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.