Southeast Asia was greatly weakened by the 1997 economic crisis. The crisis had numerous impacts, but all appeared from the outset to be economic, which has had the effect of concentrating the blame for this serious regional destabilization on economic causes. If one looks further upstream, however, a political view clearly highlights faults in the political systems, which were designed to prolong the dominance of traditional powers. These specific political features of the market and emerging economies were well known, and were documented and even hailed to some extent by institutions such as the World Bank. The 1997 shock impacted the most vulnerable countries most by precipitating the destabilization of Indonesia, which was expected to undergo the unavoidable crisis of succession quite apart from the economic crisis. At a crucial moment for its future, ASEAN was incapable of intervening. The political changes seen in many countries since then are significant but at first sight appear not to be significant. Throughout the region, political reshuffling has been observed in spite of the concurrent pressure from a civil society in search of alternative social projects.