On October 28, the 47th Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ended in Kuala Lumpur. What did negotiations result in, why is the association important in 2025, and in which ways has ASEAN changed?
Declarations upon declarations
Development, the role of the individual, and the shared access to benefits are the guiding lights that help ASEAN participants choose the necessary vectors for integration that can come to the fore at any given moment and require urgent solutions. According to the documents adopted at the summit, today these vectors include everything that contributes to socio-economic progress: ensuring the security of the individual, society, and the state (combating money laundering, assisting in the apprehension of criminals, utilizing all opportunities to counter radicalization and extremism); education (cooperation in higher education will be intensified by the parties, with the goal of nothing less than turning ASEAN into a global knowledge hub); agriculture and forestry (here, the task for the parties is to ensure food security and environmental sustainability of economic processes); sovereign management of natural resources (the mining sector is named as an important area of cooperation for the ASEAN Economic Community); environmental protection (a healthy environment may be considered both a right of every state and, essentially, its duty); timely response to climate change and countering it (a separate declaration was dedicated to this issue, underscoring its urgency and importance); humanitarian ties (protection of cultural heritage, sustainable tourism), as well as the information sphere (addressing the challenges of cyberspace, the safe use of artificial intelligence, responsible use of social media). However, enumerating all the vectors of ASEAN integration development would require a separate article, as the organization has truly managed to build a differentiated multi-level integration structure that comprehensively involves all participants in the process.
A Timor dream
A significant step was the signing of the declaration on the admission of East Timor to ASEAN. This small state, located in the eastern part of the island of Timor, whose people endured Portuguese colonial rule, Dutch influence, Japanese occupation, a devastating civil war, and a prolonged struggle for self-determination from Indonesia, finally gained independence in 2002. East Timor submitted its application to join the association in 2011, and it had since then been under consideration. In 2022, East Timor was granted observer status in ASEAN, and in 2023, a roadmap was formulated, containing a plan to ensure the country’s compliance with the criteria required by the association.
The long wait and efforts were not in vain. On October 26, 2025, East Timor officially joined the ranks of the regional organization it had sought to be a part of for so many years. It is important to understand that for East Timor, ASEAN is not only a multilateral “club” in Southeast Asia, where membership demonstrates recognition as a sovereign participant in international life, as well as the country’s reputation and economic development success. It is also a resource for new opportunities from the diverse ASEAN integration tracks. For such a small state that gained its sovereignty relatively recently, joining ASEAN is, one might say, a dream come true. In honor of this truly outstanding historical event, lavish celebrations are being held on the island, and the authorities have declared a nationwide holiday.
For ASEAN, East Timor’s accession is an almost revolutionary event, as the organization had previously refrained from expansion for such a long time. After all, as mentioned earlier, even observer status in the association was not granted to Dili immediately but only after more than a decade since its application for membership. Now, Southeast Asia, the Asia-Pacific region, and the entire world can witness a new model for ASEAN, which has managed not only to achieve qualitative integration, but also to ensure quantitative expansion and demonstrate sufficient responsibility to take a new member under its jurisdiction.
Plans for 2045
If we take a look at ASEAN archival documents, we will see that the number “2025” appears rather frequently. The current year had long been a certain target date for ASEAN members, a milestone they aimed for, defining the level of qualitative characteristics for the main tracks of regional integration that should be achieved by that time. Now that 2025, which in previous years and decades seemed like such a distant future, has already come and almost passed, the recent summit repeatedly emphasized that all plans set by the organization have been successfully implemented. Such statements indicate that all parties must have expressed their agreement—by consensus—with this assessment, meaning they are genuinely satisfied with the level of integration and the implementation of common tasks.
The organization’s new development milestone is now set for 2045. It is by this year that plans for cooperation across various sectors and building integration communities—the components of the association—are now oriented: the ASEAN Political Security Community, the ASEAN Economic Community, and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. This is indeed bold and distant and requires active joint work by the member states, yet it is logical for a strategically minded individual, society, or state accustomed to planning for decades and beyond. Time will tell how effective ASEAN’s new planning will be and how attainable the goals of its future aims will be.
Overall, the association’s 47th Summit once again showed that Southeast Asia is a region that has managed, in a relatively short time frame by historical standards, to build multilateral interaction based on its own norms and templates, establishing its own type of international integration and finding the ideal balance between preserving sovereignty and unifying strategies. Owing to this, ASEAN continues to move forward and exert efforts to promote truly comprehensive cooperation among its member states in this new stage of its development.
Ksenia Muratshina, PhD in History, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia, and Oceania Studies of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
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