Australia, Asia and the new regionalism

Australia, Asia and the new regionalism

The following article is an excerpt of Australian Prime
Minister Paul Keating's "Singapore Lecture" on Jan. 17. This is
the first of two articles.

SINGAPORE: The nearly forty percent of immigrants to Australia
who now come from Asia are playing their part in changing the way
Australians think about the world and their country. In just the
same way that earlier waves of immigrants, ever since 1788,
successively shaped and re-shaped Australia's sense of itself.

Although it is often described as a young country, Australia
is one of the oldest democracies in the world. We had universal
suffrage and secret ballots well before the United Kingdom and
before almost any other country. The democracy is old and runs
deep. Our sense of ourselves is imprinted with ideas of equality
and equity -- among them, the conviction that all members of our
society not only have a right but a duty to have their say. That
is why voting in Australia is compulsory.

And despite deep imperfections in our record, including the
racism inherent in our immigration policies until a quarter of a
century ago, Australia has also been a very tolerant community,
absorbing settlers from all parts of the world with remarkably
little tension.

In many respects, the values I believe in and most Australians
believe in are precisely those that are often referred to in this
debate as "Asian". The importance of family, the benefit of
education, the need for order and public accountability, the
inherent value of work -- most Australians I know would describe
these as Australian values. Indeed the word most Australians
would very likely choose to describe as the core Australian value
is `mateship' -- and `mateship' expresses an ethic of
communitarianism and mutual obligation which in other contexts is
called "Asian".

In other areas -- respect for authority, the importance of
`face' and the preference for harmony and the avoidance of
conflict -- the differences between Australia and some other
Asian countries is clearer, but the degree to which this is a
debate about values, as opposed to cultural practices, is less
clear.

More important over time will be where we stand on the larger
debate -- not about `Asian' or Western values, but about values
themselves and what the role of government should be in shaping
them.

Fundamentally it will be a debate between those who believe
the main role of government is to get out of the way and let the
market rip and those who consider that government -- provided it
is operating with the consent of the governed -- has a role in
shaping and expressing the values of our community.

Defined this way, the debate cuts across Asian and Western
societies alike.

I have never believed that Australians should describe
themselves as Asians or that Australia is or can become part of
Asia.

We are the only nation in the world to inhabit a continent of
our own. I have said more than once before, we can't be Asian any
more than we can be European or North American or African. We can
only be Australian and can only relate to our neighbors as
Australians. Our history, including the 40,000 year history of
our indigenous people and the histories of the 150 different
cultures from which Australians derive, make us unique in the
world.

Our somewhat unlikely history and geography should not change
this fundamental conviction and this irrevocable commitment --
that Australia is and must always be an integral part of the
region around us.

The fact that we describe the present international scene as
the post-Cold War World -- in terms of what came before us rather
than what we have become -- underlines how fluid the
international environment is at present and how uncertain we are
about the shape it is taking.

We are living through the greatest period of change in the
world since the emergence of the nation state, and we have a very
limited time in which to shape the new international structures
before nations and institutions settle into new grooves from
which it will be very difficult to dislodge them. What we -- I
mean all of us -- do now will lay the foundations for prosperity
and security in the 21st century just as fatefully and inevitably
as the actions of Europe's leaders did a century ago.

And unless we get it right now, our failure might be no less
calamitous than theirs.

When the Berlin Wall came down, when President Yeltsin and his
supporters later stood on the tanks outside the White House in
Moscow to defy the coup plotters and brought down the Soviet
Union, they also brought down the Post War international order.

The expectations of a new international order, based on a
concert of powers operating to a large extent through a revived
and renewed United Nations, have not been fulfilled.

In part, I believe, this is because our global international
structures are incomplete and immature. They still reflect too
directly the world into which most of them emerged at the end of
the 1940s.

Japan and Germany, the world's second and third-largest
economies are self-constrained from playing their full part in
the international system.

Russia will always be one of the world's great powers, but now
and over the next few years it will be preoccupied with the
consequences of the end of the Soviet Union.

China is emerging into the world, and the way that happens
will dominate the Asia Pacific like no other issue over the
coming decades. But for the time being China, too, is largely
preoccupied with domestic issues and especially developing its
economy.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the world's only remaining
superpower, the struggle goes on as it has since the foundation
of the republic -- between those who believe the United States
should avoid foreign entanglements and those who want it to be
engaged with the wider world. This, as always in the United
States, is not only a debate among the politicians and the
political elite. Its outcome depends, in the end, on what the
American people think, and we should not be surprised if it is
harder to engage them with foreign policy now than it was for the
high moral struggle of the cold war.

