The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN, founded 1967, ten members) and the African Union (AU, founded 2002 as successor to the Organisation of African Unity, fifty-five members) are the most ambitious Global South regional organizations of the postwar era. Neither pretends to the integration of the EU — no shared currency, no supranational court binding members against their will. Both have produced something more than mere talking shops. ASEAN's combined GDP, over $3.6 trillion, exceeds India's. The AU has authorized peacekeeping missions, suspended members after coups, and launched one of the world's largest free-trade areas (AfCFTA, 2018), spanning 1.4 billion people. Modest in mandate, enormous in implication.
The two organizations handle the same problem — regional cooperation among states with very different sizes, regimes, and histories — through different conventions. ASEAN works on the consensus principle: every member state has a veto, decisions emerge from prolonged informal consultation rather than majority voting, and the organization deliberately avoids intervening in members' domestic affairs. This ASEAN Way — born of states only recently freed from colonialism and wary of any new overlord — has been criticized as toothless (it failed completely on the Myanmar coup of 2021, on the Rohingya genocide, and on Chinese assertion in the South China Sea) but praised for keeping a fractious region with deep historical animosities at peace for half a century, a stretch with no war between members since 1967. The AU is more interventionist on paper — Article 4(h) of its Constitutive Act authorizes military intervention against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, a striking break from the old absolute-sovereignty doctrine that the OAU had treated as sacrosanct — but in practice has been constrained by funding, capacity, and member-state politics, with most of its budget supplied by outside donors and its peacekeepers, as in Somalia, dependent on UN and EU money. The deeper contrast is that ASEAN protects sovereignty while the AU, in principle, qualifies it; yet both default to the same instinct, non-interference, when a crisis would demand confronting a fellow member. Both organizations have nonetheless been forums for Global South coordination on climate, trade, debt, and sovereignty issues that the older Western-led institutions have handled poorly; the AU won a permanent seat at the G20 in 2023, a recognition of demographic and diplomatic weight that no single African state had been able to claim.
ASEAN's centrality in the Indo-Pacific is being challenged by US-China rivalry — both Washington and Beijing court ASEAN states individually, eroding the consensus that was the bloc's whole point. The AU is being challenged by a wave of coups across the Sahel and Central Africa (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Gabon), by Russian Wagner-network influence filling the vacuum, and by a series of conflicts (Sudan, Ethiopia) that have exceeded its peacekeeping capacity. Whether either organization can strengthen its institutional teeth, or whether they remain dependent on great-power forbearance, will shape Global South diplomacy for the next generation.