Eastern initiatives

The East Asia Summit begins its search for a niche role in community-building even as others seek to achieve this goal.

P.S. SURYANARAYANA in Singapore

THE fledgling East Asia Summit (EAS), a forum that includes some of the world's established and emerging powers but excludes the United States, is beginning to dream of flying high. Nothing wrong with that, but the flight path of this new entity is far from clear.

The 16 EAS participants - China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) - are not surely clueless as such. But the challenge before them is how best to carve out a niche role for themselves. This should have been a simple task, if only they had not created a complicating reality on their own.

The basic fact is that the EAS subsumes two other groupings - ASEAN, which will turn 40 later this year, and the ASEAN Plus Three, now rechristened APT, which will be 10 years old in a few months' time. The APT consists of China, Japan and South Korea, besides ASEAN members. The disadvantage of the EAS, despite being the largest of these three entities, is that it has been in existence for just over a year. The EAS held its second summit in Cebu (the Philippines) on January 15, and this meeting followed the latest annual session of APT leaders and that of ASEAN heads of state and government.

The sequential summits of ASEAN, the APT and the EAS spelt out in Cebu a vast array of political visions, economic goals and specific targets. In addition, several other summits, all organised under the overall auspices of ASEAN, were held in the same place. At the end of this orchestra of summitry, three major decisions emerged. These have more to do with procedures that are meant to facilitate a clearer and more substantive way forward through all this maze of acronyms, political alphabets and long-term goals.

First, ASEAN leaders agreed to mandate a designated High Level Task Force to commence drafting a charter for their association. The draft should be completed in time for the next ASEAN summit slated for November in Singapore. A stated objective is to turn ASEAN into "a legal personality" with a "firm foundation". The vision remains that of coalescing the member-states into "one ASEAN Community" with a capital `C' or a definitive existence as a collective forum.

Second, the APT identified itself as "the main vehicle" for accomplishing the long-term goal of "an East Asia community". Within the APT, China, Japan and South Korea are the players with greater economic strength and political weight than ASEAN itself.

The proposed community, with a small `c', will be an informal rather than a legal entity for the common values of peace, stability and prosperity on the Asiatic side of the Pacific Ocean. This region is widely recognised by not only ASEAN and the APT but also by other international players as the potential theatre of economic dynamism and political power of a very high order in the not-so-distant future.

In a sense, the APT view of itself as the prime player in the East Asian region is not a particularly new discovery. What is new is that the APT has recognised that "ultimately, we should sustain [only] those fora and cooperative frameworks that have the greatest positive impact on the peoples of East Asia". The implication is that the EAS may lose its relevance in the event of any failure to produce "positive impact" of the kind expected. The APT may then find it difficult to "sustain" the larger EAS.

Within the framework of these assertions and implications, the APT has emphasised that it "could make positive contributions" in East Asia. More precisely, China, Japan and South Korea have acknowledged that the proposed ASEAN Community will remain "at the centre of our long-term pursuit of an East Asia community". The APT sees itself as "an essential part of the evolving regional architecture, complementary to the East Asia Summit and other regional fora".

The essence of these long-winded commitments is that the EAS, which alone has India as a participant, is still less fancied than the APT, whose stars are China and Japan, as the forum of the future in East Asia. Yet the EAS is beginning to find its feet in only the second year of its existence. After the Cebu summit, the EAS described itself as "an important component of the emerging regional architecture". The forum pledged to remain "outward-looking" and commended ASEAN as "the driving force" for East Asian integration. As a "leaders-led" forum for discussions on "strategic issues of peace and stability in our [East Asian] region and in the world", the EAS would "complement" the "other existing regional mechanisms".

Evident, beyond these perceptions and assertions of self-importance, is the fact that EAS leaders have yet to come to terms with the multiplicity of regional "mechanisms" that ASEAN has brought into being in the past decade or so. In order to stay relevant, therefore, the EAS decided to set up an Energy Cooperation Task Force and identified several areas of possible collective endeavour such as regional "integration" in the finance and education sectors.

In particular, the EAS has launched the energy security initiative, with the focus of potential cooperation spanning a wide area. This ranges from the efficient use of existing energy sources, including renewable ones, to the promotion of civilian nuclear power in the case of "interested parties". India, Japan and Australia are the obvious players in this category of "interested parties".

In the interludes between summits, key countries held bilateral meetings. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao met on January 14. They urged "greater vigour and greater innovativeness" for the resolution of the border dispute. Also emphasised was the good neighbourliness of the two emerging powers. Their worldviews were also seen to be similar.

China firmed up a trade in services agreement with ASEAN, as a sequel to the year-old accord on trade in goods. India too got into the act with a July deadline being thought of as a possibility for finalising a pact with ASEAN for trade in goods.

Compatibilities among the big East Asian players can also be seen in the current efforts by China and Japan, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to ride out the recent difficult phase in their ties.

Yet ASEAN prefers to hasten the EAS process slowly. ASEAN Secretary-General Ong Keng Yong told this correspondent that it would be better to firm up the EAS process through "functional cooperation" at first. The "geographical and ideological issues" of community-building through the EAS process would take time to address, he indicated.

Behind the scenes of such public diplomacy and purposive politics, some new strategic realities have emerged in East Asia. These relate to the accelerating economic rise of China and a more or less corresponding marginalisation of the U.S. At one level, the U.S. continues to strengthen its military ties with Japan and retain defence-oriented links with Australia and South Korea. Washington is also becoming increasingly wary of Beijing's scientific and "military" prowess in outer space. Overall, though, the U.S. is yielding some space to China as an economic player in East Asia.

It is in this context that the APT is asserting its primacy over the EAS for East Asia community-building. This should not dismay India, if it can take forward the current momentum in its engagements with China and Japan.

The marginalisation of the U.S. in East Asia, relative to the scene about a decade ago and earlier, is still evident only in the economic sphere. At the political level, as articulated by Harvard scholar Stephen Walt in his book Taming American Power, "the less legitimate U.S. primacy appears to others, the more resistance the United States will face and the more difficult it will be to attain any of its foreign-policy goals". Yet countries can come together for "soft balancing" the U.S. in the economic domain too, especially in a region like East Asia, where Washington evokes mixed feelings.

However, the EAS, which has not slammed its door on the U.S., is yet to evolve as a forum. And the APT, as also the EAS, have in their fold Japan, a political ally of the U.S. In all, therefore, the Cebu summits have given rise to more questions than answers.