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.