Royal University of Phnom Penh

Institute of Foreign Languages

Department of International Studies

Diplomacy: Theory and Practice (IS 410)

Lecturer: MEY Punlok (MPL)

Major Assignment

Factors Leading to the Failure of ASEAN to Issue

the 2012 Joint Communiqué

(Final Draft)

Class: M4.1
Group 5: Ung Kimhour
Kok Tola
Cheot Pidihun
Nhim Sothaneath

Deadline of Submission: June 10, 2019

Academic Year: 2018-2019
 Factors Leading to the Failure of ASEAN to Issue the 2012 Joint
Communiqué
I. Introduction
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional organization
created in 1967 to promote regional cooperation and assist economic, political, and security
integrations among its ten member states. Under the ASEAN Charter, it requires each
member to take turn based on alphabetical order of the English name of their countries to host
the ASEAN Summit twice annually, as well as other related meetings. The ASEAN Summit
is the policy-making body of ASEAN, comprising the head of state or head of government of
each member state. They come to discuss issues pertaining to economic, political, security,
and socio-cultural development in the region (ASEAN, 2008). However, the 21st ASEAN
Summit held in Phnom Penh in 2012 marked the first failure in ASEAN’s history to issue a
“joint communiqué”. The annual consultation failed to agree on the maritime disputes in the
South China Sea after Cambodia blocked any brought up about South China Sea disputes.
Member states articulated anger and accused Cambodia of siding with China on the issue, but
H.E Hor Namhong, who was the Cambodian Foreign Minister at that time, said that all
ASEAN members were responsible for this failure (Hunt, 2012).
However, it is important to note that prior to this meeting, ASEAN forum ministers
had adopted key elements of a code of conduct on maritime issues and proposed it to China.
For over two decades, the four ASEAN members namely the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia,
and Brunei that were the claimant states had paid much effort to engage China in many
discussions on a potential Code of Conduct (COC) in order to manage the South China Sea
maritime and territorial disputes. In 1992, ASEAN issued its first statement on the disputes
and introduced the idea of COC in 1996. After many negotiations, China and ASEAN finally
settled for a nonbinding Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC)
in 2002, but it was not adopted until 2011. In spite of the much effort they had made, this
regional grouping still could not succeed in adopting the COC while the tension of the
disputes remained and have notably risen throughout the 2000s (South China Sea Expert
Working Group, 2018). This paper, therefore, aims to further examine the in-depth grounds
of the ASEAN’s failure to issue the joint communiqué in 2012, despite the prior effort they
had paid.

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II. Factors leading to the failure of ASEAN to issue a joint communique in 2012
2.1 The Influence of China
In respect to the ministerial meeting in 2012 in Phnom Penh, it marked the very first
time in 45 years in history that ASEAN failed to issue a joint communiqué of its annual
meeting. One of the main problems that led to this failure is the external pressure from both
the claimant states to the South China Sea disputes and the regional hegemon, the Republic of
China, which was put on Cambodia who played role as the chairman in the meeting. On the
one hand, Cambodia had to handle with the claimant states such as the Philippines and
Vietnams who declared its interest in including the issues in the South China Sea in the joint
statement. For the Philippines, it emphasized the Scarborough Islands while Vietnam stressed
on the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) as the mean to deal with the dispute with China over
the Spratly Islands. On the other hand, the chair had to face the pressure from China that
never wanted to see the success of this joint statement since the first place. After having
discussed with his advisers outside the meeting room, the chair came back with a tough
decision making by providing unsatisfied result for the claimant states saying that such a
dispute shall not be included in the ASEAN joint statement and suggested the affected parties
solve the conflict through bilateral talks with China instead (Bower, 2012). The result of this
decision raised criticism among its neighboring countries as well as the international
community stating that Cambodia was lack of its independent foreign policy as it chose to
favor China regarding the South China Sea disputes.
To prove whether Cambodia really favored China, it is significant to look in depth
into the relations between these two states. According to Bower (2012), Cambodia has been
influenced by China’s economic and political strategies and became China’s international
trading partners as well as its allies for a long period of time. The two reached an agreement
of the Comprehensive Partnership for Cooperation in 2006 and moved forward to the
Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Cooperation in 2010, where this agreement deepened
the two countries’ relations and cooperation. China, as a regional hegemon, truly had an
economic power to actually put Cambodia in an unfamiliar situation among its ASEAN
neighboring countries. Cambodia received a high tension because China pushed Cambodia to
put aside the South China Sea issues from the agenda, and China asserted that it wanted to
deal with the conflict in bilateral ways with only the affected parties, not through multilateral
forum (Bower, 2012). China, in addition, is believed to be the number one investor in
Cambodia, and it has also provided unconditional aid to Cambodia to boost the country’s
economic development. Not only has China supplied economic benefits to Cambodia, but it

