ASEAN and the EU amidst COVID-19: overcoming the self-fulfilling prophecy of realism

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is one of the greatest challenges of our lifetime. Quite appropriately, the pandemic has been declared a non-traditional security (NTS) threat in many countries in Europe and Asia. Beyond its detrimental effect on public health, COVID-19 is testing the international resolve to cooperate and represents a particularly tricky challenge to regionalism. Due to the nature of pandemics, regional pandemic management is imperative. However, the two most successful regional organisations, the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have not been able to match the resolve of their individual member states, and there is a substantial gap between timely and robust national pandemic management and inadequacy at the regional level. This is a paradox that merits further investigation. To what extent and why diverged early national and early regional responses to COVID-19? This article identifies a causal relationship between robust national pandemic management as a result of early securitisation and ensuing paralysis on regional level, a process which I call the ‘selffulfilling prophecy of realism’—a vicious cycle of national self-help responses paralysing regional cooperation. This article contributes early to the impact of COVID-19 on regionalism by analysing EU and ASEAN pandemic management efforts, investigating what has hindered or facilitated successful regional cooperation and identifying room for meaningful interregionalism.