Anthony Milner

Basham Professor of Asian History of Asian History, Australian National University

The blockage to forming AEC is also a security and cultural issue


ASEAN has slowed down tremendously by bringing in all 10 countries into ASEAN but there were vital security reasons for that. Some people were saying that the trouble between Thailand and Cambodia is a sign of real problems in ASEAN but I think it’s a sign of how important ASEAN is. These kinds of trouble could be going on all over the place. The region was very much artificially put together in the colonial period, boundaries and borders put in really quite recent times. We have to be grateful that ASEAN was willing to move more slowly by bringing in all of the 10 countries and watch this building up of this sense of community.

About Anthony Milner
Anthony Milner is an historian specializing on Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia. After having been the Director of the Academy of the Social Sciences project on ‘Australian-Asian Perceptions’, he also became increasingly involved in research and Track II activity related to Australian engagement in the Asian region. He was Dean of Asian Studies 1996-2005, and has held visiting appointments at The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the National University of Singapore, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Humboldt University and the National University of Malaysia. He was educated at Monash University and Cornell University.

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