Mr. Chairman,
Your Excellencies,
ASEAN Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
My respects to His Majesty and my appreciation to the Government and people of the Kingdom for the generous welcome we have received here in Bangkok. At the same time, may I offer my congratulations to Prime minister Chuan Leek Pai on his thoughtful and stimulating address and my thanks to you, personally, Chairman, for all your hard work as Chairman of our Standing Committee and for the excellent arrangements you have made for our meeting.
Lastly, as always, my warmest greetings to all our guests and our Special observer from Papua New Guinea.
Mr. Chairman,
There are signs that we have gone some way towards solving the problems we have all held over the last three years. To that extent, we have recaptured the mood of ten years ago at the start of the 1990’s. There is again a feeling of cautious optimism’.
However,I believe, it has to be very cautious indeed. Here, I am no referring to financial problems as, thankfully, regional discussion now focuses on recovery rather than ‘crisis’. Nor am I bringing up the economic aspects of globalisation which have been the topic of so much debate in the last two years.
In both those cases, we leave set up mechanism and taken measures to address them. I am sure these will enable us to meet any renewed challenges they may pose.
What I am referring to is something I know many of our people are finding extremely worrying. It has been summed up by a statement I recently beard about recent developments in biological. science. “we have entered an exciting new era of human existence”
That may indeed be true in some respects. But, when we still haven’t cleared up many of the problems of the last two centuries, such statements may not mean too much to the people of developing nations like ours.
For them, the new era is not very exciting. The sheer speed of the changes that are taking place around them are making it very difficult indeed. Its impact is often no longer measured in years. There are moments when even lasl week is history and last month is pre-historic!
To our people, this can have an alarming effect on any family or community’s sense of security and well-being. It can destroy their confidence in the future. For ASEAN, its potential to destabilise our programmes is considerable. It is something beyond any controlling mechanism or modality we can devise here. It has a life of its own, created far beyond our shores. It often results in us having no time to regard people as much more than statistic. In this sense, it is dehumanising and ASEAN has never stood for that.
Consequently, Mr. Chairman, I hope we in ASEAN will continually revisit our approach to the mechanisms we set up in the closing yean of thelast century. All of them particularly AFTA require us to take on the modem world on its own terms and at its own pace.
Those terms are primarily economic. The pace is that of modern international trade. We have to play and win high-speed modern games of international trade, finance and commerce. If we become just passive spectators today, the future could see us sidelined for a very long time indeed. If that happens, our people will not wait for us. They will see us as a problem rather than a solution. They will seek other means to ensure a satisfactory future.
So, our effectiveness as an association in a time of extraordinarily rapid change heavily depends on the value our funding fathers espoused when they faced the challenges of their own era – very close cooperation and the skill and sensitivity with which we continue to build consensus on every issue.
The founding fathers saw this association as being, in itself, the mechanism that will enable the people of Southeast Asia to live in peace and hope. They believed the confidence ASEAN would generate among our people would have a far greater impact than the sum of all its meetings, conferences and committtees and any temporary successes and setbacks.
Reviving that confidence in our people’s hearts and even among ourselves here is, I believe, ASEAN’s. most important current challenge. Not merely to purchase the attention of -foreign investors but to ensure that ASEAN, is an unshakeable constant in our people’s lives, a haven of permanence and security for them in a very turbulent international ocean.
That task, Mr. Chairman, is far more urgent than globalisation or liberalisation or harmonisation or any of the other big long words on our agenda. So, whatever else is decided here, I believe it is essential dot we start this new century with the same hope and inspiration expressed in the ASEAN declaration to which this great City gave its name.
That is our covenant with our founding fathers and I look forward to joining my colleagues in renewing it here in the place where this association first began.
Thank you.
