Asian Values and Socialization of Human Rights Norms：The Analysis of Human Rights Politics in Southeast Asia from the Development and Challenges of ASEAN Human Rights Regime
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Lee, Ming-Hsun
Abstract
Human rights norms and values can be incrementally internalized into the local context by the regional human rights regime. So far, three major regional human rights regimes have existed in the world, namely European Union (EU), America, and Africa. Although none of the regional human rights regimes exists in Asia, a weak Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) human rights regime is emerging, such as the establishment of the ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in 2009 and ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC) in 2010, and the signature of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD) in 2012. This institutionalizing tendency has had many scholars investigate why ASEAN started to build this regime in the late 2000s. However, as the evolution of this regime, the protection of human rights in most ASEAN states has less improvement, which is the so-called human rights decoupling between formal institutionalization and practical human rights protection. But few studies have reported on the impacts of this regime upon human rights politics in Southeast Asia. As a result, the purpose of this thesis is to further analyze why ASEAN starts to promote ASEAN human rights regimes and why these ASEAN states change their attitude toward human rights from Asian Values to universal human rights. And I also attempt to clearly analyze what the impact of this regime on human rights politics is in Southeast Asia. Through the acculturation mechanism in the socialization theory, I argue that transnational socialization and regional integration in ASEAN could clarify these puzzles by analyzing the evolution and the challenge of this regime. This article divides this evolution into three periods: the Asian values period (1991-1997), becoming period (1997-2007), and deepening period (2007-). This finding shows that the agenda of the ASEAN human rights regime was actually embedded into the re-setting process of ASEAN integration in order to elevate its reputation and international status that severely frustrated in the 1997 financial crisis. Generally speaking, the Western powers possibly failed to use material incentive mechanism to pressure ASEAN to promote its human rights regime; in contrast, the development of this regime could reflect potential acculturation mechanism because the cognitive and social pressure from international social environment, as well as inter-regional and intra-regional human rights regime, could make ASEAN conform to other regional human rights regimes. Furthermore, the balance of promoting states (Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand), wait-and-see states (Malaysia, Singapore), and following states (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Brunei) in ASEAN could also shed lights on the development and challenges of this regime. Most importantly, the shadow of the China model projecting into Southeast Asia since 2010 seems to have those states whose political transition faced some impediments regard the China model as the alternative reference group. Not only could it influence those states’ attitude toward human rights, but also its benefits that this regime initially exerted. All in all, this research may provide an alternative to the problem about human rights politics in Southeast Asia, notable for resisting the human rights issues in the past. And the implications of this study may suggest a broader approach for future research into the effects of regional human rights regimes, thereby enriching the existed theoretical explanations about the interaction between international politics and international human rights.
Subjects
ASEAN Human Rights Regime
1997 Asian Financial Crisis
Asian Values
China Model
Acculturation
Reference Group
Human Rights Decoupling
Type
thesis
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