The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) has received the least attention and is the least developed among the three pillars mentioned in the Bali Concord II. This glaring oversight might impede the development of the AEC and ASC as regional social and cultural integration is integral to advances in the economic and security integration. For instance, an ASEAN social agenda is needed to ensure that poverty, deprivation or social inequities do not undermine the potential of economic growth, and indeed if economic development is threatened by social inequities, it in turn can undermine political stability. At the national level, all ASEAN states evidently recognized the utmost importance of social and cultural integration to their nation-building and economic development projects. Yet, however, the importance of building a socio-cultural community has yet to move beyond the national mindset and boundary to the regional level.

As it stands, the ASCC comes across as an afterthought in the Bali Concord II where non-security and non-economic issues are simply relegated. Moreover, it just strings together a lot of words that corresponds to what have by tradition been areas of functional co-operation, i.e., co-operation through projects rather than through policy-based initiatives, and this has been the traditional distinction between functional co-operation and economic cooperation in the ASEAN framework. Thus there is a need to make clearer what the ASCC means and what its objectives are, and below are a few issues for further consideration: