The “ASEAN Way”: A Sore Thumb for ASEAN Solidarity in the Face of an Ailing Global Trade System?

Abstract

“Standards and integrity are for Oscar winners. Everybody else has to bend over”. (lan Arkin’s character, Norman Newlander, to Sandy Kominsky (Michael Douglas) in The Kominsky Method, 2019). The Kominsky Method is a comedy series starring Michael Douglas as Sandy Kominsky, a once successful actor turned acting coach, and Alan Arkin as Norman Newlander, his recently widowed agent. Both are in their latter years. Newlander retorts with this line when Kominsky attempts to explain why he turned down numerous career enhancing opportunities in his younger years. When we strip away the fictional characters, setting and circumstances, the substance of this retort represents a struggle that is far from fictional. For many years, scholars who identify themselves as being advocates of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) have argued that the “Oscar winners” of the international community, the America and the Eurocentric West, who could afford to have standards and integrity, proceeded to shape international law with these standards and then imposed them on everyone else under the brand of human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law. TWAIL developed as a response from the “everybody else”, the colonized Third World, which had to bend over. Southeast Asia’s participation in international law is uniquely recent, but important. The region was only recently decolonized, culturally and politically diverse, experiencing unprecedented economic and population growth, and integrated into the international legal order. But it is at the same time considered to be the birthplace (geographically at least) of the Third World’s response to mainstream international law scholarship traditionally dominated by Western powers with a colonial lineage. The Bandung Conference of 1955 became an assembly of like-minded, recently independent and mostly Asian