Opening remarks by Senator Gareth Evans, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia, to "Asia Players" Session, World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 28 January 1995
The first was the APEC Leaders' Summit in Bogor, Indonesia, in which the leaders of the eighteen major economies of the region - accounting between them already for almost 45 per cent of the world's trade and nearly 55 per cent of its production - committed themselves to achieving free and open trade and investment: no later than 2010 in the case of the industrialised economies, and no later than 2020 for everyone else.
The other meeting, which has attracted less global media attention, was the inaugural meeting in Bangkok in July of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) - bringing together for the first time the eighteen major security players of the region (including Russia and Vietnam, not presently part of APEC) to begin a multilateral dialogue aimed at creating a new cooperative security environment in the region - the idea being to build trust and confidence through a variety of cooperative strategies, including military cooperation programs, wide-ranging information exchanges, the development of preventive diplomacy processes and inter-governmental cooperation in mounting UN peace keeping operations.
These two meetings should be seen as consolidating, and putting in place, respectively, the key institutional elements - one about economics, the other about security - of a new regional architecture. 1994 was a watershed year, because these events can be seen as marking the transition, from theory to reality, of the idea of an Asia Pacific community.
In talking about an Asia Pacific community, I don't want to be taken as claiming that the region is, or ever should be, a Community in the capital-C European sense, implying among other things a customs union and single internal market. Rather I am speaking of community in the small-c sense, the flavour of which is best captured by the usual Chinese translation of the term, which involves characters meaning literally 'big family'.
Even expressed in this cautious way, there are still plenty of critics who can be heard to say that the idea of an Asia Pacific community is at best premature and at worst misguided. It is suggested, variously,
* that the region is simply too heterogeneous in terms of its political cultures, economic cultures and basic value systems ever to be capable of being so described;
* that it involves too many major powers with competing interests for any genuinely multilateral process - especially in the security matters - to assume any real significance; and
[I/95]
* that there is an unbridgeable gap, in particular, between the countries of East Asia and North America - that their separate regional identities will always count for more than any common Asia Pacific identity.
I believe that these responses, while familiar and understandable, understate the forces now at work to bring the Asia Pacific together; understate what has been achieved so far; and understate what is capable of being achieved. (I say this from the perspective of a country which, perhaps more than any other in the region, straddles its alleged dividing lines: we are historically and culturally of the West, but geographically located squarely in East Asia, doing most of our business there, having most of our strategic interests concentrated there, and with a demography increasingly reflecting that reality. We are a country, moreover, that has been more actively involved than almost anyone else in creating the new regional institutions to which I have referred.)
In the time available I can only substantiate these arguments in highly abbreviated summary form, but these are the main points.
As to the forces now at work to bring the region together:
* The phenomenon of convergence - of countries of very different backgrounds developing, with the help of modern communications technology, information bases, tastes, outlooks, practices and institutions that are ever more alike - is at least as alive and well in the Asia Pacific as anywhere else in the globe.
* Although there are obviously different rates of take-up around the region, there is increasing acceptance - as there is indeed around the world - that there are a common core of universal values which are more powerful in their resonance across the region than any values which are argued to be peculiarly Western or peculiarly Asian. These more universal values go to individuals' needs for security, for prosperity, and for dignity and liberty - including the right to have a say in the way they are governed.
* There is already a high level of economic integration within the Asia Pacific region, with some 60 per cent of APEC countries' trade being with other APEC members, and rapidly growing trade and cross-investment links between Asian economies who have not previously had much to do directly with each other.
As to the achievements and potential of APEC:
* APEC, within the very short period of five years since the inaugural meeting in Canberra in 1989, has grown from a loose grouping prepared to cautiously discuss an OECD-style economic cooperation agenda (focusing on data compilation,, policy dialogue and particular sectoral projects) to one which has now embraced a clear-cut trade facilitation agenda (involving business cost-savings measures in areas like technical standards and conformance testing, customs harmonisation and investment access guidelines), and now - following Bogor - a clear-cut, classic trade liberalisation agenda (involving tariff and quota cuts as well). True it is that much remains to be delivered, as distinct from merely talked about, but the progress has been remarkable.
