Asian disunity appears chronic and willful

Wang Gungwu, Director, East Asia Institute, University of Singapore, Project Syndicate

Why can't Asia unite even for the sake of its own security? For decades, Western experts have complained about the failure of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to learn the value of collective security from Europe's postwar experience. ASEAN's leaders have ignored the lessons offered first by the Common Market, and then the European Union.

The benefits of these models are supposedly so obvious that it seems incomprehensible that ASEAN's leaders cannot see them.

East Asia's apparent disarray over a response to North Korea's nuclear demarche brings these complaints into the open once again. A North Korea with nuclear bombs surely poses a common threat to all Asians. Everybody, it is said, should help the United States put Kim Jong-il in his place. The fact that North Korea's close neighbors seem unable to grasp this seems to confirm that Asian disunity is not just stupid, but chronic and willful.

But history and geography matter in assessing the nature of a threat. Different traditions in tactical and strategic thinking also matter -- to say nothing of the unique way Europeans forged their current cooperative arrangements out of aggressive nation- states that shared a common civilization.

Nothing in Asia's history, however, remotely compares to Europe's half-century of division and veritable occupation by two rival superpowers. So it is no surprise that Asia's leaders do not look to Europe for solutions to their regional problems.

Of course, human beings and nation-states do often behave in similar ways. When threatened, countries tend to group together against a common enemy. When the world was divided into two camps during the Cold War, deciding who was an enemy and who a friend seemed easy. Alliances were established along pro-American or pro-Soviet lines.

But even then, things in Asia were not so clear-cut. A jagged line loosely joining Tokyo to Jakarta via Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore was sufficient to sustain international cooperation. But that cooperation was nothing like a lasting alliance.

Why? There are many layers of explanation. At one level, Asian history has been dominated by rival elites from China, "Turkestan," India, Persia, "Arabia," Japan and Java (to name but a few examples) who claimed to lead separate indigenous cultural entities. This differs markedly from Europe's shared Greco-Roman- Christian civilization.

Throughout Asian history, the continent's ancient foundations of power were more sharply divided from one another -- and over much longer time spans -- than in Europe.

Modern history, however, did teach Asians that disunity led to European triumphs over them. In the 20th century, leaders advocating unity against the colonial and imperial powers emerged. But the Europeans, who controlled over half the globe, seemed able to disrupt any temporary gains.

Europe's approach was two-pronged. First, it aimed to keep Asia divided insofar as the West was concerned. This was relatively easy during the Cold War, as Asia's postcolonial elites were forced to choose sides in a conflict of ideologies. Today's global war against terrorism permits this approach to be modified to create new divisions. Second, Asia was brought under the rubric of a single interdependent global economy in which the West holds the key technological and financial cards.

That strategy has proved remarkably successful. Over the past decade, Asia moved from division between two superpowers to something that could be described as dominance by one super- economy. Either way, no regional unity on politics and security has arisen. The only prospect for a feeble identity of interest is the emergence of some form of economic regionalism, pursued by Asian leaders through free trade agreements.

Asian disunity can be overcome only if Asia as a whole confronts a common enemy. The West will do everything possible to prevent Asians from viewing Westerners as that enemy. In fact, most calls for Asian unity are concerned with uniting Asia "with" the West (often equated with the interests of the whole world) against some part of Asia, whether it be Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or Myanmar. Given that most Asian leaders believe Asian disunity made the West all-powerful in the first place, these calls are treated with understandable caution.

What, then, of the future? It will take time for Asia's leaders to shed the burdens of the past, in some cases especially where relations with the West are concerned. In the meantime, if the global economy continues to integrate, will the prospect of Asian unity be enhanced or hindered?

Much depends on whether the West retains its sway in other parts of the world. If that dominance continues through increasingly powerful networking technologies, the chances of Asia creating a distinct unity of its own are slim.

It is in this context that we can see why Asian leaders appear two-faced or unreliable in the eyes of Europe and the United States. Asia cannot afford to unite against the West. But Asia equally cannot afford to divide itself by ostracizing one of its parts. For that way lies permanent dependence on the West.