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This article demonstrates how South–South Cooperation (SSC), as it is now constituted in Southeast Asia, is little more than a liberal norm retaining only echoes of its origins in the 1955 Bandung Conference that first created SSC based on solidarity, common interests, and sovereignty. Southeast Asia is a useful case study of SSC’s evolution, as its states have been major players over the decades – with Indonesia proposing the Bandung Conference, Malaysia playing a key role in the 1980s, and Indonesia again at the forefront of the region from the first years of the new century onwards. Thailand and Singapore also have notable SSC programmes. However, the practices of SSC in the region show that it has become a liberal norm based on one key instrument – technical cooperation programmes. The process of SSC norm internalisation has occurred through a complex webbing of the interests and ideas of Southeast Asia’s states, regional dynamics, and Northern donor interests.

This paper is a conceptual study that attempts to analyse the possible effects of the development of the Kra Isthmus Canal on ASEAN relations. The Kra Canal would constitute a mega-project, a passageway that would connect the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand at the Isthmus of Kra, Thailand. Although the proposed Kra Canal is projected to provide many economic and trade benefits to Thailand, and to the region as a whole, steps toward its development have yet to be taken. There has been much debate over the costs for trade, the costs for the environment, national and regional security concerns, as well as major concerns related to political and economic relations in the region. Therefore, one of the main purposes of this study is to contribute to the debate on the possible impact of the devel-opment of the Kra Canal on ASEAN’s regional relations. In particular, it proposes that the development of the Kra Canal could threaten regional solidarity as it would physically divide maritime Southeast Asia from main-land Southeast Asia, which would ultimately result in an economic, cultural and political divide of ASEAN itself.