* APEC's trade liberalisation agenda is yet to be worked through in detail, and I expect it to take two to three years before detailed agreement is thrashed out. Questions like what precisely 'open regionalism' means in this context, whether the progress can be made short of a formal Free Trade Area being negotiated, or indeed a new GATT/WTO round being leveraged into effect - are issues still to be resolved. But the political horsepower has now been injected, and the overall internal dynamics are highly favourable for further trade liberalisation momentum.
As to achievements, and potential further achievements, on the security side:
* The Asia Pacific region is - perhaps not unconnected with its economic success - as benign as it has ever been, and most countries seem to want to capture that mood and make it as permanent as possible. Witnessing as we do in Australia the minuet of the giants in our region (the US, Japan, China and Russia), and conscious as we all are in the region of potential flashpoints still like the Korean Peninsula, the Four Islands, the South China Sea and the uncertain future domestic environment in China, no one can sensibly deny the continued applicability of traditional real-politik, balance of power considerations. The United States's role as a 'balancing wheel' in the region is universally accepted, and no one is in the business of tearing up familiar bilateral alliances. But at the same time, there seems now almost complete acceptance of the idea that a great deal can be done to supplement and reinforce more traditional approaches by multilateral dialogue, confidence-building and problem solving processes.
* The ARF - the Asia Pacific's own version of such a process - will necessarily take some time to assume a clear institutional status and role. It has not yet had the visible achievements to its credit of even the OSCE in Europe - and sceptics there are of course still legion. But I think all of us attending the first session in Bangkok of the ARF came away with the feeling that something of real weight and value had been set in train. The first specific-subject conference under the auspices of the new forum - designed to develop specific suggestions to feed into the ministerial process - took place in Canberra in November in the form of a seminar on trust and confidence-building. Some prominent military and civilian policy makers - including from China - attended the seminar and participated freely and constructively in its deliberations. And a series of practical measures were identified ranging from the immediately do-able (such as strategic planning exchanges and joint training for peace keeping operations) to those presently, but not necessarily permanently, in the too-hard basket. Further such seminars are contemplated in the first half of this year on peace keeping and, hopefully, preventive diplomacy. As with APEC, a clear agenda for action is beginning to emerge and there is no evidence yet that it will be strangled at birth by the kind of indifference or resistance to change that seems to be, unhappily, becoming endemic elsewhere.
Despite all of this, there is a residual sentiment in a number of quarters that the 'Asian' countries of East Asia have distinct and common interests that are worthy of separate recognition, perhaps in institutional form. The arguments against this approach boil down essentially to these:
* First, Asia (even if one confines the description to North-East and South-East Asia, including Indo-China, and leaves out South Asia - quite apart from geographically contiguous countries like Australia) is itself a totally heterogeneous construct. Even in terms of basic values - work ethics, family and group consciousness and so on - one has to work hard to find common value systems embracing, for a start, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Islam.
* Secondly, almost every East Asian country has an interest, economic or strategic or both, in maintaining a close relationship with the United States, and the United States's intense continued engagement in the region.
* Thirdly, the danger involved in East Asia having a less than clearly distinctive voice in international economic discussions is far less than that associated with a world dividing itself up into three warring trade blocs built around the deutschmark, dollar and yen respectively. This was the nightmare scenario, avoided in the Uruguay Round and which no one wants to recreate. If there was any single overriding rationale for the creation of APEC, it was to build a bridge across the Pacific between the East Asian and North American economic groupings, and to avoid that fault-line opening up.
A final word. One of the main pundits of "Asianisation of Asia" approach has been Yoichi Funabashi of Japan, who spelt it out in a recent Foreign Affairs article under that title. But he acknowledges in his concluding paragraphs that the most likely outcome of recent developments is not in fact the emergence of a distinctive 'Asian' or 'East Asianised' identity, but rather what he describes as a new 'Asia Pacific internal "cross-fertilised" civilisation'. And in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, another well known writer on "Asian values", Kishore Mahubani, argues that we are now witnessing, as an unprecedented historical phenomenon, "a fusion of Western and East Asian cultures in the Asia Pacific region". I think they are both right.