ASEAN’s Multilateral Dilemma: Continuity and Change from NAM to BRICS

ASEAN’s Multilateral Dilemma: Continuity and Change from NAM to BRICS

Authors: Evi Fitriani and Anis H. Bajrektarevic

ASEAN’s enduring strength has never been its ability to project power, but its capacity to manage diversity through restraint, process, and dialogue. In an increasingly polarized strategic environment, pressures to align more explicitly with emerging blocs such as BRICS risk diluting ASEAN’s long-standing emphasis on autonomy and consensus. For Southeast Asia, security is less about joining alternative power centers than about preserving decision-making space amid intensifying great-power rivalry. A revitalized non-aligned approach—adapted to contemporary challenges such as economic fragmentation, digital governance, and maritime security—offers ASEAN greater flexibility to engage all major actors without becoming dependent on any. In this sense, non-alignment is not a rejection of cooperation but a pragmatic strategy to sustain ASEAN centrality in a multipolar, yet deeply contested, regional order.

Let us continue with a rather simple question: Why does ASEAN’s security lie in non-alignment, not bloc membership?

For more than two decades, the “Asian Century” has been treated as an inevitability rather than a hypothesis. Yet inevitability is not strategy, and Asia’s economic rise has not produced commensurate strategic autonomy. As this author warned in No Asian Century, “growth without agency is not power.” It is exposure.

Nowhere is this clearer than in ASEAN’s strategic predicament.

The region is richer, more connected, and more central to global supply chains than ever. It is also more militarized, more contested, and more instrumentalized by external powers. This is not ascent; it is crowded relevance.

Consequentially, ASEAN is increasingly urged to anchor itself more firmly in BRICS—or, alternatively, to revive the logic of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The choice is often framed as outdated idealism versus modern multipolar pragmatism. This framing is false.

BRICS: an alternative center, not an alternative logic

BRICS markets itself as a corrective to Western dominance. In reality, it substitutes one form of centrality for another. The bloc is multipolar in composition but hierarchical in effect, shaped by stark asymmetries of power, demography, and strategic ambition.

For ASEAN (and RI for that matter), deeper institutional attachment to BRICS would not mean insulation from great-power rivalry. It would mean internalizing it. Sino-Indian competition, Russia’s confrontation with the Atlantic world, and the geopolitical agendas of newly admitted members are not externalities. They are the bloc’s operating environment.

As one of the co-authors observed, “multipolarity without rules multiplies friction.” For smaller and mid-sized states, friction is not leverage; it is vulnerability.

BRICS offers financial instruments and political visibility, but not protection in the sense ASEAN requires. Protection implies predictability, autonomy, and room for maneuver. A bloc dominated by continental powers with unresolved rivalries offers none of these.

Non-alignment: misunderstood, not obsolete

Non-alignment is often caricatured as neutrality. Historically, it was the opposite: a strategy of autonomy (active peaceful coexistence—strategic equidistancing engagement, not a passive neutrality) in a system designed to deny it. NAM failed not because its premise was wrong, but because it lacked economic integration, technological depth, and institutional discipline. Those deficits are not arguments against non-alignment today. They are arguments for upgrading it.

The contemporary international system increasingly resembles the one that gave rise to NAM: weaponized finance, sanctions as diplomacy, fractured trade regimes, and information warfare. In such a system, alignment reduces options; autonomy preserves them.

ASEAN already behaves as a de facto non-aligned actor—hedging, consensus-building, and resisting exclusive security commitments. The problem is not doctrine; it is institutional confidence.

ASEAN’s real security deficit

ASEAN’s vulnerability is not military inferiority. It is structural dependence. Security in 2026 is decided less by troop numbers than by (i) control over supply chains and standards; (ii) digital and data sovereignty; (iii) food and energy resilience; and (iv) narrative and diplomatic bandwidth—to name but a few of the most pressing ones.

Neither BRICS nor NAM can deliver these automatically. But BRICS constrains ASEAN’s room to build them independently, while non-alignment preserves that space. As No Asian Century (almost two decades old but still highly relevant work) reminds us, “Asia’s problem is not lack of power but lack of cohesion.” ASEAN’s cohesion is diluted, not strengthened, by bloc discipline.

(We are drifting from a Kantian promise of cooperative order into a Hobbesian reality of coerced choice. Rules increasingly yield to power, norms to narratives, and multilateralism to managed loyalty. In such a system, as Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic has warned, the message to smaller states is blunt: comply or die. For actors like ASEAN, the challenge is not to moralize this shift but to survive it—by preserving strategic autonomy in a world where alignment no longer guarantees protection, only obedience.

Centrality must be defended, not donated.

ASEAN’s strategic value lies in being indispensable, not aligned. The moment it becomes a junior partner in any camp, its celebrated “centrality” becomes rhetorical.

Selective engagement with BRICS is sensible. Conceptual renewal of non-alignment is necessary. Exclusive commitment to either is unnecessary—and risky.

There may be no Asian Century, as Bajrektarevic famously argued (long ago), because Asia has yet to decide whether it wants to be a subject or a venue of global politics. ASEAN’s answer to that question will determine its security more than any acronym it joins.

History rarely rewards those who choose sides early. It remembers those who made themselves unavoidable.

*Anis H. Bajrektarevic, Chairperson and prof. Intl. Relations & Global Pol. Studies

Source: Modern Diplomacy