Do you know ASEAN?

 

As a research post-graduate student, I am required to conduct my fieldwork research over the summer. It was really nice experience travelling to three Southeast Asian countries learning about the regional security cooperation and identity.

I just thought it would be interesting to share with  you guys some archives I have collected during my fieldwork about ASEAN, which stands for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) including 10 member states: Brunei Darussalam, Lap DPR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

 

 

 

This is a survey supported by the ASEAN Foundation on how are university students throughout the regional universities aware of their own organization. By targeting the university students, it is taking the measure of the ideas and feeling of the most highly educated members and future generation of ASEAN citizens . The objective is to gauge their knowledge about and orientations toward ASEAN.

 

Of all the questions in the survey to students, I was most interested in these three:

The first one is: Do you feel you are a citizen of ASEAN?

Southeast Asia is regularly described as a region of nations distinguished more by their diversity than their commonalities. ASEAN was first established in 1967 committed the member states to cooperate for the purpose of economic growth, social progress, cultural development, and regional peace and stability.

 

Across the nations, university students generally see ASEAN countries as culturally similar but economically and politically dissimilar. over seventy-five percent of students agreed with the statement "I feel I am a citizen of ASEAN". These sentiments were strongest in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and weakest in Singapore and Myanmar. Nearly ninety percent of students felts that membership in ASEAN is beneficial to their countries. Nearly seventy percent felt that ASEAN membership was beneficial to them personally.

 

The second question ask students about their general knowledge about the region and the Association

The survey assessed student's knowledge of ASEAN by asking them to rate their own familiar with the Association, to list the countries of ASEAN, and to identify its flag and year of founding. Overall, students across the region displayed a remarkably strong knowledge of the countries that make up ASEAN and in most cases they readily recognize ASEAN's primary symbolic marker – the ten bound stalks of rice. They were somewhat less capable in identifying the year in which ASEAN was founded. Students did very well with respect to their ability to list the member nations of ASEAN. Their ability to identify them on map varied across the region.

Over sixty percent considered themselves very familiar or somewhat familiar with ASEAN. Students from Vietnm and Laos exhibited the most self-confidence in their answers. Elsewhere, the percentage ranged from about two-thirds (Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia) to about fifty percent (Brunei and Singapore). The extreme outlier among these responses came from MyaNmar. There ninety percent of students considered themselves to be only a little familiar or not at all familiar with ASEAN.

The third and final question is about sources of information about the region.

They asked the students to circle all the ways in which they had learned about ASEAN, providing them with a list of fourteen possible sources. Television, school, newspapers and books are clearly (and expectedly) the most important sources of information about ASEAN for the respondents. However, while Internet is often popularly considered to be of special importance among the current generations of youths, it is interesting to see that in most of member states - including Singapore, which is arguably the most 'wired' ASEAN nation - students rated Internet as a less important sources of information. It is a notable trend that this has nothing to do with development gap but rather the linguistic characteristic of the nations involved. ASEAN awareness is higher in countries with English-fluency or those with language using Roman scripts and lower where non-Roman scripts are the norm (for example, Burmese, Khmer, Lao or even Thai).

 

It is worth mentioning about the uneven responses to radio as a source to know about ASEAN. Radio is relatively high importance in Cambodia, for example, where it rated far more than television or newspaper. It is an important reminder that some culture avoid the common reflex to utilize Internet for communicating or broadcasting information by those in central (urban or affluent) location s where Internet access is the most readily available. Whereas in some cases, 'older' technology such as radio may be more useful.

In sum, the finding in this survey shows that there is much more to ASEAN , at the very least in potential if not already in fact, than a talking shop for political elites and diplomats. Students across the region demonstrate a relatively high level of knowledge about the Association, generally positive attitudes towards it, and go so far as to consider themselves 'citizens' of ASEAN.

 

You can read the full report at http://www.aseanfoundation.org/documents/Attitudes%20and%20Awareness%20Toward%20ASEAN.pdf

 

For more details and inquiries, why not visit ASEAN website today at: http//www.aseansec.org


Chau Nguyen
Vietnam Student Ambassador