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.