An integrated East Asia

An integrated East Asia

Bantarto Bandoro, Jakarta

Leaders from 16 nations will gather in Kuala Lumpur later this
month for the first ever East Asian Summit. This historic
gathering will be participated in by the 10 member states of
ASEAN, plus Japan, Australia, China, India, New Zealand and South
Korea. The East Asian Summit will take place around the same time
as the ASEAN+3 meeting. So, in a sense, this is an Asian meeting.

The groundbreaking East Asia Summit could pave the way for the
creation of a permanent East Asian community, the equivalent of
the European Union or, in its initial stages at least, the former
European Economic Community.

The summit is being held at a time when the countries in the
region, individually or collectively, are intensifying their
economic interdependence, as witnessed by the flourishing of
intraregional trade. The growing need for cooperation and
integration among Asian countries dictates that East Asian
countries get together and move toward forming one community.

With this summit, East Asia countries, after suffering through
the Cold War and the economic crisis of 1997, will achieve a kind
of miracle in terms of peace, politics, economic growth and
prosperity. The spirit of creating prosperity and growth-based
regional peace has led the countries of the region to accept the
importance of fresher and more organized multilateral mechanisms
for projecting a much stronger East Asian voice on regional and
global issues.

The region hopes this summit will result in a more bona fide
regional community with shared challenges, common aspirations and
parallel destinies. By stressing economic cooperation rather than
political and strategic-defense links, the summit will use the
economic sector, including trade, investment and finance, as the
catalyst for a comprehensive community-building process.

The summit is a clear reflection of the common understanding
reached by East Asian countries. They are out to create an arena
that will attract massive investment to the region, turning it
into a major growth area in the Asia Pacific.

Whether the summit will eventually result in the formation of
a real East Asian community is a question each capital will have
to answer for itself. Community, however, provides space for
integrating more deeply elements of cooperation already in place
or setting aside, if not eliminating, sources of suspicion and
partial hostility.

So East Asian leaders are attempting to create a kind of
integrated mental image for East Asians. It is assumed that East
Asian states will interact, link with each other and learn to
live with each other because they feel that they "belong
together", at least economically. This presumably will result in
a greater unity as well as greater regional self-help.

However, the political reality might prove to be just the
opposite, given that East Asia does not have a long history of
collective action. In addition, the Asian style of diplomacy
typically shows a preference for dialog over binding decision-
making.

Despite the intensive and extensive interaction among East
Asian countries over the past few years, in the economic as well
as the political fields, such interaction has not necessarily led
to a positive attitude among those East Asian countries that
interact with each other.

With all the agreements, consensus or declarations that might
be adopted at the East Asian Summit, the leaders of the East
Asian countries might imagine they are building some sort of a
norms-based community, because community usually entails norms to
guide the behavior of members. But even this will not necessarily
contribute to a spirit of East Asian community among those that
abide by the collective norms.

Thus, what we will actually see is not what East Asian leaders
have long dreamed of, that is an integrated regional framework of
cooperation, but a community marked rather by suspicion,
distrust, individualism and perhaps unwillingness to sacrifice a
minimum of national autonomy for the sake of pursuing collective
and collaborative action.

An East Asia community is one that is supposed to convey the
idea of certain economic, social and security bonds stemming from
proximity, common interests, neighborhood, friendship and so
forth. But the East Asian community will later find that with its
competing state interests -- for example China vs Japan, the U.S.
vs China, or China and South Korea vs Japan, policy preferences
and views, conflicts within the community will remain inevitable
and the road to a solid and integrated East Asian regional
framework of cooperation will not be smooth.

ASEAN would then have to decide whether it is worthwhile for
them to be a part, if not in the lead, of such a community, if it
is truly the desire of its leaders, given the perceived concern
in ASEAN itself that in a region-wide arrangement it would be
overwhelmed by the much larger East Asia region.

The question is perhaps whether ASEAN can serve as an engine
to propel or effectively and successfully manage the process of
building an East Asian community and sustaining the interests of
its partners. If not, ASEAN might as well put its nest in order
first.

The writer is the director of scientific infrastructure and
publications, and the chief editor of The Indonesian Quarterly,
at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in
Jakarta. He is also a lecturer in the International Relations
Graduate Program at the School of Social and Political Sciences,
the University of Indonesia. He can be reached at
bandoro@csis.or.id.