(a floater) Exclusion of certain ASEAN nations from the resolution?

["M. Roston" <mroston@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>]

while sitting on a bench waiting for a late bus today, my mind started to
wander toward things of debate and a thought occurred to me.

whatever action we choose to focus on in the resolution, could the debate
potentially be enriched by excluding a certain group of Southeast Asian
countries from the topic?

I'm not sold on the idea myself, but I thought maybe it would be an
interesting one to consider.

Consider this:  I just did some very scanty searches on Brunei Darusalaam.
I checked the card catalog of 3 Big 10 schools(Iowa, NU, Michigan), and I
also checked four of Iowa's computerized indexes of periodicals.  I hardly
found any mention of foreign policy/diplomacy/foreign assistance/etc. 
between the United States and Brunei(not to mention farily tiny amounts of 
literature in general when compared to the thousands you might come up
with for Indonesia). The only contact I could really determine the two
have is commercial, and the articles I saw about that seemed to be more
within the context of ASEAN as a unit.  

the second thing I observed was that Brunei does seem concerned with its
role within ASEAN.  I am not sure in what ways exactly, but the article
abstracts mentioned that ASEAN helped Brunei have sort of a "built in"
security and foreign policy.  Multilateralism and collective security
might be important to Brunei and other countries, much more important that
bilateral contact with the U.S..

By excluding a handful of ASEAN countries from a Southeast Asia topic,
could we possibly create some more built-in negative ground??  Possibly,
we might find arguments that say doing policies toward a few ASEAN nations
and not for them all can damage the regional integration processes in
ASEAN for security and free trade purposes(essentially the
multilateralism v. bilateralism debate).  Possibly, it might worry the
excluded nations about the intentions of their neighbors.  And more on
ASEAN, it might damage negotiations in the ASEAN Regional Forum which
would seem to implicate American foreign policy much more.

Now I know there are some obvious objections to this idea of a topic,
especially that by not involving all ASEAN nations, we prevent the change
of certain American policies toward ASEAN as a whole.  That's certainly an
important concern.  

Additionally, it seems feasible that some of the possible negative
arguments I list above would be wholly feasible in a topic that includes
some sort of "one or more" construction.  I just think it might create
good debates if we were to make that sort of ground much more implicit to
the resolution itself.  

It's a comparative advantage with a few possible disadvantages.  What I am
afraid of is that we will create a resolution with the phrase "one or more
ASEAN nations," and in the process, mostly ignore several of ASEAN's
members, even if a change in policy affects all ASEAN nations directly
through the organization.  Perhaps with exclusion, we might be able to
bring those nations closer to our debate.

-michael roston

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