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is also the largest provider of military assistance to Cambodia to strengthen its security (Var,
n.d.). Based on this strong tie they have made together for years, it is hard for Cambodia to
upset China while Cambodia is receiving a big amount of aid, security assistance, and
investment from this major regional donor.
2.2 The Disagreement on Agenda Content
Besides the study on external influence from China which was the key factor of this
failure, we should also look deeper into the agenda content of the joint communique itself to
see how it also contributed to this undesirable outcome. According to Berridge (2015),
agenda content plays a major role in determining whether or not the conflicting parties agree
to negotiate because a particular content may benefit one party over the other, and sometimes
it could be used as the propaganda victory for other side. Moreover, some agenda contents
can be too sensitive for both sides that they do not want to bring to the table for discussion or
have no willingness to give concession due to the lack of mutual trust among them.

As it can be reflected in the 21st ASEAN Summit in Phnom Penh, the process of the
meeting seemed to run smoothly in the beginning as all delegates who represented their own
respective countries sit and talked with excitement. It took hours for them to review a
substantive agenda that covered several broad aspects of concerns which ranged from
political and security issues to social and cultural cooperation, plus the economic integration.
Even the sensitive topics related to North Korea’s nuclear program, bilateral territorial
disputes between ASEAN member states, and especially the disputes in the South China Sea
were also put into the agenda of discussion (Bower, 2012).

After many hours of discussion and negotiation among all delegates, the serious
problems emerged when it was the time they had to draft the joint statement to cope with the
above sensitive issues. At that time, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of
Cambodia, His Excellency Hor Namhong, who served as the chair in the meeting decided to
delegate the task of drafting the declaration to a committee consisting of four member states
such as Anifah Aman who was the delegate of Malaysia, Marty Natalegawa of Indonesia,
Pham Binh Minh of Vietnam, and Albert Del Rosario of the Philippines. These countries
seemed to be so much sensitive when they came to draft clauses that emphasized the South
China Sea disputes as most of them were the claimant states against China. The
Philippines wanted to produce a joint communiqué that showed discussion on the
confrontation between the Philippines and China at Scarborough Shoal, while Vietnam
insisted that the declaration should contain a clause that mentioned the mechanisms of

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solving the dispute based on exclusive economic zones (EEZs) officially stated in the 1982
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (Bower, 2012).

After spending some amount of time on negotiation, they finally came up with a draft
that could reflect their will and interests. The draft was then submitted to the chair for him to
review before putting it on the table for the final discussion and voting. However, after
carefully examining the draft, the chair adjourned the meeting and immediately left the
meeting room to consult with his advisers. After he came back, he, without any hesitation,
rejected the clauses proposed by the Philippines and Vietnam which stated about the
Scarborough Shoal and EEZs respectively, even though there were many attempts from
Vietnam and the Philippines to find a compromise (Bower, 2012). The chair claimed that any
territorial disputes shall be settled bilaterally because the meeting is not a court, neither a
place to give a verdict about the dispute (BBC, 2012). He continued that if such issue was to
be solved multilaterally, it would make the situation even worse, which could break up the
unity in ASEAN. However, the rationale behind such decision was that if Cambodia, as the
chair, had agreed on the draft, the final joint statement would have benefited the claimants
more while its relations with China, which was its major donor, would have been in a worse
condition (Bower, 2012). In the end, ASEAN, after the rejection of the chair, officially
announced that there would be no joint communiqué made following this meeting. This could
be the first failure for this regional grouping and the major cause was the agenda content
related to the sensitive issues in the South China Sea that not all parties, especially Cambodia,
agreed to put into discussion.
2.3 The Problems of Non-interference and Consensus Principles
While we acknowledge the influence of China and the sensitive agenda content
related to the South China Sea disputes as the major contributions to this failure, we should
not take other possible factors for granted. Actually, if we carefully examine the five basic
principles of ASEAN Way, we will see two of them, which are the principle of non-
interference and consensus, also played the major role. Regarding the principle of non-
interference, the failure actually emerged from two contrasting perspectives. On the one
hand, some member states, especially the claimants, want to see the dispute to be solved
through multilateralism, meaning that ASEAN would act as the unit when dealing the
disputes with China. In this sense, it is believed that the claimant, especially Vietnam and
Philippines, states would likely to gain a lot of benefits from the Code of Conduct because
China alone would find it hard to confront with all the 10 ASEAN member states. On the

