ASEAN Community will begin in the end 2015 and ASEAN countries have attempted to prepare their citizens to confront global changes in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, a lot of people have not comprehended ASEAN Community yet due to lack of engagement in interaction with other people in ASEAN countries.

Noticing the fact, Head of Political and Cultural Studies of Swansea University, the United Kindom, Prof. Allan Collins dares feasibility of ASEAN to be named a community. It was declared in a public lecture for International Relations students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta on Wednesday (28/10) in meeting hall of International Relations.

He mentioned that characteristics of a community, which people of ASEAN countries are supposed to possess, are direct interaction, shared identities, and diffused reciprocity. “However, the relations among ASEAN countries are merely government-to-government relations, while community may exist if the relations are people-to-people that are still low in ASEAN,” he contended.

On the contrary, Prof Allan Collins inserted, ASEAN may divest the community status. It will be a challenge for ASEAN people to build their identities, indeed. They have to understand more that ASEAN Community refers to mingling with other people in Southeast Asia and having the same perceptions as a community. “It will be a huge challenge since ASEAN countries have different cultural backgrounds, distinctive religion as well as beliefs. They ought to be the foremost concerns to create ASEAN Community. The characteristics have to be applied to bring ASEAN Community into reality.

ASEAN Community possesses three main pillars namely Economic Community, Socio-Cultural Community, and Political-Security Community. ASEAN has displayed efforts to always move forward and cooperate with one another. ASEAN also has joint disaster management, human right body, and cooperation among ministers of each country.

Furthermore, an International Relations lecturer Dian Azmawati conveyed that yields of Political-Security Community has been great and diverse, yet the weakness is in the system. “For instance, regarding the issue of smoke haze in Indonesia, ASEAN as a regional organization has not owned an authority to provide aids or to cope with the issue,” she asserted. Hence, being a community needs a centered sovereignty having authorities to make immediate decisions for a conflicted country.

ASEAN conceptually is excellent at becoming a community, but the implementation faces barriers and has not run well yet. Therefore, agreement of ASEAN countries on joint rules has to be applied in public.