The coming East Asia Summit: A thirty-point agenda

The coming East Asia Summit: A thirty-point agenda

Tan See Seng and Ralf Emmers, IDSS Commentaries, Singapore

On Dec. 14, 2005, representatives from sixteen nations will
gather in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the inaugural session of
the East Asia Summit (EAS). Participants to that first meeting
will comprise the ten ASEAN members, China, Japan and South
Korea, as well as Australia, New Zealand and India. The inclusion
of the two primary engines of economic growth in Asia -- China
and India -- within the EAS immediately raises the profile of the
Summit. The event promises to be an historic and timely
gathering.

East Asia today is characterized by a combustible mix of old
and new challenges. At no time in its history has the region been
confronted, all at once, with a host of complex strategic and
non-traditional security challenges as those which confront it
today. This is where the East Asia Summit comes in.

As Singapore's Foreign Minister George Yeo intimated at a
forum on global leadership this past September, the EAS
represents a crucial part of the region's "collective response to
the dramatic changes taking place in the world -- globalisation,
the re-emergence of China and India, the challenge of
international terrorism and the revolutionary impact of new
technologies".

The Summit offers therefore an opportunity to shape the East
Asian region in ways that will best maintain its economic
dynamism, enhance regional security and preserve peace and
stability amongst Summit members.

What might we expect of this incipient East Asia Summit?
Recent developments offer some clues. For more than a decade,
multilateral cooperation in Asia -- whether in the form of the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), the ASEAN
Regional Forum (ARF) or most recently the ASEAN+3 (ASEAN plus
China, Japan and South Korea) -- has been driven by the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Association looks set to assume the leadership of this
latest institutional form. The modus operandi of the EAS will
therefore likely be similar to those of other ASEAN-led
institutions.

No More "Business as Usual"?

But will the so-called "ASEAN Way" of consensus, informality
and minimalism, which had worked relatively well for Southeast
Asia in the past, be sufficient for present-day East Asia?
Unlikely so -- as we and some of our colleagues argue in a newly
released policy study, An Agenda for the East Asia Summit --
because the many challenges confronting the East Asian region
require EAS members to "think out of the ASEAN box". Current
efforts at conferring a legal personality on ASEAN through a
charter may mean that the ASEAN Way could soon become a relic of
the past.

An Agenda for the East Asia Summit sees the EAS neither as a
replacement for the APEC, ARF or ASEAN+3, nor as a surrogate for
the host of functional mechanisms provided for under these
regional frameworks. Rather, the Summit complements these
arrangements. Moreover, the EAS is a new grouping of sixteen
members distinct from the ASEAN+3 and other institutional
expressions in the region.

It remains unclear to many what exactly the strategic purpose
of the Summit is -- as understood by East Asian leaders
themselves. Arguably, the EAS can be viewed not only as a
confidence building enterprise -- a central feature of all extant
forms of East Asian regionalism -- but also as a future venue for
substantive cooperation.

To that end, An Agenda introduces thirty policy
recommendations for regional collaboration that we believe are
essential if the EAS is to graduate from a nascent institution
for addressing broad concerns and generalized confidence
building, to a regional mechanism armed with a thematic and
problem-oriented agenda.

It is imperative that members of the EAS establish a level of
comfort amongst themselves. While the ASEAN countries have had
almost four decades of collective experience in regional
reconciliation, this experience is new for the Northeast Asian
members of the EAS, whose relations with each other have largely
been confined to bilateral ties and the Six Party Talks, an ad
hoc forum with a highly focused objective.

Similarly, Australia and India also require time to establish
confidence with their counterparts from East Asia. An Agenda
therefore recommends that Summit participants treat the upcoming
inaugural session in December 2005 as essentially a confidence
building exercise.

But as the experience of Asian regionalism has taught us,
institutions with no other aim except confidence building do not
go far. It is imperative that the EAS move forward in due course
to substantive collaboration on the complex issues and challenges
that affect the region. An Agenda therefore urges the adoption by
EAS members of a thematic and problem-oriented approach to
regional challenges through functional cooperation on various
issues, which we have divided into two time-sensitive "baskets"
according to consensus and capabilities.

For the immediate term, An Agenda envisages a series of
plausible cooperative efforts in dealing with terrorism, piracy
and maritime security as well as health security. Among other
recommendations, we encourage EAS members to devise a
comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy comprising operational,
ideological and functional objectives.

We recommend the creation of joint cooperation zones and more
accurate assessments of the piracy and maritime terrorism
situation in the Malacca Straits. We advocate developing a
disease-surveillance control mechanism for the East Asian region
as well as strengthening cooperation among health agencies at
both interstate and intrastate levels to better deal with
pandemics.

For the medium to long term, An Agenda also offers policy
recommendations for tackling economic and energy challenges,
human security concerns, forms of transnational crime and the
like. For instance, we see the EAS as an alternative venue -- in
conjunction with the APEC and ASEAN+3 -- for initiating informal
discussions on the realisation of the East Asian Free Trade Area
and issuing calls for the successful completion of the Doha
Development Round.

We urge Summit members to consider creating a regional fund
for poverty reduction and developing regional agreements on
disaster management and emergency responses. Finally, we argue
that regional law enforcement and legal cooperation against
illegal money-laundering and trafficking in humans and narcotics
can and should be enhanced through the EAS framework.

In conclusion, we see confidence building as an ongoing
objective of the Summit, upon which different layers of
functional cooperation can be added at various stages. Mindful of
the many reasons that stand in the way of meaningful cooperation
at the regional level, the recommendations from An Agenda ought
to be seen as proposals which could be taken up as and when the
Summit is ready to proceed beyond mere confidence building.
Proposals for functional cooperation do not imply that we see the
EAS as a replacement for existing regional institutions. Rather,
the Summit complements such arrangements.

In George Yeo's words, "getting the DNA right" is crucial when
it comes to designing regional institutions. Getting the East
Asia Summit's "DNA" right will therefore be critical for EAS
members. Otherwise, failure to make the Summit relevant may well
result in dire region-wide consequences should East Asia
experience anew the various crises which recently jolted the
region, be they man-made or natural. The peoples of East Asia
deserve better.

Tan See Seng is Coordinator, Multilateralism and Regionalism
Programme, and Ralf Emmers is Deputy Head (Studies) at the
Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological
University. The views of the authors are their own and do not
represent the official position of IDSS.