Year-Long Programme of National Prestige Events Condensed to Series of Video Calls After Middle East Crisis Complicates Travel, Agenda, and Concept of Navigating the Future Together

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

MANILA, PHILIPPINES — The Philippines opened the 48th ASEAN Summit this week under the theme “Navigating Our Future, Together,” a phrase that summit organisers confirmed had been selected before the current global situation made navigating anything, together or otherwise, considerably more complicated than originally anticipated. What had been designed as a full-year showcase of Philippine hospitality, infrastructure, and diplomatic sophistication — involving state dinners, cultural programmes, motorcades, and the installation of 847 newly planted decorative palms along EDSA — was condensed into what officials diplomatically described as a “lean, digitally integrated, strategically focused” programme, and what three separate foreign delegations privately described as “mostly Zoom calls.”

Navigating the Future: A Theme in Context

The summit’s theme, selected by the Philippine chairmanship team in 2024 when the future appeared somewhat more navigable, has acquired what foreign affairs commentators described as “a layer of unintended irony” in the current geopolitical environment. The Middle East crisis, ongoing trade tensions, and what one regional diplomat called “a general ambient sense that the future is navigating us rather than the other way around” had complicated the original ambitions of the Philippines’ ASEAN year considerably.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo confirmed that the Philippine chairmanship had adapted to circumstances with flexibility and resilience, two words that appear in every ASEAN official document regardless of context and that regional journalists have learned to translate as “we did not quite manage what we planned but we are not calling it that.” The Secretary noted that ASEAN’s core principles of consensus, non-interference, and centrality remained “robust and forward-looking,” a sentence that ASEAN watchers said meant the summit had concluded without anyone agreeing to anything binding, which is consistent with ASEAN’s record going back to its founding in 1967.

The Infrastructure That Was Prepared for Guests Who Attended Digitally

Among the more poignant details of the adapted summit was the infrastructure that had been prepared for a physical gathering of regional heads of state and which now sat in various states of completion or readiness awaiting a diplomatic occasion that had not quite materialised at the intended scale. The 847 decorative palms along EDSA were planted as scheduled and are flourishing. A dedicated ASEAN summit media centre in the Philippine International Convention Centre was fully equipped, staffed, and accredited, and hosted primarily Filipino journalists covering foreign delegates who were on video screens. The official summit gift — a handcrafted wooden box containing artisanal Philippine products selected to represent the country’s cultural diversity — was shipped internationally to delegations who acknowledged receipt and sent thank-you messages with appropriate emoji.

The Department of Public Works and Highways confirmed that four road improvement projects in Metro Manila had been fast-tracked in preparation for the summit, reaching completion levels of 40 percent, 65 percent, 30 percent, and “not meaningfully started but the signage is up” respectively. A spokesperson said the projects would continue after the summit and that their progress should not be assessed in relation to the summit timeline specifically, a framing that reporters found creative and noted for future reference.

ASEAN Centrality and the Question of What ASEAN Is Central To

The summit communique, released Thursday, affirmed ASEAN’s commitment to regional peace, economic integration, sustainable development, digital connectivity, and “a rules-based international order,” a phrase that all ten member states agreed to include and that three of them define differently in their domestic policy documents. The communique did not address the South China Sea by name, referring instead to “certain maritime areas” and “relevant international law,” a diplomatic formulation that the ASEAN Secretariat said represented “constructive consensus” and that legal scholars at the UN Division for Ocean Affairs said represented “careful avoidance of the word China.”

The Philippines, as chair, is credited with holding the meeting together under difficult circumstances and producing a communique that all ten countries signed, which ASEAN veterans said was a genuine achievement and not something to be taken for granted. The incoming Malaysian chairmanship congratulated the Philippines on its leadership year and expressed enthusiasm for the challenges ahead, in language that left open whether “challenges” was being used optimistically or descriptively.

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The decorative palms are doing well. NewsThump is attending the next summit by video from Croydon.

What the ASEAN Chairmanship Meant for the Philippines Beyond the Summit

Beyond the summit itself, the Philippine ASEAN chairmanship involved hundreds of working-level meetings, technical consultations, and preparatory sessions across the full range of ASEAN work programmes, from trade facilitation to disaster risk management to counterterrorism cooperation. These meetings, less visible than the summit but more consequential for the actual operational agenda of the regional body, proceeded throughout the year across multiple Philippine cities and produced agreements, frameworks, and work plans that ASEAN officials describe as the real substance of any chairmanship year. Philippine negotiators were credited by regional diplomats with competent management of the agenda, productive facilitation of discussions on digital economy frameworks, and what one ASEAN ambassador diplomatically called “admirable composure given the broader context,” a reference to the domestic political situation that the diplomat said was not intended as a comment on Philippine domestic politics, which ASEAN’s non-interference principle precluded, but was intended as a genuine acknowledgement of professional conduct under challenging circumstances. The Philippine government said it was proud of the chairmanship year overall and that the online pivot had in some respects increased participation from officials who might not have travelled to Manila and that perhaps this was, in the current period, a reasonable way to run a regional organisation of 700 million people.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/philippines-asean-summit-48th-online/