Challenges lie ahead for Asia Pacific as stabilizer

Challenges lie ahead for Asia Pacific as stabilizer

The Asia-Pacific region has emerged as a powerful economic and
political stabilizer but challenges lie ahead, says former
Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans in this Inter Press
Service commentary.

CANBERRA: In a world turned upside down by the end of the Cold
War and its bi-polar universe -- plus the dramatic rise to
economic prominence of East Asia -- the emergence of the Asia-
Pacific as a new organizing force has been an important economic
and political stabilizer.

The countries of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)
built a crucial bridge across the Pacific between East Asia and
North America at a time when the Uruguay Round was a long way
from finality, and the world threatened to divide into three
warring trade blocs built on the dollar, yen and deutschemark.

It was also a time when the world's major security powers had
to rethink their relationship with each other in the post-Cold
War period. The Regional Forum (ARF), established by the
Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), is a cooperative
security agreement embracing the United States and Russia, China
and Japan which has added an important new dimension to a debate
that had previously been conducted almost entirely in terms of a
realpolitik balance of power.

To date, the significance of the new institutions of Asia
Pacific cooperation has been in their promise than in their
performance. If there is to be a real future for Asia-Pacific
cooperation, there are at least five major challenges which will
have to be met. The first is to maintain the vitality and
coherence of the "Asia-Pacific" idea, and identity, against
pressures both from within and without. For all of us, the Asia-
Pacific is more inherently significant than any of our other
regional or sub-regional attachements.

The biggest game in the world at the moment, not merely in our
part of it, is the trilateral relationship between the United
States, Japan, and China; and, by 2020, China will almost
certainly become the biggest economy in the world.

It will take a substantial effort by all players to ensure
that the traditional tendency of economic leaders to become
political and military ones does not lead to a new Cold War or
worse. The best framework within which to achieve this is not a
bilateral, trilateral or North East Asian sub-regional one but
one of total Asia-Pacific economic interdependence and security
cooperation, in which many more players than just the big three
have a major stake in ensuring continuing peace and stability.

The second challenge is to further consolidate and develop the
institutional dimension of that Asia-Pacific identity. APEC is a
grouping of "economies", and the ARF a grouping of sovereign
countries: their memberships do not necessarily align and may
never do so.

I believe that uniting these two presently parallel economic
and security institutional streams would be desirable, and
achievable by using the Leaders' Summit, which would meet
successively in economic session and political session.

APEC and the ARF would continue to maintain their separate
functional identities, but the Leader's Summit would provide
support and authority to both, and move the cause of Asia-Pacific
peace, stability and prosperity a quantum leap forward.

The third challenge is to accelerate the momentum of Asia
Pacific economic cooperation.

APEC has firmly established itself as a regional organization,
different in character from, but rivaled in significance only by,
the European Union. One of APEC's most distinctive contributions
has been to evolve a new consensual, voluntarist -- and rather
self-consciously "Asian" -- approach, to multilateral
negotiations, sharply distinguishable at least in theory from the
anal-retentive, card-sharping and horse-trading traditionally
associated with the GATT rounds.

What gives us hope for success in this approach is the
increasing recognition around the region that the economic
benefit of being able to easily access each other's markets and
compete effectively in global markets greatly outweighs the
short-term costs of the adjustments that are needed.

The big challenge for APEC, I think, lays in ensuring that
APEC's success does not become totally hostage to achieving zero
tariffs by 2010-2020, as agreed to at the Bogor meeting.

The liberalization and facilitation agenda touches many more
issue than just tariffs, a great many of which are even more
economically significant -- from the national treatment of
international investment to a code of practice for trade policy
dispute settlement or harmonization of technical standards.

The fourth challenge is to accelerate the momentum of Asia
Pacific political and security cooperation. The time has come to
demand from the ARF some more substantive outcomes than we have
seen so far -- particularly in the identification and
implementation of confidence and security building measures, the
more formal development of preventive diplomacy processes and
strategies, and in arms control.

The region should show leadership on the crucial issue of
nuclear weapons elimination. The ARF, which includes a number of
the really key players in this debate, could be an ideal vehicle
for generating real momentum toward the achievement of what is
now, in the post-Cold War, at last within our reach.

The final challenge for the Asia-Pacific is to evolve
strategies for accommodating differences within the Asia-Pacific
on question of values, particularly regarding human rights. This
challenge, as I see it, is to win recognition for the position
that human rights values -- including the right to participate
genuinely in the choice of one's governor--are genuinely
universal values, not those embraced only by people reared in the
Western liberal democratic tradition.

The only way one can really advance the resolution of this
issue is through dialogue in which each side makes a major effort
to understand the perspectives of the other and find common
ground. The point is not to legislate an instant resolution of
the different and longheld views but to get us all so familiar
with each other in this Asia-Pacific community that we can
continue to draw ever more strength from the many things that
unite us, and are not driven to counter-productive action by the
things might divide us.

Gareth Evans, deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party, is
the former Foreign Minister of Australia 1988-1996).

-- IPS