ASEAN Neutrality in the Age of Naked Imperialism

Malaysia chairs ASEAN for the fifth time in 2025, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the historic Bandung Conference of 1955, which marked Afro-Asian solidarity against colonialism and imperialism. Ironically, 2025 is also the year that the Trump administration unleashed its trade wars against the entire world (including remote islands inhabited by penguins), revealing the nakedness of the US-led colonial/imperial capitalist world-system.

What does ASEAN neutrality mean in the age of naked imperialism?

Prior to the declaration of Southeast Asia as the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) in 1971, Malaysia had earlier proposed that Southeast Asia be a free and neutral area during the Lusaka Non-Aligned Conference in 1970. The Lusaka conference was the third summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, a bloc formally established in 1961 and rooted in the ten-point principles adopted at the Bandung Conference (also known as Dasasila Bandung).

Neutrality can mean either “non-interference from external parties” or “not taking sides in external competition”. Ralf Emmers, a Professor of International Relations (now at the School of Oriental and African Studies), calls the first one “autonomy” and the second one “impartiality”. He argues that ASEAN neutrality was closer to the notion of autonomy during the Cold War but has shifted to the notion of impartiality since the 2000s.

This new understanding of neutrality as impartiality has been criticised as inadequate in confronting the global trade wars between the US and China. In the words of Virdika Rizky Utama (Virdi), a lecturer in International Relations at the President University in Indonesia, “In 1955, neutrality was a declaration of agency. In 2025, it risks becoming complicit in a global order that still privileges a few.”  

I want to extend Virdi’s line of thinking by suggesting that both notions of neutrality risk becoming complicit in the current global order. This is because the two notions of neutrality as autonomy and neutrality as impartiality take the question of what constitutes “external” and “internal” affairs as settled matters. The assumption of external/internal as fixed categories risks subsuming historical and ongoing struggles for decolonisation in the region as domestic instabilities and internal security threats, in which external parties should not interfere or take sides.

Here, going back to the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement is crucial, as they help us understand that neutrality is indeed a declaration of agency but also one that is anti-colonial and anti-imperial in spirit and character. The historical context, then, was that nation-state boundaries were fluid, and there were competing visions on how to redraw the lines of postcolonial Southeast Asia, so what constituted “external” and “internal” affairs was not a settled question.

In fact, the formation of Malaysia was at the heart of regional contestations at the time. Partai Rakyat Brunei, led by A.M. Azahari, wanted to unite Brunei, Sabah, and Sarawak as Kalimantan Utara first, and after achieving that, let the people decide through a democratic vote whether to join the proposed Federation of Malaysia and on what terms. Diosdado Macapagal, then president of the Philippines, had laid territorial claims on North Borneo (Sabah), championing it as an anticolonial issue. Partai Rakyat Malaya, headed by Ahmad Boestamam, envisioned a broader Melayu Raya that would include, on equal terms, Indonesia, Kalimantan Utara, Singapore, and the southern provinces of Thailand.  

These anti-colonial struggles rejected colonial and imperial impositions on how postcolonial Southeast Asia should be established, often in ways that did not conform to colonial-inherited contours. Many of the anti-colonial leaders were also critical of capitalism and wanted the postcolonial boundaries of Southeast Asia to be decided through a democratic process and premised on the right to self-determination, not something shaped by the economic and security interests of colonial capitalist powers. Military alliances with major powers were shunned, particularly the presence of military bases in the region, most notably enabled by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).

Therefore, neutrality as autonomy was not merely understood by anti-colonial movements as “non-interference from external parties” but more specifically as non-interference from colonial and imperial powers. Non-alignment did not mean impartiality or not taking sides, but strategic alignment with broader anti-colonial struggles and principles. Solidarity with countries outside the region (or “external parties”), namely those that shared the precepts of anti-colonialism, was welcome, as seen in the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned summits.        

However, by the time of the Bangkok Declaration in 1967, which established ASEAN as an official regional grouping originally comprising Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, most of these anti-colonial movements had already been demobilised with the help of colonial and imperial powers. Azahari was living in exile in Indonesia after the failed Brunei revolt in 1962. Boestamam was arrested in 1963 prior to the formation of Malaysia, while Operation Coldstore in Singapore had seen the detention of key socialist leaders opposed to the terms of the Singapore-Malaya merger. The fervently anti-colonial Sukarno was no longer the president of Indonesia following the G30S coup d'état in 1965, which also contributed to the end of the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation. In the Philippines, Macapagal had lost the presidential election to Ferdinand Marcos.

When ZOPFAN was signed in 1971 by representatives from Indonesia (Adam Malik), Malaysia (Abdul Razak), the Philippines (Carlos Romulo), Singapore (S. Rajaratnam), and Thailand (Thanat Khoman), colonial-endorsed political boundaries in Southeast Asia had already been formed and were solidifying. While ZOPFAN affirmed self-determination and non-interference in its articulation of neutrality, it also called for “internal affairs” to be safeguarded from “external interference” in upholding “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states”. In other words, ASEAN neutrality solidified what constituted “external” and “internal” affairs based on nation-state boundaries built on the suppression of alternative visions of postcolonial Southeast Asia.      

As the US imperial power is currently forcing the world to take sides to maintain its own hegemony in the global capitalist system, it is important for ASEAN to recover the anti-colonial and anti-imperial visions of the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement. Between becoming vassal states or enemies of the state, ASEAN should indeed not take sides. However, the basis of this neutrality should not be impartiality, but autonomy aligned to anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.    

But a return to the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement demands more. It requires ASEAN to embrace decolonial movements in Thailand (Patani), Indonesia (West Papua), the Philippines (Mindanao), and Myanmar (various ethnic groups fighting for independence) as legitimate struggles in unravelling the obstinate legacies of colonialism, not merely as internal/domestic problems left to the respective states to resolve.

The anti-colonial and anti-imperial basis of neutrality means that ASEAN must take a firm stance against state violence unleashed on activists fighting for liberation, self-determination, and autonomy and not hide behind neutrality to justify its silence and inaction. In a similar vein, ASEAN neutrality cannot be used to justify deporting a Cambodian domestic worker (from Malaysia) simply for criticising her own government on social media. It compels ASEAN to set up mechanisms that challenge internal colonialism happening within nation-state boundaries as well as imperialist tendencies of national elites.

This is perhaps where Timor-Leste’s participation as a full member of ASEAN brings a hopeful note. It will be the first ASEAN member state to have obtained independence from another member state (Indonesia) since the inception of the regional grouping. The newly independent country obtained its independence in 2002 despite ASEAN neutrality (as impartiality), offering many valuable lessons on what regional solidarity with decolonisation should and should not look like, and how ASEAN neutrality can be reformulated to support the autonomy of member states without compromising anti-colonial and anti-imperial principles.  

The US is currently eyeing Greenland for its critical minerals and Gaza as a prospective real estate project, while the US’ imperial outpost, Israel, is expanding into the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon. Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, wants to divide the world into buckets based on their alignment with US imperial interests. All these demonstrate that colonial/imperial powers are not bound by fixed notions of nation-state boundaries and will impudently reconfigure them when it suits their self-interests.  

As Virdi poignantly writes, “In such a world, neutrality is not just insufficient: it is dangerous. Silence has a cost. Those who do not speak will be spoken for. Those who do not define their interests will be defined by others.” In such a world, redefining ASEAN neutrality according to Dasasila Bandung is not historical nostalgia nor ungrounded idealism. In the age of naked imperialism, it is a necessity.