The Gulf and South-East Asia show civilisations can work together, despite their differences

The second summit between the Association of South-East Asian Nations and the Gulf Co-operation Council wound up in Kuala Lumpur around lunchtime on Tuesday. In the afternoon, the regional groupings were joined by China, for the first ever Asean-GCC-China trilateral.

Did the gatherings constitute one of the “most substantive” milestones in 10-nation Asean’s history, as this year’s chair, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, put it? Was the trilateral “historic”, as the Malaysian academic Phar Kim Beng argued last week, because “it institutionalises symmetry among three civilisational spheres – maritime South-East Asia, the Islamic Gulf, and Confucian China”?

Or was the Asean-GCC meeting a small and incremental step forward for two very different regional blocs, with the addition of an extra meeting with China that may turn out to have been a one-off?

There may be elements of truth in all three statements. Mr Anwar made a confident case, saying he thought “the Asean-GCC partnership has never been more vital than it is today”. He pointed to both region’s centuries of history as trading hubs, mentioning that Oman and the Malaysian city of Malacca had both served as “strategic crossroads that linked East and West, demonstrating the power of openness, exchange and strategic connectivity”.

Kuwait’s Crown Prince, Sheikh Sabah Al Khaled Al Sabah, also called the partnership “vital”. He said: “Together our 16 nations represent immense economic and human potential, with a combined GDP nearing $6 trillion and a population of about 740 million.” The total trade volume between the two blocs stood at $131 billion in 2023, he added – a figure he expected to rise to $180 billion by 2026. “The growth in GCC-Asean trade, along with rising Gulf investments in Asian markets, reflects mutual confidence and deepening economic integration.”

Chinese Premier Li Qiang said that Beijing was “willing to join hands with Asean and the GCC to fully harness the synergy of one plus one plus one being greater than three, and inject powerful momentum into the common development and prosperity of our three sides” and that “differences are not obstacles to co-operation – rather, they present opportunities for complementarity”.

Prof Phar Kim Beng’s at-times rather poetic essay also pointed out that “when senior officials discuss port interoperability, halal certification frameworks, or AI governance standards, they are doing more than negotiating terms – they are creating a shared civilisational grammar … China’s Digital Silk Road, the GCC’s green hydrogen corridors, and Asean’s biodiversity-based value chains are not competing blueprints. They are complementary avenues for creating value – and values – across regions that refuse to be passive recipients of a waning Bretton Woods system”.

There’s no doubting that the sentiment between the leaders, ministers and officials in the meeting halls was warm and genuine. Timor-Leste Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao – present because his country is expecting to join Asean later this year – spread the joy when he unexpectedly handed out chocolates to reporters waiting outside the ballroom at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre after the first of Tuesday’s summits. “Take it, you’ve waited so long,” he told them with a smile. The summits also concluded with a joint statement that underlined the commitments of Asean, the GCC and China to peace, stability, dialogue, development, mutual respect and co-operation, non-interference into the internal affairs of others, and to strengthening collaboration between the regions.

But that doesn’t mean that getting there was easy or that concrete results will automatically follow without much further work.

Negotiations in the run-up to the summits were “hard”, I’m told by a senior official involved. There were substantial differences in style and process between the GCC and Asean – which is not surprising, considering how different their make-ups are. The GCC countries are all Arab Muslim and the amount they have in common may aid faster decision-making. Asean, on the other hand, is made up of states with so many different faiths and ethnicities that the region was once known as “the Balkans of Asia”. The association is used to a very measured – critics would say laboured – way of reaching conclusions.

I’m told that some on the GCC side were pushing for a mutual free trade agreement fast, whereas some Asean members were suggesting that the GCC should consider joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – a free trade agreement that includes all Asean countries, plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. “And in any case,” one other official said to me, “the Asean way is that we can’t take a formal decision without doing a study first.”

Differences in approach may have led to some misunderstandings. Some on the Asean side felt their GCC counterparts didn’t always appreciate the advances some of their countries had made. On the other hand, perhaps because of its long and deep institutional relations with Beijing, there is a danger that Asean overestimates the extent to which it is needed as a “bridge” between the Gulf and China – two parties that now know each other extremely well.

This doesn’t appear to be a problem at the top level. It is among the ranks of diplomats and sherpas on both sides that these issues must be worked through – for it is they who will need to put in the hard yards to turn warm words into economic mechanisms that benefit the peoples of both the Gulf and South-East Asia.

It’s not just a matter of material progress, and shared and equitable prosperity, important though both are. There should be a kind of magic, even a touch of romantic idealism, about trying to bring these two regions (and China) closer. And so, I will leave the last words to Prof Phar.

The senior officials who were working to make the Kuala Lumpur summits a success were doing more than laying the groundwork for trade, he wrote. “They are rewriting the rules of recognition. They are showing that in a fragmented world, civilisation can still speak to civilisation – not through weapons or treaties, but through standards, ports, and trust.”