Rangoon about membership of ASEAN, despite the military regime’s
unsavoury human rights record.
The inclusion of Brunei in 1984 had brought ASEAN member-
ship to six. The next state to join, however, was not Burma but
Vietnam. Vietnam (and Laos) signed the Treaty of Amity and Co-
operation, the core document of ASEAN, in July 1992 and, three years
later to the month, Vietnam joined the Association. This was a highly
significant and symbolic addition, coming as it did so soon after
Vietnam’s loss of Soviet support. Vietnamese membership effectively
healed the division that had existed between ASEAN and the
‘Indochina bloc’ during the Cold War. At the same time it signalled to
China that Vietnam would henceforth consider itself a part of South-
east Asia, and so placed a little more distance between Hanoi and
Beijing. The ASEAN seven went out of their way to reassure Beijing
that they did not intend to act as a bloc to ‘balance’ China, but it was
clear, nevertheless, that the addition of Vietnam did strengthen both
ASEAN and Vietnam in their dealings with Beijing, especially with
respect to overlapping claims in the South China Sea (see below).
In December 1995, the ASEAN summit in Bangkok was also
attended by heads of government from Burma, Laos and Cambodia,
the first time all Southeast Asian states had met at this level. Leaders
marked the occasion by signing a treaty establishing a nuclear
weapons-free zone in Southeast Asia. Laos indicated its intention to
join the Association when it was better prepared to participate in the
full range of ASEAN affairs. Member states, particularly Indonesia,
were also eager to include Burma, specifically to reduce Rangoon’s
dependence on Beijing. The new coalition government in Cambodia
also elected to join, but was delayed from doing so by internal political
conflict. Laos and Burma both joined in 1997, with Cambodia finally
becoming ASEAN’s tenth member in April 1999.
Though ASEAN—as it entered the twenty-first century—was a
much looser association than the European Union, the fact that it
grouped all Southeast Asian states, and that it had already evolved a
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia