A long and bumpy road towards an East Asian Community
A long and bumpy road towards an East Asian Community
By M.C. Abad, Jr.
BANGKOK: It seems that East Asia has taken the challenge. On
July 26 foreign ministers of 13 East Asian countries met here for
the first time to firm up institutional arrangements that would
coordinate the implementation of East Asian cooperation agenda.
No less than the leaders of East Asia launched the seven-point
East Asian cooperation agenda at their summit held in Manila in
November 1999.
The agenda include trade and investment, finance, science and
technology, technical cooperation, regional security,
transnational crime, and cultural exchange. The foreign ministers
meeting was preceded by the trade ministers who met last May in
Yangoon to advance the common interests of East Asian economies.
In some ways, these government mechanisms merely ratify what
has been evolving on the ground over the years. As a proportion
to its global trade, the value of trade among East Asian
economies increased from 30 percent in 1980 to 40 percent in 1990
to more than 50 percent just before the financial crisis of 1997-
1998.
The financial crisis, which spread with unprecedented pace and
magnitude, demonstrated how interdependent East Asian economies
have become. All of East Asian economies suffered either negative
growth or significant slowing down of their gross national
products before the recovery phase took hold in 1999.
Finance ministers of East Asia met in Chiang Mai in May and
agreed to develop regional financing arrangements to mitigate the
impact of future financial crisis in the region.
Taken together, East Asia has combined foreign reserves of
more than US$1 trillion. It has a combined population of 1.8
billion or one-third of the world's total. The 13 countries are
Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos,
Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand,
and Vietnam.
In a way, this development is a realization of Malaysian Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad's idea of an East Asian Economic Caucus
(EAEC) in the early 1990s, which did not generate enthusiastic
support from some countries. The West feared that East Asian
regionalism could sharpen an East-West divide. With Japan not
prepared to support anything that could be misinterpreted by its
Western allies as something intended against them, EAEC could not
take off then.
The progress achieved by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in recent years has
allayed some resistance to an exclusive forum for East Asian
countries. The regional contagion proved the legitimacy and
imperative of regional cooperation.
Thus, in Bangkok, it was Japan which proposed that the Foreign
Ministers of East Asia meet every year. South Korea called on the
East Asian region to take its place in the tripolar economic
world order with North America and Europe as the other two
pillars. China wanted to see East Asia have a single voice on
international and regional economic and political issues of
common concern.
While the Trans-Atlantic relationship between North America
and Western Europe has a longer history and is supported by
formal mechanisms, including the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, their economic relations have not been
significantly growing in proportion to their global trade. Over
the last decade, North American and Europe's trade with East Asia
was bigger than between them.
East Asia, however, is not without problems. The region still
has to find lasting solutions to the issue of nuclear
proliferation in the Korean Peninsula, overlapping claims in the
South China Sea, the China-Taiwan dispute, and numerous border
problems.
Moreover, East Asia has to address the wide disparity in the
levels of economic development between and within their
respective countries. Historical grudges have not been fully
overcome by some nations, while centuries of colonialism confined
whatever limited cultural bond there was. Contemporary problems
of poverty, illiteracy, environmental pollution, and various
forms of transnational crime continue to threaten human security.
The international community is watching East Asia whether it
has the political will and sincerity to sustain several efforts
to promote peace and stability in the region. The historic North-
South Korean Summit of June this year and the drafting of a
regional code of conduct in the South China Sea were among these
positive developments. The ASEAN Regional Forum, composed of
countries of East Asia and the major powers, has been established
to promote security dialogue on East Asian security issues.
The force of logic and reality are behind this recent East
Asian regionalism. Secretary-General of ASEAN Rodolfo C. Severino
Jr. stated that, "the immutable reality of geography underpins
the strengthening bonds among the countries of East Asia."
It appears that market forces are succeeding in bringing East
Asia together where military force during the World War II failed
under Japan's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" imperial
ambition. This time, with great enthusiasm and promise.
Indeed, a road toward an East Asian community has been taken;
but it remains to be seen what it will look like and whether we
can get there.
The writer is the communications director of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations based in Jakarta.