This essay was written in September 2007 in an interstitial if not pivotal moment:  between the 40th birthday of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Bangkok on 8 August, and the expected announcement of an ASEAN Charter at the 13th summit of the Association in Singapore on 20 November. Future analysts may look back on the 2007 Summit as a threshold event, or mere business as usual, or something in between. Whatever their judgment, the intermission between the birthday of the organization and that of its new charter seemed an appropriately transitional time to comment, however briefly, on the Association and some of the challenges it faces.

I also wanted to link this essay to the person whom this Festschrift honors: Jusuf Wanandi. Accordingly, I selected an op ed by him on ASEAN and its plans for a charter first published in April 2006,1 and made it a basis for my own ruminations. In thus responding to his ideas and using them as points of interpretive departure, I hoped to illustrate the stimulus that he has provided for students of ASEAN, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia over many years.

I was tempted to predict the content of the charter and its impact on ASEAN. But that would have amounted to short-term speculation, and I could well have been wrong. I chose instead to consider how questions of democracy may challenge the creativity of ASEAN's leaders and advisers in the longer run, whatever the text of its new charter does or does not say.