Hard Choices

Southeast Asia faces hard choices. The regions most powerful organization, ASEAN, is being challenged to ensure security and encourage democracy while simultaneously reinventing itself as a model of Asian regionalism. Should ASEANs leaders defend a member countrys citizens against state predation for the sake of justiceand risk splitting ASEAN itself? Or should regional leaders privilege state security over human security for the sake of orderand risk being known as a dictators club? Should ASEAN isolate or tolerate the junta in Myanmar? Is democracy a requisite to security, or is it the other way around? How can democratization become a regional project without first transforming the Association into a people centered organization? But how can ASEAN reinvent itself along such lines if its member states are not already democratic? How will its new Charter affect ASEANs ability to make these hard choices? How is regionalism being challenged by transnational crime, infectious disease, and other border-jumping threats to human security in Southeast Asia? Why have regional leaders failed to stop the perennial regional haze from brush fires in democratic Indonesia? Does democracy help or hinder nuclear energy security in the region? In this timely bookthe second of a three-book series focused on Asian regionalismten analysts from six countries address these and other pressing questions that Southeast Asia faces in the twenty-first century.