An East Asian community? Not so
fast By Bennett Richardson
The meeting of 16 national leaders at the
second East Asia Summit (EAS) on the Philippine
island of Cebu last week offered the promise of
the politically fractious but economically
powerful Asian mega-region one day coalescing into
a single meaningful unit.
Many Western
commentators dismissed the inaugural confab held
in Kuala Lumpur in 2005 as a pointless talk fest
that failed to produce even a mission statement.
But the amount of chatter in Asian academic and
policymaking circles after the second
summit had ended on Monday
suggests that East Asian community building is a
concept whose time may have come.
The
momentum has been helped by improving relations
between Japan and its neighbors, as well as
continuing efforts to create regional free-trade
agreements (FTAs) and liberalize markets.
"A desire to increase market access and
promote domestic policy reform has helped spur a
rush of FTAs which have freed up the movement of
goods, funds, people and information," said
Shujiro Urata, a professor of economics at Waseda
University in Tokyo.
The number of FTAs
has skyrocketed over the past three years. At last
count, there were 18 major trade agreements in
place in East Asia, and at least another 32 under
negotiation. The possibility of one day a massive
multilateral trade pact covering the entire East
Asia superseding bilateral agreements was
discussed at the summit, resulting in a plan that
China had previously blocked that includes
Australia, New Zealand and India. To be sure,
debate on the concept of an East Asian community
is not new. After a surge of interest in the
mid-1990s, the topic lost its cachet in the wake
of the 1997 financial crisis. Meetings between
intellectuals and government policy planners
around the Asia-Pacific in so-called "Track II"
unofficial dialogues dropped to just 20 by 1999,
but were estimated to have surged past 200 last
year.
Official government-level meetings
among Asian countries have increased by a similar
margin. "This reflects the fact that these
meetings have taken up non-traditional security
issues [such as terrorism and transnational
crime], which have been increasing with greater
regional interdependence," said Akiko Fukushima, a
senior fellow at the National Institute for
Research Advancement in Tokyo.
Analysts
say Sino-Japanese rivalry is a compelling factor
behind the revival of the East Asian community
concept. Japan is concerned that the ASEAN+3 (the
10 member states of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations plus China, Japan and South Korea)
process will become dominated by China and wants
to bring other major players into the process.
ASEAN countries are also hedging against possible
Chinese dominance to varying degrees.
"Thailand and Malaysia see engagement with
Beijing on a bilateral basis and through regional
processes as sufficient to balance China. But
countries like Vietnam and Indonesia seem to nurse
greater apprehensions, and seek to hedge against
Chinese dominance by opting for a stronger EAS,"
said Mohamed Jawhar Hassan, chairman of the
Institute of Strategic and International Studies
in Malaysia.
Although rivalries have
emerged more clearly in the region, underlying
cultural and social links are quietly flourishing.
The number of tourists from ASEAN countries
visiting other ASEAN countries has doubled since
1991 and now makes up almost half of all visitor
arrivals. More exchange students are choosing to
study within East Asia, and indirect cultural
exposure though media such as television dramas,
movies, and manga comic books is booming.
Yet even in this most non-political arena,
national rivalries can block integration: Japanese
anime cartoons had become so popular among
Chinese children that Beijing in September banned
them from being broadcast during prime-time
viewing hours. Such sensitivity is also reflected
in the lack of consensus on what the cultural
basis of an East Asian community should be.
Questions over regional identity underscore the
vast social disparities that exist within the
region.
A huge range of political systems,
religious beliefs, gender values, social mores and
patterns of economic activity exist across Asia.
Although Australia, New Zealand and India have so
far been included in EAS discussions, the issue of
membership on cultural grounds is far from
settled. Japan backs a wider cultural community
partly because it seeks to include countries that
respect human rights and share democratic beliefs.
But South Korea and China favor a more purist
Asian identity for community-building.
"Australia and New Zealand are culturally
part of the West, so it's hard for them to take
part in the identity-formation process," said
Andrew Kim, a professor of Korean studies at Korea
University in Seoul.
The desire to keep
the community-building process a primarily Asian
initiative is perhaps understandable in a region
that was under Western colonial control until 60
years ago. Yet it also harks back to the concept
of "Asian values" proposed by former Malaysian
leader Mahathir Mohamad - an idea based on the
misconception that Asian countries share basic
belief systems.
The results of the Asian
Barometer, a massive comparative survey of values
across Asia involving research teams from 17
nations, show that the region is so socially
diverse there are no basic attitudes common to all
countries.
"The idea of Asian values has
no strong empirical basis," said Takashi Inoguchi,
a professor of political science at Chuo
University in Tokyo and leader of the Japan team
for the Asian Barometer project.
Most
Asian countries contain a range of cultures and
languages within their borders. China, for
example, contains some ethnic minorities more
closely related to Turks than to Han Chinese. Most
Indonesians speak Bahasa Indonesia only as a
second language after local tongues. Different
value systems also exist between generations,
particularly after rapid modernization.
People in Asia prefer to identify with
their cultural sub-group rather than be called
Asian, said Lee Mei-hsien, an expert on
comparative politics at National Chi Nan
University in Taiwan. "We are in an era that
requires multiple identity - we can't give that up
for an Asia-wide identity that doesn't exist," she
said.
Bennett Richardson is a
Tokyo-based freelance journalist.
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