Asia: Sports-Shirt Diplomacy

The Foreign Ministers of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore arrived in Bangkok ready to join with Thailand in the serious business of creating a new, five-nation economic alliance. But Host Foreign Minister Than-at Khoman decreed pleasure before business. He whisked the diplomats off to the nearby seaside resort of Bang Saen for two preconference days of golf and conviviality. It was a shrewd move. By the time the ministers sat down last week for their formal deliberations, everyone had done so much private lobbying, a consensus had already emerged. “We’d all been so busy implanting ideas in the minds of others in private conversations,” said one delegate, “that we didn’t know whether it was finally our idea turning up in another version—or someone else’s.”

The combined ideas added up to a determination to create an alliance for trade, aid and economic harmonizing that may eventually lead to a more farreaching customs union of the five. The first joint efforts will include such modest projects as tourist promotion and cooperative fishing and shipping enterprises. The new alliance differs from such earlier Asian nonmilitary groupings as the Asian Productivity Organization, Association for Southeast Asia, and Asian and Pacific Council in that it includes Indonesia—the largest and potentially the richest nation in Southeast Asia. And though South Viet Nam was not included because of the war, the five left the door open for other nations to join, when their desires and domestic conditions permit.

So effective was Khoman’s sports-shirt diplomacy that the five’s remaining stumbling block was what to call their creation. The logical first choice was SEAARC, for Southeast Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, but Filipino tongues stumbled over the construction. Those agile acronymists, the Indonesians, came to the rescue with ASEAN—and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was christened.

The contagion of cooperation was not limited to Southeast Asia. Even as ASEAN was being born, Japan met one of the toughest tests of its regional role in the Northwest Pacific, by agreeing to $270 million in credits to finance South Korea’s second five-year plan and the purchase of ships and fishing equipment. The Koreans, who still remember long, painful years of Japanese colonial rule, reciprocated in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: they agreed to conduct the talks in Japanese.