BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The claimant issues that happened in South China Sea area seems to be the most popular and long-standing dispute among some countries that share and close geographically with the region. With the present of numerous and richness resources and the strategic locations for shipping route, Spratly groups of Islands seems to be the center of attraction of certain countries nearby to claim the right over them. According to Bouchat (2013), the area that owns abundance of fish stocks, the potential of having oil and natural resources and security importance escalate the value of the area to the Southeastern Asia and other nautical powers with the addition of the high seas interests and stability in this strategic province which
Besides Spratly Islands, Paracel Islands also become the attention by some states especially Vietnam and China and their situation are overlaps with their dispute over Spratly Islands. China’s claim seems to be comparatively stronger than Vietnam based on historical reasons (Chiu & Park, 1975). The involvement of China in the ownership of the territorial dispute of Spratly Islands seems to worsen the situation for ASEAN countries in managing the conflict as the influence and challenges brought by China as a great power are something that need to be precisely measured in order to response by the ASEAN countries. This is also one of the challenges that need to overcome by ASEAN member countries either than managing the dispute and clash of ownership of the region among themselves. The other factors that evolved around the Spratly Islands dispute also closely-related to the Post-Cold War era atmosphere with the participation of United States interests and Soviet Union influence among the countries that responsible for the claimant and with the presence of answerable United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
Regionalism acts as important platform to enhance the capability of the member’s countries in many aspects such as to boost their economy or to maintain the security of their countries or in other words the integrating forces can be market-led or political-led. Being close geographically and interdependent towards each other can be refer as the meaning of regions while regionalism can defined as official cooperation between the members countries (Fawcett, n.d). However, geographical closeness became less relevant reason nowadays in defining the region but more towards political considerations that interrelated with security as mentioned before with the addition of economic and monetary stability. The argument regarding ‘regionalism’ also has been discussed by the previous scholar by using the term Regional Integration Areas (RIAs). (Hofmann, 2000, p. 31) has his own definition for