Brunei joined ASEAN immediately upon achieving its independence from the United Kingdom in 1984. Vietnam was admitted in 1995, even though it was still under a communist system. Laos and Myanmar followed in 1997, and Cambodia in 1999.
Although in the early day ASEAN sought to stabilize the region politically, the grouping has started out as a geo-political organization, set up in response to the fluid regional political situation at that time, but its dynamic has shifted the direction towards economic cooperation during the 1970s, and later towards economic integration, especially from the 1990s onwards.
In February 1976 during the First ASEAN Summit in Bali, economic cooperation, not economic integration, moved onto the ASEAN agenda. The Declaration of ASEAN Concord called for economic cooperative action by member states, aiming at the promotion of their national and regional development programs, by utilizing as far as possible the resources available in the ASEAN region to broaden the complementarity of their respective economies, while hoping that regional cooperation in large-scale industries in critical sectors could spur economic development via industrialization.
It was globalization and growing economic regionalism that forced ASEAN to make an economic turnaround toward enlarging their market, attracting investments, cutting costs, increasing efficiency, improving productivity, and thus generating jobs and raising people’s incomes.