Review by Sonakshi Garg (July 17, 2024): The term ‘Foreign Policy’, which gained prominence in the 19th century, became essential in the 20th century, and now, in the 21st century, has become a fundamental aspect of governance and public discourse. Hans J.
Do we have the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment? One of the most obvious questions, even the cycle of heat waves engulfing India this summer, has been missing during the largest democratic practices as 834 million Indians are voting in the 2024 General Elections.
India’s External Affairs Minister, Mr Natwar Singh, while attending the ASEAN - plus 3 meetings and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Jakarta in July 2004, had noted that India was ready to provide security in the Malacca Straits and stressed that it was in India's national interest to ensure that the Strait remained a crime-free sea-lane.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has a geopolitical dimension that people outside the foreign policy circuit in India may not be sufficiently aware of. The ASEAN has always wanted to influence the shape of the regional order in Southeast Asia and the role of major powers in it. How can a group of ten relatively small countries aspire to manage the geopolitics of a region that is stalked by military or economic giants like the US and Japan and rising behemoths like China and India with populations of more than one billion each?
The East Asian Community has been propagated as the new harbinger of comprehensive security processes. The idea of an East Asian Community got an impetus with the December 2003 Tokyo Declaration between Japan and ASEAN. Although East Asia has witnessed sufficient degrees of ‘regionalization’, ‘regionalism’ still has a long way to go. The former refers to those processes, which come from markets and private investment flows while the latter emerges as a result of intergovernmental dialogues and treaties.