At another level, too, global structures are often too large
and rigid to permit productive discussion. The sheer weight of
numbers in the United Nations, for example, means that complex
negotiations often have to be conducted through increasingly out-
of-date groupings which often fail to reflect current economic
and political realities.

Australia can speak with feeling on this matter. For United
Nations purposes, we are relegated to the category of `others'.
As part of a Western European and others grouping.

It is not just the absurdity of this classification which
irritates but the practical consequences.

More and more clearly, Australia's interests cannot be
properly pursued in such a framework. It is a structure which
emphasizes North/South Divisions. This tends to generate -- on
the side of the North -- a strongly Eurocentric perspective on
global problems. But the `South' is where Australia's neighbors
are, and it is with the `South' that our interests often coincide
rather than diverge.

For all these reasons, the present global structure is
inadequate.

This is not an unchangeable state of affairs. There is much
that can be done about it.

For example, Australia support permanent membership of the
United Nations Security Council for both Germany and Japan, a
position for which Japan's excellent chairmanship of the Osaka
APEC meeting further justified it.

And we believe it is essential to encourage the United States
to play an active and engaged role in the world -- not just in
the Asia Pacific, but globally.

We hope that such outside encouragement -- will strengthen the
position of those Americans who share our conviction that U.S.
interests, as well as ours, are advanced by their continuing
active engagement in East Asia. Nothing is more likely to
generate security tensions in this part of the world, or threaten
the region's continuing economic and social development, than
uncertainty in countries like Japan and Korea about the continued
U.S. security commitment.

One of the main reasons behind Australia's support for APEC
has been our conviction that closer American economic engagement
in Asia and the Pacific will reinforce the essential political
underpinnings of its security relationships.

The other great uncertainty about the international situation
in the coming decades is China.

The economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping and President
Jiang Zemin have brought profound benefits for the international
community as a whole, not just for China. There have been few
more significant developments in the past half century.

I do not believe China is an expansionist or aggressive power,
or that it is likely to become so. It is an essential and central
part of the regional community. However, the sheer size of its
population and economy raises questions for the rest of us about
how we deal with it.

For my part, I think there is little doubt about what the
broad approach should be.

Above all, the answer is to ensure that China is engaged
comprehensively in global and regional institutions. This has
been a major aim of APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum -- to
engage China, not to contain it or isolate it.

But the answer also lies in China's neighbors making their own
way in the region and taking responsibility for their own future.
It is the responsibility of all of us to build what ASEAN calls
our national and regional resilience: a region which is self-
confident and cooperative, rather than apprehensive and self-
absorbed, will be better for all of us -- including China.

And, in part, that means building institutions and structures
which engage all the countries of the region in a dialogue about
the future.

For the time being, at least, the role of the great powers in
shaping the development of the international system is less
dominant than it might otherwise be. And this is happening at the
very time when we are molding the institutions and processes and
ways of resolving problems which will form the pattern of the
next period in international relations.

I think that one outcome of this situation is that regionalism
and regional approaches will come into their own as never before.

This century, was dominated by global struggles. Imperialism
and later communism were of their nature global. Two world wars
and the ideological struggle of the Cold War taught us to
structure our ways of thinking about the world in essentially
global terms.

Regional approaches were usually subordinated to this broader
competition. The multilateral defense pacts of the 1950s were an
example. Even the development of the EEC was driven in part by
the need to strengthen Western Europe economically and
politically against the Soviet threat.

But with the breakdown of the bipolar structure of the Cold
War, regional problems no longer automatically form a metaphor
for a wider global and ideological struggle as they did in
Afghanistan and Angola and Central America. Instead, it is easier
now to address regional issues on their own terms.

And a degree of flexibility is possible in regional
institution building which has never been possible before.
Vietnam's membership of ASEAN and the common membership of APEC
by the three Chinese economies are important examples.

So, for all these reasons, regionalism offers the capacity to
generate new ideas in the immediate future, subsume old enmities
and provide new ways of doing things. It can let the light in --
in a way which global structures are too large or unwieldy or
rigid to do.

This, in turn, means that the opportunities for small and
medium sized countries to shape the international agenda are
greater than they have ever been in the past. So long as they
know what they want and where they are heading.

It is not a new phenomenon, of course. ASEAN has been an
enormous success in transforming the tensions of the
confrontation era in Southeast Asia into a habit of working
together.

But the next burst of regionalism, including within ASEAN, is
growing in range and ambition.