Philippine Intervention
delivered by
Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr.
during the
ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conference Session with the European Union
06 August 2021, ASEAN Conference Room
Co-Chairs, Excellencies,
The Philippines is honored to be Country Coordinator of the ASEAN-EU Dialogue Partnership for the next three years.
We are living in unprecedented times, faced with two “existential” —using the word without exaggeration— and alliterative crises: COVID and climate change. In both, we all pitch in with no holding back or we share the same fate; no one escapes.
In both, we’re talking survival on acceptable terms; most specially that of our posterity if we fail or leave things to go on as they have from worse to worst, as a species on a livable planet.
It is not to Darwin that we turn for the answers. He had no answers; only descriptions and Hobbes beat him to it: life started nasty, brutish and short — with spotty interludes of good manners — and life will end up that way.
Rather we turn to an anarchist of all people. Kropotkin proposed that helping each other and working together for mutual benefit is the way for all to go forward so it’s at no one’s exclusive expense. So Darwin’s off the table; on his terms only cockroaches have a future.
COVID continues always one step, maybe more ahead; mutating to strike again when we think we got it beat. It is inexhaustibly adaptable — but not by itself. Actually it is helpless to perpetuate and spread without the help of its victims. And there will always be enough people to play host to it by carelessness or reckless disregard. This pandemic is never going away because it will never run out of enough of the heedless and reckless for its survival and spread.
Our priorities stay the same.
One, equitable, timely, and affordable access to vaccines; vaccines made a global public good.
Two, speed up vaccine production worldwide and help developing countries put them up. There will be enough business for all is the sad news.
Adopting WTO’s proposal to waive intellectual property rights in COVID vaccines will be easier than it sounds. Even Big Pharma realizes that if the world runs out of customers for COVID vaccines, there won’t be any left for its other cures. In another context, Keynes said that in the long run we will all be dead.
Third, make it easier for the vaccinated to cross borders. What’s the point of vaccination if not to bring back some measure of the world as it was before COVID.
There should be no discrimination among vaccines: either of the first one on the scene that was and is as good as it could get given the speed of its development; or the subsequent better ones developed with the benefit of hindsight.
Let’s not make the acceptability of this or that vaccine the extension of diplomacy by being just plain mean. Especially to those who took what was first offered, what was the one readily at hand or the cheapest to buy.
C’mon. You have a better chance to avoid racism by sticking to your kind than escape the harm and hurt on life and livelihoods by vaccine discrimination.
We’re beyond warning of climate change. And pointing to signs of its sure coming. The increasing number and intensity of extreme weather events — forests and plains swallowed in swathes by fire; crops shriveling on stalks; droughts parching farmlands. Alternatively, we have more floods of uncommon scale swallowing entire cities. Our planet is dying. If climate action does not measure up to what is needed, we all face the same fate of diminished existence or extinction altogether.
So, we’re no longer arguing. We’re deep in thought I hope; we’ve certainly been in lots of talks on dealing with it. Or not at all.
On the one hand there are the incorrigibly heedless even of their own posterity. Maybe they want to be the last of their kind living and doing business as dirty and destructive as usual.
Or there’s Greta Thunberg. At my age and with the history of my generation denying climate change or whining that there is no help for it — or going with Greta. I am going with her.
We have had our time; let’s give the young a chance to have theirs. They’ll make mistakes but they won’t be ours. But we can give them something better to start with. Like including in the ASEAN-EU Plan comprehensive climate action across the board, including job losses from irrelevance. The pandemic has forced us to choose new ways of making a living, of otherwise getting on and going forward in a world of new and ineradicable dangers.
In our regional architecture and external relations, ASEAN Centrality is non-negotiable. It is not a matter of pride or respect. But utility and relevance.
How can we partner as two groupings or bilaterally as members of either, unless we —Southeast Asians and you — European Unionists first put ourselves in the other’s shoes. And walk around in them. That’s the only way we’ll both know why we’re coming from our respective directions. Harper Lee said that in To Kill a Mockingbird. And nothing will work as well in achieving the mutual understanding that is the only basis for sustainable cooperation.
It won’t be smooth; there will missteps. And both sides have to realize it will have to be give and take. With the same comparative advantages, one of us has to make room for the other or replace the other altogether. Then see what either can give to make up for the loss.
On the South China Sea, I’ve repeated myself ad nauseam. Suffice it to say that the provocations have been counter-productive for the provocateur; but the reaction has sometimes been overboard for being overbroad.
It is one thing to fear the Resident Evil’s potential for trouble, and another to hit out anywhere over anything including those things where it might improve the situation to work together or just keep out of each other’s ways but at no one’s expense.
There is a reason red lines are drawn but not carved in stone. They must be drawn after reflection and with clear foresight; and then redrawn when circumstances greatly change. What we find useful and therefore welcome is the EU’s statement on the 5th Anniversary of the 2016 Arbitral Award, that “what happens in the South China Sea matters to the EU , ASEAN and the whole world.” Finally, we are not alone in what we alone fought for and won. Until it became useful to stand by the one still standing after fighting a giant in an empty arena. But we like company whatever the hour.
On Myanmar, we stand firmly by the swift implementation of the Five-Point Consensus and the non-negotiable restoration of the democratic (such as it was) status quo ante the coup, including the dominant role of the military in ensuring Myanmar’s territorial integrity and national identity. There is no good way forward until that happens. After that, changes will be acceptable because they were democratically adopted.
This is my government’s last year and mine. As I started in Foreign Affairs with two consecutive trips to Brussels and the EU just a week apart — arranged by career officers to test my patience and mettle, so shall I end it. But someone else will go in my place to ASEAN’s landmark 45th anniversary with the EU next year at a Commemorative Summit in Brussels. Thank you.