The 2008 global financial crisis, the subsequent anemic recovery across many of the world's economies, and disorganised policy responses worldwide are only among the most recent indicators of what some are calling a deep ongoing failure in world leadership: a gridlock in global governance. The global economy's traditional leaders have gone missing in action, and no replacement has been found. Instead, on the world stage, political leaders pay mind ever more only to short-term national interests, and overlook how their actions might inadvertently destabilize the global economy. Paradoxically, however, just looking out for one's self-interests could ultimately be self-defeating.
In microcosm, the ASEAN region today faces these same challenges of cooperation and leadership, as ASEAN seeks ever greater consolidation towards an ASEAN Economic Community by 2015. ASEAN's concerns might be regional rather than global, but the problems are identical to those faced by a world economy that is uncoordinated and leaderless. The danger, at all levels, is that the benefits to regional economic integration and cooperation might be sacrificed on the altar of national expediency, as member states attempt to engage with domestic populations showing ever greater political clout, ever more visible political dissatisfaction, and ever greater sensitivity to the benefits of economic growth needing to be distributed equitably.
As ASEAN continues to build a regionally-integrated economy, what lessons can ASEAN offer for how the world's economic leadership might be usefully restructured? Conversely, what are the lessons from world or indeed European economic cooperation for how ASEAN's political leadership might guide collaborative economic success? In this last century, has world economic leadership succeeded only because of the vision and the power of (benevolent) US hegemony? If the age of American unipolarity has passed and the centre of the world economy soon will be Asian, what does Asia need to build that it might help guide global leadership? How does this centre avoid being only a battleground for great-power competition? And, perhaps most critical, how do these proposals for regional and global leadership benefit the ordinary people in Asia?