FORUM - Brexit serves as a warning to ASEAN

The lesson from the UK-EU split should not be one of smugness, but that regional cooperation only exists thanks to citizens permission, Mathew Davies writes. For decades the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was judged as a pale imitator of the European Union. ASEAN was weaker, enjoyed less support from its members, achieved less substantively and, at the most polemic, was nothing more than a captive of the inter-state power competition between its member states, while the EU was a decisive step away from such regressive practices.