SE Asia's future ties with West (1)

SE Asia's future ties with West (1)

This is the first of two articles based on a paper presented
by Indonesian Ambassador, Adrianus Mooy, to the European Union,
at the Fuji-Wolfensohn Europen Advisory Board Meeting in London
on Nov. 18.

LONDON: Notwithstanding the technological miracle and the
onset of the post-Cold War order, the world is still not quite as
neatly ordered and constant as the authors of the global village
theory would have it. What we find today is not a neat small
world of homogeneous people, but rather one that continues to
hold disparate nations within its technologically shortened
space.

The uniqueness and distinct peculiarities of differing
cultures, historical experiences and value orientations will
continue to make co-habitation an enduring challenge for the
inhabitants of the global village.

Moreover, the global village will continue to face the
challenge of having its inhabitants move more harmoniously in the
same direction. Despite the optimism that the end of the Cold War
brought, in practice the global village was much the same place
as before, peopled by countries in different stages of economic
development and approaching political stability with variant
strides, driven by often conflicting definitions of their
respective development needs.

No where are these dichotomies in the global village more
exemplified than in Southeast Asia, representing the vast
majority of people in developing economies, and the broad
grouping of developed countries that are referred to here as the
"Western world".

To many minds the map of the unfolding global village today is
dominated by three major highways to the future: one points to
America, specifically North America, where the United States is
still the leading economic power; a second heads for Europe, an
enormously transforming area, rife with potentials; and a third
leads to the fast-growing Asia Pacific rim. The first two
comprise, for the main, the developed economies of the West, and
Southeast Asia in one of main engines that propels the third.

With such crucial roles for the evolution of the global
village, it is little wonder that so much interest is now being
devoted into studying the prospects for their relations. The
questions, however, is that if we -- the inhabitants of the
global village -- are likely to remain separate and divided in
spite of our shared berth, what does the future hold for
relations between Southeast Asia and the Western world?

Obviously the global village is still in the midst of change
and evolution: a state of constant flux that makes it difficult
to decipher even the shape that the relations between Southeast
Asia and the Western world will ultimately take. However, there
are a few landmarks along the way that may help point to where
the future is heading for. Extrapolating the prospect for the
future from the experiences of the past, I would like to
conjecture that there are some developments that give rise for
concern and at the same time, a few that represent grounds for
hope.

The more disturbing developments in our relations emanate from
the fact that the global village is still, as I mentioned
earlier, a divided place. The countries of Southeast Asia and the
West may aim for the same objectives of economic prosperity and
political stability, but they differ in the pace and approach
that they take towards those very same goal posts.

Much of this difference is accounted for by the persistence of
uneven development within and among nations; countries in
different stages of progress respond to the tune of their
respective development needs. Economic and political exigencies
often dictate whether countries will choose to tread gradually
or, for that matter, rapidly into the future; others are in such
dire need of basic development that they do not even have the
luxury of option. What is happening to Southeast Asia and the
West, therefore, is that although we share the same end goals,
there are a multitude of speeds with which we find ourselves
striving to achieve those same ends. And to my mind, this is
where the crux of the disturbing developments in our relations
lie.

By itself, this situation of uneven marches to the same tune
should not have been the springboard of some disturbing elements
in our relations. It is a natural part of economic and political
evolution which should have merited ample consideration for its
own sake. But as I see it, there are some problematic attitudes
in the way the Western world appears to be seeing the situation.

When it comes to political development, I detect a failure in
the West to recognize and comprehend the problems of Southeast
Asia, which then breeds a strong impatience that developing
countries in the region are not advancing as fast as they should
be. Its measures of "political progress" are often in terms of
standards that mirror those in the West, albeit cloaked in the
sweeping guise of "universality".

But what it actually assumes to be universal, are taken to be
so because the West is able to adhere to them. There is little
tolerance for developing countries calls for respect for national
sovereignty, for the right to balance their own political needs
in conjunction with their economic and developmental needs, for
the trust and respect to evolve as gradually as the West was able
to do in the past, when it was in similar stages of development.

And just as strong as the feelings of Western impatience are
when it comes to the speed of Southeast Asia's political growth,
when it comes to Southeast Asia's economic advancement, there is
a palpable ambivalence, if not outright discouragement in the
West.

What makes this discernible hesitance from the West more
disturbing to Southeast Asia is that it has reached its level of
economic advancement largely by acting on cues provided by the
West itself. When the now booming economies of Southeast Asia,
for example, were in the early stages of economic development,
the Western world told us to enact structural adjustments. We
complied. We were told that the route to economic advancement was
through industrialization and open, outward market economies.
Again, we complied. But now that the developing countries of
Southeast Asia are finally edging closer to the economies of the
West, the West seems to see their approach as a threat -- a
threat to be nipped in the bud, if not halted, altogether.

In the Western world's spectacles, in other words, Southeast
Asia is politically not progressing fast enough, but economically
advancing too closely for comfort.

The troubling aspects about this vision do not stop there: the
West seems to aggravate the situation by thinking that the
solution to Southeast Asia's uneven speeds of economic and
political development is to link the two together. And the main
tool for implementing this solution is to introduce political
conditionality in its economic relations with Southeast Asia. It
appears to me that the West seems to think that linking politics
with economics will automatically solve the problems of uneven
political and economic developments, and make Southeast Asia a
more acceptable global partner in the evolving global village.

The question is, however, will it? We in Southeast Asia do not
think so. True, the main challenge for us - as it is to the
larger global village of which we are a part - is how to close
the gap between the different speeds in our developments so that
we are both able to move together more harmoniously towards the
direction of the global good.

But such a automatic linkage, and putting a conditionality to
our relations, will not be the appropriate approach for this
purpose. It is a mutually defeating display of a carrot-and-stick
arrogance that leaves little choice to developing countries but
to opt between economic prosperity and political sovereignty,
forcing at best only win-lose conclusions to the future of our
relations. At worse, it may even lead to lose-lose conclusions
when one considers that in this age of global interdependence, a
loss or faltering of political or economic advancement in
Southeast Asia will invariably have a knock-on effect on its
relations and impact on the West.

These are some disturbing developments that I have observed
while looking at relations between Southeast Asia and the Western
world. They are trends that checker the prospects of our
relations in particular, and that of the global village as a
whole. They need a creative plan of action to correct so that the
future holds possibilities for what I call "win-win situations".
Politically, this may need seeing problems and limitations as
they are, and finding ways to work together that could lead to
greater convergence in perspectives as well as political
stability. Economically, it may take seeing each other's progress
and potentials for the opportunity that they are, and seeing
shortcomings not as something to penalize others about, but
occasion for mutual assistance and cooperation.