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