The first Russia-ASEAN summit will be held in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur next year. Earlier this week, an invitation to Vladimir Putin to attend the event was given to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who had arrived in the capital of Laos, Vientiane, to take part in the ASEAN summit.
This is a success. It crowns the years of work Russian diplomats have conducted in a relatively new area, i.e., South East Asia. It should be recalled that the new Russia faced major problems in this region in the early 1990s. By force of inertia, the old part of the ASEAN, countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, continued to be suspicious of Moscow, remembering the USSR's role in the wartime events in Indochina. The USSR, Vietnam and China were then "on the other side of the iron curtain", while "on this side", there was the association of six non-communist ASEAN states that concluded alliances with the US or Australia to oppose communist expansion. Moscow's former ally, Vietnam, was then preparing, as was Laos and later Cambodia, to join ASEAN, which subsequently happened.
However, the invitation to Vladimir Putin to attend this meeting means that Russia has become a proactive partner and a good friend of the new ten-nation ASEAN, which includes the USSR's former cold war foes and allies. The former political configuration in South East Asia has genuinely been consigned to history. An important point is that although ASEAN strives to maintain relations with every leading power, only China, India, Japan, Pakistan and South Korea have reached the level of annual November summits so far. This is "the inner circle" of the association's friends, large and not so large countries that share ASEAN leaders' political ideology.
This ideology is expounded in the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in South East Asia (the 1976 Bali Treaty). During his current visit, Sergei Lavrov tookpart in a ceremony to seal Russia's accession to this treaty. In essence, it is a set of commitments to ASEAN, above all, on non-interference in sovereign states' affairs, which Russian politicians take for granted. Upon closer examination, this is an exposition of the key provisions of the UN Charter.
Moscow did not face any problems while discussing this act. In point of fact, the Bali treaty resembles the Russian foreign policy doctrine or its basic principles. In signing the treaty, Moscow also assumed an obligation to refrain from any activity creating a threat to the political and economic stability of other parties to the treaty. These are self-evident things for Russia. However, recent years have graphically demonstrated to ASEAN member-nations that far from all great powers consider these principles and obligations to be obvious. It is hard to imagine, for example, the US or Australia signing up to the Bali treaty. This is why they are neither signatories to the treaty nor ASEAN's active partners.
Joining the treaty and holding a summit in a year are symbolic acts designed to step up cooperation between the businessmen, state institutions and civil societies of our 11 countries. It is no secret that in Russia, just like in ASEAN member-nations, a top-level visit is a signal to executives and businessmen that the region or the country that the president visits is a priority. Apart from that, preparations for such summits mobilize state structures and businessmen who work on drafting the agenda of the talks. Agreements and other steps needed to intensify trade and other relations are on this agenda, which is a kind of a "road map" for developing relations in various fields.
Russia's trade with the ten ASEAN countries, which has markedly grown over the past year or two, was a factor that brought about the current events. Admittedly, Russia's $3 billion annual trade with an epicenter of world economic growth is not that impressive. However, the rapid growth of tourism, primarily from Russia to the warm seas of Asia, and successfully developing cooperation in combating terrorism have prompted politicians to realize that Moscow and the ten capitals of the region are united not only by a common political vision of the global order. These trends will now be developed further at the presidential level.
