Page 40 - AEI Insights 2018 Vol 4 Issue 1

AEI Insights, Vol 4, Issue 1, 2018

The Code of Conduct

The article would consider the Association’s effort to produce the Code of Conduct of Parties
(COC) in the South China Sea as a form of principled-pragmatism in a bid to defuse the
tensions between ASEAN claimants and China. It is because, through this effort, ASEAN
managed to assert its interest in maintaining centrality in regional security affairs and hold all
the parties' commitment to negotiate realistically to provide guidelines for the future code
(Thayer 2013:81). Under this logic, ASEAN cautiously holds onto its ‘high benefit and low
cost' approach by investing on the expected gain and not just a quick fix for short-term political
settlement.

By keeping this expectation in mind, the current standard of ASEAN’s principled-pragmatism
is less on ‘who owns what’, due to the bottleneck exhaustion of using legal solution, but rather
‘who does what’ which is relating to the islands militarization in SCS. Under this concern,
ASEAN believes this issue can be addressed only by doing what the Association does the best
for fifty years, which is keeping the opponent close. In this aspect, the painstaking process of
creating the Code of Conduct is not solely because ASEAN wanted it to be legally binding
given the China's problematic culture of compliance, but the prime agenda of COC is to
‘meaningfully' interacting and communicating with China.

The term ‘meaningfully' here means to gain further information pertaining to its activity in
SCS and as a collective way to remind China that ASEAN is aware of its behaviour. But the
Association often choose to ‘save Beijing’s face’ in respect to its competing status quo in the
international system (Swee-Hock et al. 2005:194). Besides, ASEAN is also trying to position
the member countries' source of comfort in the conflict, by focusing on territorial sovereignty,
peaceful dispute settlement and a time-off in SCS militarization, or else outside interference
might be more attractive for ASEAN than staying on Beijing's course. This also includes
ASEAN’s principled pragmatism way of managing conflict that is by taking advantage of the
politics of ambiguity, which encourages parties to maneuverer around the flashpoints and
subsequently allow shock deflection and tensions to be dissipated (Oishi 2017:10).

In this sense, the effort to create a Code of Conduct should be seen as realistic for ASEAN
because it allows the SCS dispute to be discussed underneath an ASEAN-centric umbrella. It
pulls diversity of political interests into a regional bargaining power, taking into account its
small states status quo and the limit of legal primer in SCS dispute (Thayer 2013: 82). Should
there be no code of conduct as proposed by ASEAN, there might be no other localised
instrument, or perhaps Beijing might put forward its own version Code of Conduct in SCS, as
evident in its economic approach, which might put ASEAN in a zero-sum geopolitical
disadvantage (Simon 2008:278).

The discussion also explains the scholars' presumption of the possibility of ASEAN members
being socialised by China, rather than the other way around. To which this article would put
forth the concept of ASEAN's principled-pragmatism where member-states using the regional
weight to pursue their national interests as an extension of states' vulnerabilities (Jones and
Smith 2007: 61). It suggests that ASEAN's principled-pragmatism approach relating to the
legal ruling in SCS might be different if ASEAN possesses a solid form of regional resilience.
The constant regional belief is that the ultimate logical solution to this conflict should follow
the guidelines given by UNCLOS or the tribunal ruling. Yet, it could only be done effectively
if there are joint efforts by the international community to diversify the legal methods as well
as to enforce the ruling outcome of UNCLOS.

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