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.