I am Carolina Hernandez from the Philippines and I am supposed to have been at the creation of a lot of think tank networks in Southeast Asia and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

Q1. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the ASEAN, and your country, the Philippines, is the chairman of ASEAN this year. What are the ASEAN’s major achievements over the past five decades?

We have had so many attributed achievements, but the achievements are mostly from people that observe ASEAN. Among them would be the establishment of certain norms for cooperation in spite of what official governments think about these issues. ASEAN has promoted a kind of role already to get as many of the actors in the region as possible together to talk about critical issues that affect the region.


Q2. What are new opportunities and remaining challenges for the ASEAN?

Opportunities are also challenges because they are two sides of the same coin. But we live in a new environment where you have a lot of complex things that are going on. Those are challenges but, at the same time, are opportunities for ASEAN to take advantage of. One of the most important things is because of the power shift that is taking place all over the world, and particularly in our part of the world, ASEAN as a group of small and middle-sized countries, can probably help to ameliorate the competition between the big powers in the region.


Q3. In particular, what are the implications of Brexit for the ASEAN?

Some people think that there are no implications because of the fact that integration in the EU is different from the integration in ASEAN. In the first place, in the EU you have a supranational authority, but in ASEAN we do not have that. We are allergic to supranational authority. However, I think Brexit is a kind of experience that will teach ASEAN to avoid the pitfalls that have occurred in Brexit. Secondly, I think it also invites our leaders to pay attention to the opinion of every ASEAN person, whether the person is a citizen, a subject, or an object of the significant actors in ASEAN, meaning to say that there are a lot of people in ASEAN that feel that they are left out of this particularly project of building an ASEAN community. I think this is why our leaders in 2014 decided they were going to have a new approach to community building and that is a people-oriented/people-centered ASEAN.


Q4. In order for Northeast Asian countries to achieve peace and cooperation like the ASEAN has done, what should they do?

In ASEAN, we were able to establish friendly relations with each other and convert the sub-region of Southeast Asia from a very uncertain, unstable, poor sub-region into one that is at present supposed to be used as an example by our neighbors. For the longest time I have been thinking about what made ASEAN the way it is today and we need to credit not only the other countries but particularly the policy that Indonesia, the largest in ASEAN, took. It tried to ignore its personal interest, by exerting power on the basis of its size and influence, and tried to, as some people call it, put themselves in a cage and threw the key into the ocean. The biggest country in any region, whether it is Northeast Asia or South Asia, will have to have the biggest power also to behave in the same way that Indonesia behaved in relation to the sub-region. This is probably very simplistic, but you know.


Q5. What role, if any, can ASEAN play to promote peace and cooperation in Northeast Asia?

Already we have been trying to, I think you know that the three Northeast Asian countries of China, Japan and South Korea were not meeting with each other, but ASEAN provided a venue for the three countries to get together, and now they have been getting together on their own. We can continue to play that kind of role if given the opportunity. This is going to be very tough because we need to have changes in our mindsets in order for us to be able to meet the challenges of the future. But I am not sure that countries in any region of the world are prepared to do that right now.


Q6. As a founder of the ISDS Philippines, you are a living history of Southeast Asia’s track 2 diplomacy. For those of us in Northeast Asia, can you explain what track 2 diplomacy is and why it is important?

It has changed its meaning. When we first started to be track two diplomats, what we did was to invite all relevant actors, from government, academia, media, the broader civil society, in their personal capacity so they can begin to discuss without any personal constraints about very sensitive issues. But right now, track two diplomacy has come to mean those meetings of think tanks and academia without the participation of the broader civil society or even individual officials from government. So it has changed. Track one is the official, track two are the unofficial academic-think tank epistemic communities, track three would be the broader civil society, and track four would be those that want to pull government down.


Q7. What were the role and significance of think tanks in the evolution of the ASEAN? How can think tanks promote regional integration and inter-regional cooperation today?

In the evolution of ASEAN, think tanks were very important because they were sources of informal policy thinking that governments could take into account. Think tanks, of which I had broad experience, we were able to provide some policy advice to governments which they were free to take or not take. That is how we were able to help in the evolution of ASEAN. We can also promote inter-regional cooperation with the ROK think tanks as we had been doing in the past. For example, until the presidency of the impeached President Park, we were cooperating with think tanks in the ROK to promote the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI). Even before this time, we were able to get the cooperation of personalities from the ROK in terms of our extra-regional cooperation. So we built habits of dialogue and cooperation with those think tanks. In Southeast Asia today we have the ASEAN Institutes of Strategic and International Studies, or ASEAN ISIS. One of its most important programs is the Asia-Pacific Roundtable and, I would like to say, there is an ROK intellectual that was part of the beginning of the APR.


Q8. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Can ASEAN promote its own economic integration without the presence of the United States?

That is a tricky question because the TPP that the Obama administration promoted and that everybody wanted to get on it was more comprehensive than the so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) because the latter is only for trade. However, the TPP is more geo-strategic than economic precisely because the requirements are so difficult to comply with, but RCEP is simpler but it is not over and maybe we can all get together on RCEP. But RCEP is not a Chinese invention, it is ASEAN. This is a very tricky thing because even in ASEAN, a lot of people think that it was China that promoted it it is not. It is an indigenous to ASEAN.


Q9. How can South Korea and ASEAN strengthen their partnership? How can our partnership contribute to peace and prosperity in East Asia?

Think tanks are very important because through our activities we are able for form friendships that are able to last in spite of all of the difficulties that our respective countries face. This is how we can promote better relations between the ROK and ASEAN, by relying on people-to-people contacts.


Q10. Any last words to our JejuTube viewers?

I would like to thank the people of Jeju for having me participate in another exciting conference which is the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity 2017. I was here two years ago and it was a fantastic experience. You have such a beautiful province in Jeju.

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