ASEAN Culture Establishment Recommendation

ASEAN Culture Establishment Recommendation

Culture is a process of human collective works in order to defend and develop their existence through a production colour process in the developing space and time span. Understanding the culture will be easier if we divide it into three main elements:
1. The values devoted
2. Rituals or activities practiced
3. Physical result from the community production

While ASEAN is understandable as a regionalism entity if we try to understand that in the world that is growing narrower we can classify it in the areas of political economy, security and defense, and in the local, national, regional and international scopes. So, the regional entity is an entity of the communities currently live in the unity of the nations living in a specific region. We see that ASEAN has the cultural diversity within the communities living between Asia and Australia continents, bordered by Pacific and Indonesia oceans.

Cultural Problems

In the world that goes borderless, in Southeast Asian region we still see many imbalance and difference in the community-produced culture and colour development. In many countries human rights are still violated, democracy is still merely the state symbol. In the production colour, most is still in the agricultural colour more dominant from the industrial colour but one or two countries turned up forming capitalism economy at the advanced stage, leaving their other regional brothers behind so that economic solidarity became difficult to build and the economic competition to suck one another is and will be greedier.

Cultural Recommendation

In neoliberalism era, a genuine awareness should be built more to become strongholds to determine the communal living goals and fates, including at the regional level.

1. To return the cultural strategic position into one of the main grounds in making decisions and political economic power planning, so that the built up strategy will be more comprehensive and holistic dignifying the humanitary values above the mechanism and bureaucracy.

2. To create the cultural space to move broader by expressional cross-region, not to unite the cultures into the homogeneous one, but more to exchange, cross and collaborate the cultures present in Southeast Asia region to traverse a rainbow of culture enriching the human cultures on earth.

3. To build a political economic solidarity so that it becomes a community order that is firm in facing the threats of the economic pressure forms that is growing more complex and global.

4. Refuse all forms of commercializing the cultural products and all the efforts to recognize the copyrights as private ownership so that the cultural forms can be developed collectively in long time span.

Jakarta, 8 August 2008

Revitriyoso Husodo