Регионы в современном мире: глобализация и Азия. Зарубежное регионоведение

Among these issues, the pivotal are prospects for the association to lose its digital sovereignty as a result of the intensifying Sino-American contradictions over the digital issues, the emergence of new imbalances between and within Southeast Asian states with negative implications for the ASEAN Economic Community. The aftereffects of the on-going digitalization of economic exchanges for ASEAN’s multilateral dialogue platforms and initiatives in the economic and political-security sphere. The authors’ findings on this set of issues, as well as their assessment, determine the academic originality of the paper.

Keywords: ASEAN, digitalization, security, Asia-Pacific multilateralism, Belt and Road Initiative, Indo-Pacific region, Russia.

Introduction

The new period of globalization marked by an exponential increase of information flows with the concomitant benefits and challenges presents the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with serious policy dilemmas. By its very definition, the “brave digital world” can expand ASEAN’s possibilities to maintain the presently respectable rates of economic growth by exploring its new sources.

But a deeper insight suggests that the same developments may well give the association strong reasons for concern rather than for optimism.

As the 2020 marks the year of realization of the ASEAN ICT Master-Plan and the middle point of ASEAN’s journey between the ASEAN Community to 2015 and to 2025, in which the digital competitiveness is given special significance, an interim assessment of what the “brave digital world” means for the association is a timely and relevant exercise.

Asean in the Pre-Digital Era: What Was and Was Not Achieved

Declaring that in the realization of ASEAN’s prospective plans to increase its digital competitiveness the previously developed foundation is an important prerequisite, the ups and downs of ASEAN’s digital journey will be assessed from this starting point.

Regarding ASEAN’s real achievements, the establishment of the ASEAN Community is of special significance.

The importance of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) as part of the ASEAN Community project hardly stems from the advantages of the AEC itself as much work remains to be done even to make Southeast Asia a single market and a single production base as just one of the components of AEC to 2015, not to say about realizing the more ambitious goals of AEC to 2025.