Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia hailed AEC as a “landmark achievement” which hopes to compete with China and India, urging members to accelerate integration.
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Acknowledging this reality, member states also inked the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on ASEAN 2025 charting the way forward for the community for the next ten years.
The summit also adopted the Declaration on the ASEAN Community Vision 2025, in which the ASEAN leaders show their determination to consolidate the strengthening of the community, bring into play the achieved results, and build up a truly rules-based, people-oriented, people-centered ASEAN Community, where the peoples are entitled to human and freedom rights, higher life quality and other benefits created from the on-going process of ASEAN integration and community building.
The Asean community includes such diverse countries of vastly differing political, security and socio-cultural dimensions and governments ranging from communist Vietnam, quasi-military Myanmar to the kingdom of Brunei and the overactive democracy of the Philippines.
The 2015 ASEAN Chairman, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, in his closing speech, said the establishment of the single community proved worldwide that ASEAN could become the most competitive region in Asia-Pacific and have influence on the world stage. Much remains to be done and the region faces many challenges in finishing.
At the ASEAN-Japan Summit, leaders of ASEAN countries and Japan, the bloc’s third largest economic partner with bilateral trade amounted to $229 billion and the bloc’s second largest investor with investment of $23.4 billion, lauded both side’s efforts and accomplishments in implementing the 2013 ASEAN-Japan Friendship and Co-operation Vision.
The leaders also agreed to advance a single market agenda through enhanced commitments in trade in goods, and through an effective resolution of non-tariff barriers; deeper integration in trade and services; and a more seamless movement of investment, skilled labor, business persons, and capital. “We will remain active participants in the ASEAN-led security dialogue and cooperation forums”, he added.
Q3: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang raised a five-pronged proposal to uphold and promote peace and stability in the South China Sea during the ASEAN meetings in Malaysia.
The ASEAN and U.S. likewise called on concerned parties in the South China Sea issue to exercise restraint and avoid the use of force in dealing with the territorial conflict. This means that the Asean Secretariat General in Jakarta will have to be strengthened and be vested with a stronger mandate to investigate internal markets and identify non-tariff barriers.
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“It’s also about all of us being Asean, recognising that something special binds us, and making our citizens feel that Asean courses through their veins”, he said.
