region. It will integrate Southeast Asia’s diverse economies, a region with 620 million people and a combined gross domestic product of $2.4 trillion.
The ASEAN leaders also adopted the declaration on “ASEAN 2025, forging ahead together”.
“ASEAN is working towards a community that is politically cohesive, economically integrated and socially responsible,” the declaration said.
Recently, Asian Legal Business, quoting a partner in a leading Singapore law firm, said, “China is cooling down and India is heating up; we believe that rivalry and competition from China and India will drive the ASEAN member-states to push the AEC agenda.”
The ASEAN 2025 document charts the path for the AEC building over the next ten years.
“It is a forward-looking roadmap that articulates ASEAN goals and aspirations to realise further consolidation,” the leaders said.
ASEAN 2025 means a community committed to working with external partners to strengthen cooperation in combating non-traditional security challenges like terrorism, drug-related crimes, human trafficking and maritime issues through various initiatives and projects, the declaration added.
ASEAN grouping includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
South China Sea
Following the signing ceremony, ASEAN leaders met with eight others from Asia and the Pacific for the annual East Asia summit: the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.
US President Barack Obama was set to raise concerns at the summit about China’s more assertive posture in the South China Sea. On Saturday, at a bilateral meeting with ASEAN leaders, Obama said countries should stop building artificial islands and militarising their claims in the disputed South China Sea.
China has been transforming reefs in the Spratly archipelago into artificial islands and has built airfields and other facilities on them. This has caused ripples of alarm in much of East Asia about China’s intentions and freedom of navigation in a waterway through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes annually.
China insists it has undisputed sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, a claim that overlaps with four ASEAN countries.
The US has sent military ships and war planes by China’s artificial islands in recent weeks to assert its “freedom of navigation” in the sea.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said countries outside the region are conducting “a high-profile intervention”, turning the South China Sea disputes into “a problem concerning the South China Sea’s peace and stability and the freedom of navigation,” the state news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying late on Saturday.
“That is in nobody’s interest,” Li said. “Only by expanding our common interests and seeking common ground can we narrow our differences,” Li said, calling for talks between “directly concerned countries” on the issue.
Confront Islamist extremists
Najib opened the weekend series of meetings on Saturday, calling on world leaders to confront Islamist extremism. The night before, Islamist militants killed 27 persons in an attack on a hotel in Mali on Friday before Malian commandos stormed the building and rescued 170 persons, many of them foreigners.
“The perpetrators of these cowardly and barbaric acts do not represent any race, religion or creed, nor should we allow them to claim to do so,” Najib said in his speech at the ASEAN summit. “They are terrorists and should be confronted as such, with the full force of the law.”
He said predominantly Islamic countries such as Malaysia have a duty to expose as lies the “ideology propagated by these extremists that is the cause of this sadistic violence.” Obama said on Saturday the Mali hotel attacks only stiffened the resolve of the United States and its allies, which would be relentless in fighting those targeting its citizens and would allow militants no safe haven.
“We will continue to root out terrorist networks,” Obama told a meeting of business executives. “We will not allow these killers to have a safe haven.”
