At long last Timor-Leste has been admitted to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). Asia’s youngest country and one of its poorest has become the 11th member of the regional grouping, which counts Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore among its number. Timor-Leste’s president, José Ramos-Horta, has been agitating for this since the 1970s but, as he told us this week, the real hard work begins now.

Confirmation of Timor-Leste’s accession comes at the start of Asean’s 47th summit in Kuala Lumpur, which begins on Sunday 26 October. Myanmar’s intractable civil war and the simmering tensions between Thailand and Cambodia are likely to overshadow proceedings.

This rare bit of good news for Asean is a monumental occasion for the former Portuguese colony. Timor-Leste won a long and bloody battle for independence from Indonesia in 2002 and being accepted into the international organisation has involved another arduous journey. It has been 14 years since Timor-Leste formally applied to join and 49 years since a young Ramos-Horta, during a trip to Jakarta in the chaotic period between the end of Portuguese rule and Indonesia’s military invasion, first floated the possibility of his country joining the bloc.

Ramos-Horta is now 75 years old, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner and is serving his second tenure as Timor-Leste’s president. “I’ve been pushing for this since 1974,” he said in 2023 when Monocle visited the country to report a story – a rare chance to eat soursop ice cream in a local café with a national leader and ride in his convertible Mini Moke. 

When we spoke this week, Ramos-Horta was sanguine, preparing to lead the delegation from the capital city, Dili, to Kuala Lumpur. He will preside over his country’s official welcome into Asean, a meaningful political win and a symbolic, long overdue recognition of Timor-Leste’s place in Southeast Asia.

During our reporting trip two years ago, it was hard to miss the neat row of flagpoles outside the presidential palace. The largest flag was Asean’s blue, red and yellow ensign, followed by those of every other country in Southeast Asia except Timor-Leste’s. At the very end was another flagpole, conspicuously empty. Nothing billowed from its finial until now.

The ceremonial hoisting of Timor-Leste’s flag in Dili has been hard-earned. Its 2011 bid to join Asean faltered after member states such as Singapore argued that Timor-Leste,  which was not even a decade old at the time, did not have the state capacity to meet the association’s requirements. It was a diplomatic way of saying that you don’t have the money or personnel to properly engage with a busy calendar – a difficult truth for a nation that endured 27 years of harsh Indonesian rule followed by a vengeful military exit that decimated Timorese infrastructure: no telephone lines, electricity, running water or roads. In hindsight, Ramos-Horta believes that delaying the country’s accession was the right call. “It forced us to increase the pace of our efforts to develop resources, infrastructure and so on,” he says. “Of course, we have made progress.”

Timor-Leste will now have a seat at the table – not just in Asean but at international meetings, including the East Asia Summit and other security dialogues with global powers. Membership will also provide access to preferential trade agreements and open the door to more investment, tourism and educational opportunities.

“A seat at Asean’s table gives Timor-Leste legitimacy and recognition as part of the Southeast Asian family,” says Joanne Lin, senior fellow and co-ordinator of the Asean Studies Centre at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “It helps to anchor the country strategically and provide it with huge economic potential.”

There are also opportunities for Asean. Timor-Leste far outranks the rest of the member states on global indexes of press freedom and civil liberties, and its constitution explicitly outlaws the death penalty. A vocal proponent of liberal democracy, it is joining a group whose members include repressive one-party states, an absolute monarchy and a military junta.

Ramos-Horta and prime minister Xanana Gusmão have openly criticised Myanmar’s ruling-army generals and hosted its pro-democracy opposition figures in Dili at a time when Asean, founded on principles of consensus and non-interference, has struggled to address the ongoing war and failed in its attempts to curb the junta’s behaviour. 

According to Lin, Timor-Leste boosts the credibility of Asean’s “political message of inclusiveness” while offering the bloc “a small but promising market”. But many of those opportunities – or “chocolates”, as Ramos-Horta quips – will take time and effort to develop. Timor-Leste will be the poorest member of Asean by a significant margin, making up just 0.1 per cent of regional GDP, and its economy relies heavily on fast-depleting oil reserves. Unemployment and child malnutrition are serious issues. Its fiscal capacity is probably still not quite up to Singaporean snuff.

“A country like Singapore that warned us how much hard work it takes, that said Timor should wait, will probably say ‘We told you!’” says Ramos-Horta. But he is deadly serious about what Asean membership will require and the level of reforms that are necessary across the economy, from trade and investment protection to land ownership.

“It’s not all rosy,” says Ramos-Horta. “There’s the realisation that Timor-Leste’s membership is only the beginning. The next day, after getting over the hangover from the celebration, we will be working even harder than before.”