The key to East Asian regionalism

Ooi Kee Beng, The Straits Times, Asia News Network/Singapore

History stands in the way of closer East Asian ties, as many have noted.

The latest example was highlighted by Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso as he left for Kuala Lumpur on Dec. 7 to attend a series of summits among East Asian countries. (These meetings will culminate in the first East Asia Summit (EAS) on Wednesday.)

Taro told Asian leaders that they had to overcome the past through a spirit of reconciliation and collaboration -- a praiseworthy call.

But it must also be understood that the process of not allowing history as such to limit future possibilities has a vital epistemological requirement -- epistemology being the theory of knowledge, especially in terms of its methods, validity and scope.

What is required -- and this is the contribution that historians today can make towards improving relations among East Asian states -- is a multiplicity of descriptions about modern history that are as scientific as possible.

Honest studies of the major forces in the history of international relations will show that shifts in focus regarding these forces will provide shifts in our historical understanding -- and subsequently shifts in moral blame.

Such an exercise, in a best-case scenario, will leave us with a humbler and more tentative attitude towards "historical knowledge" as such.

The European experience where regionalism is concerned has become a sort of benchmark. But we must realize that "Europe" was initially the project of conquerors and would-be conquerors.

In modern times, the continent has suffered the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte, which were followed 150 years later by the armies of Adolf Hitler. And Eastern Europe after World War II had to bear the brunt of Stalinist imperialism.

From this chaos of repeated war and imperialism spread the insight that a peaceful centralization of politics was necessary if further warfare was to be avoided among the many powerful countries on the continent.

In the breathing space created by the Allies' triumph, institutions of reconciliation and collaboration began to grow.

What made this process possible was the concept of mutuality. No decision could be forced onto any nation, no matter how correct it may appear to others. All potential partners had to be considered equal regardless of geographical or economic size.

"Mutualism" therefore is the key to peaceful co-existence, be it between states, nations or individuals. This idea is not new. We find it in the writings of wise men of all civilizations -- from Confucius to Jesus, from the Prophet Mohamed to Buddha. But how central that idea is to peaceful human existence becomes most obvious only in a crisis, or when disaster threatens.

While the EAS takes place in an atmosphere of optimism, the bright future that participants seek to construct must nevertheless contend with the dark shadow of the past, or at least of the described past.

It does not bode well for East Asian regionalism that China and Korea have refused to meet Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi on the sidelines of the summit, the tension stemming directly from the received view of modern history.

Where the modern history of East Asia is concerned, we must remind ourselves that no concept about a united "East Asia" with a status equal to that of a united "Europe" had broadly existed until the idea of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was announced as late as August 1940, and used as an excuse for empire-building by a militarized and modernized Japan hungry for resources.

The international atmosphere within which that came into being was one that had for over a century been configured by rampant European colonialism. Japan was thus part of this flow of forces, and was in a real sense reacting to save itself by becoming at least as ruthless as it understood its enemies to be.

The fall of European power in the Far East after World War I left Japan the major expansive power in the region.

No Asian government had appeared that could demand to be treated as Japan's military and economic equal, and so it marched on alone to create its own modern destiny, adopting the racism and the colonialism of the warring European nations in the process. This tore the fabric of Japanese society apart, and in 1930, militarists assassinated moderate then-prime minister Osachi Hamaguchi.

The Japanese colonization of mainland Asia continued in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria, and would stretch to Australian waters and to the Indian border. The end of World War II also meant the end of Japan's forceful unification of East Asia.

Napoleon's Empire failed, Hitler's Third Reich failed, and the Greater East Asian Economic Co-prosperity Sphere also failed.

What are succeeding instead are the European Union, and the budding East Asian Community (EAC) as both continue to consolidate. The EAC has a long way to go, no doubt, and its highest hurdle still remains "history".

China and Korea may be blamed for using the history card for chastising present-day Japanese actions, but at the same time, Japan remains fixated with the glory of its first stage of modernization. The modern history of East Asia had been about surviving and reacting to stronger outside forces. Japan, one could say, was the most reactive of them all, since it went the furthest and with the greatest speed in thoroughly dismantling its own socio-political system. Its success was a measure of the success of its socio-cultural "suicide".

A new look at historical forces in the first stage of East Asian modernization must recognize this reactiveness of nation- building and even of Japanese imperialism, and how this quality has affected domestic and world policies over the past 150 years.

Of course, one could argue that the EAS project itself is a reactive phenomenon as well. What makes this not quite true, however, is the fact that mutualism is involved, and it is the idea of inter-state equality that will make it something that Asians could be proud of.

China and Korea will find it easier to bury the pain of their modern past if Japan also buries both the shame and the glory of its modern past, and vice-versa. Once the modern period is epistemologically bracketed, mutual respect for each other's needs and shifting descriptions of history will have a chance to grow.

A common view of being caught in the same inescapable and painful dynamics of modern internationalism may then emerge among East Asian peoples.

While one should not expect too much from the first EAS, the fact that Australia and New Zealand are included shows that the world is aligned differently today. Past analyses are losing relevance. The inclusion of India supports this conclusion, as does the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been invited to speak to the EAS forum even though his country is present only as a guest.

Whether the EAS is truly East Asian or whether it is a new creature not easily labeled is not an essential issue. History moves on in the present, and so the past has to be reviewed.

The writer is a Fellow at the Institute of South-east Asian Studies. This is a personal comment.