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3 The paradox of East Asian
peace By John Feffer
would look like. In a recent issue
of Foreign Affairs, former Bush administration
official Victor Cha and former US ambassador to
South Korea James Laney disagree about virtually
everything related to US policy toward East Asia -
except that they both support a peace forum for
the region.
Such agreement would break
down, however, when discussing the form that a
regional security structure would take. Several
Asia-Pacific leaders, from Kim Dae-jung to Gareth
Evans, and
many
scholars as well have proposed turning the
six-party talks into a kind of CSCE, the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
This innovation of the 1970s brought together the
countries of Eastern and Western Europe, along
with the Soviet Union and the United States, to
discuss security, trade and scientific exchanges,
and human rights across the Cold War divide. The
model is particularly applicable to Northeast
Asia, for it offers a way to pursue on parallel
tracks a number of sensitive issues in a deeply
divided region.
For their different
reasons, neither the United States nor North Korea
will be enthusiastic about an Asian CSCE. The
United States looked askance at the original CSCE
and voted down funding that would have turned its
successor, the OSCE, into a viable alternative to
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Similarly,
Washington will likely maneuver to weaken any such
multilateral structure so that it doesn't threaten
existing bilateral alliances, hamper strategic
flexibility, or reduce what the Chinese like to
call great power "hegemonism", namely the
preponderant US military presence in the region.
North Korea, meanwhile, will be reluctant
to participate in a structure that is associated
in any way with the Helsinki model that helped
undermine the communist governments in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union. The introduction of
human rights issues alongside the security
discussions, even if held in parallel rather than
linked, will challenge North Korea's conception of
sovereignty.
In other words, the United
States will oppose a regional model strong enough
to challenge its authority in the region and North
Korea will oppose a regional model strong enough
to challenge its authority within its own borders.
Even if a compromise can be reached on
establishing a regional peace mechanism, the
interests of the strongest and the weakest will
dictate that such a mechanism remains a talking
shop rather than a body with real decision-making
capabilities. While not impossible, such a
structure would be largely irrelevant, much weaker
than the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
Regional Forum or the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization or even the original CSCE.
An inevitable reality North
Korea is hard-pressed to give up its nukes. The
United States is reluctant to give up its
hegemonic position. These are the dilemmas posed
by the strongest and the weakest powers among the
six countries in the negotiations. Not
surprisingly, the middle powers are the ones most
supportive of a regional peace and security
mechanism.
For China, Russia and South
Korea, the prime directive is to avoid war and the
potentially devastating consequences of regime
collapse in North Korea. The current state of a
cold peace is unstable, given the military
standoff, the financial squeeze on North Korea,
the risks of proliferation, the lack of official
diplomatic channels, and so on. All three
countries support a sequence of steps that can
bring greater stability: closer inter-Korean ties,
the diplomatic recognition of North Korea by the
United States and Japan, a peace treaty to replace
the armistice, arms control measures, and so on. A
regional security structure could advance these
goals and, indeed, could serve as the mechanism
within which at least some of these discussions
could take place.
Each of these three
countries also has very specific reasons for
supporting such a regional peace structure.
Over the past decade, China has performed
a 180-degree turn in its foreign policy. At one
point, like the United States, it preferred to use
its relative strength to control partners through
bilateral relationships. But since the mid-1990s,
China has become a big booster of multilateralism.
Its critical support of the current six-party
talks contrasts sharply with its hands-off
attitude during the previous nuclear crisis of the
early 1990s. It hasn't merely prodded North Korea
to the table and worked closely with the United
States in reaching pre-agreement consensus
positions. It has also specifically pushed the
idea of turning the talks into a more permanent
arrangement for the resolution of regional
security problems.
China's rationale is
essentially economic. It desires a stable and
predictable regional environment within which its
economy can continue to grow at a rapid clip.
Without such economic growth, the Chinese
leadership fears for its own position. In this
sense, the Chinese Communist Party links regional
peace and stability to domestic peace and
stability. Moreover a regional order can achieve
two useful outcomes for China with respect to the
weakest and the strongest regional players. Such a
system could anchor North Korea in a way to reduce
its unpredictability. And the United States could
simultaneously be kept engaged in the region - as
a hedge against Japan - and its hegemonic power
dissipated through regional institutions.
Russia's support for regional security is
similarly economic in nature. The future viability
of the Russian Far East depends on channeling the
enormous energy and resource wealth of that
section of the former Soviet Union into the
economies of China, South Korea and Japan. A
regional security order is not an absolute
necessity for the construction of, say, oil and
natural gas pipelines. But investments into the
region's infrastructure would be more forthcoming
if investors were less concerned about the
possibility of a war involving North Korea. Russia
would like to play a balancer role in the security
discussions in Northeast Asia. As it becomes a
more important economic player in the region, it
might be able to achieve this goal. But so far it
occupies a modest position in the discussions.
The greatest booster for a regional
security mechanism is South Korea. Unification is
an intensely national (and nationalist) project.
But it requires international support. South Korea
has attempted to gain this support in various
ways, even to the point of trying to insert a
clause in the KORUS free trade agreement (related
to the products of Kaesong entering virtually
tariff-free into the United States). In the same
way that proponents of German unification anchored
their project in the larger European Union and
OSCE projects, South Korea is thinking about
regional mechanisms that can allay the suspicions
of outsiders (toward the intentions of a united
Korea) and help encourage the narrowing of
differences between north and south.
South
Korea, too, has an economic rationale. Unification
is largely driven at the moment by economic
considerations. North Korea needs considerable
capital investment and has decided to hold its
nose and approach the capitalist world to obtain
it. The South Korean government, meanwhile, sees
unification as its comparative advantage, by way
of the North's relatively cheap workforce, in the
highly competitive economic zone of Northeast
Asia. South Korea as regional hub depends on
Kaesong and other similar zones (Haeju, Siniuju).
None of this can proceed at the levels
imagined by the architects of economic integration
- 1,500 South Korean firms employing 350,000 North
Korean workers at Kaesong by 2012 - unless both
the United States and North Korea move toward
greater reconciliation. And while normalized
US-North Korean relations is a key part of such a
move, a regional security structure could help
build institutional relationships that might
translate at some point into a regional economic
structure.
The skeptics of a regional
security system largely focus on military factors.
The United States worries about North Korea's
nuclear weapons; North Korea worries about its own
deterrent capacities. The proponents of a regional
security system largely focus on economic factors:
the importance of a stable region to encourage
economic growth and the role that economic
integration can play in reducing the risks of
military conflict.
Japan as
decider The wild card in all of this is
Japan. For several reasons Japan is skeptical of a
regional security order. But there are equally
good reasons why it might ultimately support such
a plan.
Japan, like the United States, has
found the enemy image of North Korea quite useful.
The reorientation of Japanese military and foreign
policy has required a threat. While China serves
this
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