East Timor will become the 11th member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this weekend, 14 years after it first applied for membership and just 23 years after it became a state following independence from Indonesia. With a population of 1.4 million people, it is the smallest country in the region and the poorest.
In a WPR briefing in June, Shannon Brincat examined the implications of East Timor’s accession to ASEAN. She wrote that membership will allow East Timor “to benefit from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, the world’s largest free trade agreement,” further boosting the country’s economic diversification and facilitating foreign investment. It also “highlights the value of multilateralism for small states amid the current challenges created by great power competition,” Brincat noted.