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other hand, Cambodia believed that ASEAN should uphold the principle of non-interference,
with a claim that it was the dispute between the four states and China and thus should be
solved bilaterally; the non-claimant states like Cambodia cannot interfere in the case, and
they may choose to be in a neutral stance instead (BBC, 2012).
Some people might wonder why Cambodia at that time raised the principle of non-
interference as the reason to block the joint communique since the first place. Of course, the
recent past experience clearly shows that the failure of the ASEAN to provide assistance to
the Cambodia-Thailand Preah Vihear Temple dispute was one of the major reasons.
Notwithstanding, the reaction from both Vietnam and the Philippines made a huge wound to
Cambodia. For the Filipino government, it rejected the claim on its position which the Thai
government breached the agreement with Cambodia and it was all on the media, not the
government who said that. While the Vietnamese government was looking forward to a
fruitful peaceful settlement between the two governments meaning that it would prefer
standstill and expect to see the outcome rather than choosing a side. Taking these into
account, it posed a huge wound to the Royal Government of Cambodia. Thus, history shall
not be repeated (Leng, 2014).
To some extent, Cambodia probably took ASEAN for granted. Nevertheless, it is not
always the case. For some reasons, Cambodia made the right choice in continuing the non-
interference principle (Emmerson, 2012). Cambodian government made a crucial choice to
become a member of ASEAN and one of the major pushes was to refrain from any
occupation from Thailand and Vietnam especially in the late 1990s. Also, Cambodia
witnessed the non-interference principle which is believed to be a crucial element in ASEAN.
It is evident that there was a coup d'etat in 2008 at Thailand to topple down the Thaksin’s
administration and ASEAN also remained silent in a way of respecting such principle (Tay,
2014).
In addition to the non-interference principle, the consensus-based decision making in
ASEAN also played the key role. As can be seen, to pass any declaration or solution, ASEAN
must receive the “yes” vote from all member states; the disagreement made by any member
in the meeting will cause the whole declaration to face deadlock (Leng, 2014). This principle
is very beneficial in the sense that it provides equal voice for each member, regardless of
their size, military power and economic development. That is one of the reasons why it has
kept ASEAN members united like a spider-web for years. Even though there have been many
tragic events, which could have shaken up their relationship, still they could not seriously
break the web. However, sometimes such principle is also problematic due to the fact that it

5
is hard for ASEAN to pass a joint statement when all members do not share a common
interest (Leng, 2014). As it is reflected in the case of the 2012 ASEAN ministerial meeting in
Phnom Penh, ASEAN would not have failed to issue the joint communique regarding the
Code of Conduct on the South China Sea dispute if it had not chosen to follow consensus as
the procedural and substantive voting system. By choosing to vote through the simple
majority or absolute majority, it would be much easier for this regional grouping to pass the
solution, despite receiving several objections from the member states.
III. Conclusion
The failure to issue the joint communiqué in the 21st ASEAN Summit Phnom Penh
was due to Cambodia’s external pressure caused by China as the regional hegemon, as well
as the inability to agree on a common agenda and Cambodia’s belief in the principle of non-
interference and consensus stated in the ASEAN Way. We can see that Cambodia benefits a
lot from China assistance in development, so there is no doubt that Cambodia was influenced
by China’s economic and political strategy at that time. Moreover, members insisted to put
the issue of the Scarborough Shoal and EEZ into the agenda which was too challenging for
the agenda to be carried out since the issue is very sensitive. In addition to these, Cambodia
stance towards the South China Dispute is indeed neutral in reference to the principle of non-
interference, and the consensus-based voting system even made the whole committee hard to
pass the resolution. It is very insightful to see this failure from this point of view, instead of
solely condemning Cambodia on siding with China alone as the only reason.
ASEAN is facing the prospect of being unable to issue a statement after the meeting
in 2012 since it was the first time that ASEAN Summit failed to issue a joint communiqué.
Based on this, negotiation failure can be understood as the lesson learned for the diplomats so
that they can prepare for unexpected challenges and look into what could go wrong in such a
complex process of the meeting. This failure highlighted a few challenges that diplomats can
take into consideration if they want to successfully produce a joint statement. First of all, the
external environment such as foreign economic and security interest of the regional player
which can influence a state’s foreign policy orientation. Understanding the dynamics of the
targeted state is fundamental to develop positive strategies to generate support. Second of all,
the agenda setting was broad yet very inclusive of one intense matter, making it difficult for
ministers to agree on a common agenda. The issue doesn’t pertain to every member, so it
should start the agenda with some common principle first to engage all members, if any.
Also, the agenda items should be started with easier topic to build up trust between member
states during the process before getting into sensitive issue.

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