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East Asia at a Crossroads the Japan Center for International Exchange Wishes to Thank East Asia at a Crossroads East Asia at a Crossroads The Japan Center for International Exchange wishes to thank East Asia at a Crossroads Edited by Jusuf Wanandi and Tadashi Yamamoto Japan Center for International Exchange Tokyo • New York Copyright © 2008 Japan Center for International Exchange All rights reserved. Japanese names in this book are in given name–surname order; all other names are treated according to country practice. Copyediting by Kimberly Gould Ashizawa and Susan Hubbard. Cover and typographic design by Patrick Ishiyama. Printed in Japan. ISBN 4-88907-078-8 Distributed outside Japan by Brookings Institution Press (1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20036-2188 USA) and Kino kuniya Company Ltd. (5-38-1 Sakuragaoka, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 156-8691 Japan). Japan Center for International Exchange 4-9-17 Minami Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0047 Japan URL: www.jcie.or.jp Japan Center for International Exchange, Inc. (JCIE/USA) 274 Madison Avenue, Suite 1102, New York NY 10016 USA URL: www.jcie.org Contents Foreword 1 List of Abbreviations 3 I. Overview 1. East Asia at a Crossroads 7 Tadashi Yamamoto and James Gannon II. East Asia Community Building: Progress and Obstacles 2. East Asian Regionalism and Global Governance 19 Jusuf Wanandi 3. Obstacles to East Asia Community Building 38 Carolina G. Hernandez 4. Whither East Asia? Political Will and East Asian 53 Regionalism Qin Yaqing III. Strengthening the Foundations for East Asia Community 5. Expanding the Agenda for Regional Economic Cooperation 75 Jesus P. Estanislao 6. The Strategic Rationale for East Asia Community Building 90 Hitoshi Tanaka with Adam P. Liff 7. Human Security Cooperation as a Building Block for 105 East Asia Community Rizal Sukma IV. East Asian Regionalism in the International Community 8. US Perspectives on East Asia Community Building 121 Frank Jannuzi 9. Cooperation in Global Governance among East Asia, 137 North America, and Europe: A European Perspective Karl Kaiser Appendix About the Contributors 157 About APAP and JCIE 159 Index 161 Foreword East Asian efforts to build the underpinnings of a regional community have drawn heightened attention in recent years. In a sense, the push to establish regional institutions and mechanisms has been a natural outgrowth of the region’s rapidly growing economic interdependence. At another level, these efforts also reflect an acknowledgement of the need for greater regional cooperation in the face of growing transna- tional challenges, as well as a calculation that strengthening regional institutions can help stabilize East Asia in a period of dynamic change and shifting balances of power. Despite the notable progress made to date, the question remains as to how much further community building can proceed in the face of the mutual suspicions, deepset animosities, and widespread dispari- ties that persist among states in the region. In a sense, East Asia finds itself at a crossroads, where regional cooperation can help overcome these divisions or where it can fall victim to them. With this in mind, the contributors to this study attempt to assess the current state of East Asia community building and identify ways that momentum can be sustained and regional cooperation further deepened. At the same time, they examine an issue that is often overlooked in the debate about regionalism in East Asia, namely how a more coherent East Asia might be a better global citizen. In other words, they are concerned with how regional community might better enable East Asia to serve as a coun- terpart for interregional initiatives, primarily with Europe and North America, and how it can ultimately provide a platform for East Asia to expand its contributions to global governance. This study was undertaken under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Agenda Project (APAP), an initiative operated by a consortium of policy research institutions that promote joint policy research, dialogue, and East Asia at a Crossroads information sharing on key issues facing the Asia Pacific. With the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE) serving as the secretariat for APAP, leading intellectual figures from around East Asia—including from China, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines—as well as from Europe and North America were convened for two forums, the first in Bali, Indonesia, on November 27–28, 2006, and the second in Tokyo, Japan, on March 10–11, 2007. All of this was made possible by the gen- erous funding of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The book that emerged from these discussions has been brought to fruition through the hard work of the staff of JCIE in cooperation with their counterparts in the APAP member institutions. While extending our deep gratitude to all of them, we would like to particularly note the efforts of Ryo Sahashi and Hyoma Ito to help organize the workshops; the work of Hideko Katsumata, James Gannon, and Ryo Sahashi to shep- herd this book to completion; the able copyediting of Kim Ashizawa and Susan Hubbard; and the layout and design of Patrick Ishiyama. Most of all, we wish to thank the authors, who have been so generous with their time and so willing to engage intellectually on this important topic. In an era when East Asia is becoming an increasingly important player in global affairs, we hope that this study can help deepen understanding of what is actually underway at the regional level and perhaps provoke greater exploration of how East Asia might contribute more effectively to the international community. Tadashi Yamamoto Jusuf Wanandi 2 List of Abbreviations APEC Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation ARF ASEAN Regional Forum ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN+3 ASEAN countries plus China, Japan, and South Korea ASEAN+6 ASEAN+3 plus Australia, India, and New Zealand ASEM Asia-Europe Meeting CLMV Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam CSO Civil society organization EAFTA East Asian Free Trade Agreement EASG East Asia Study Group EAVG East Asia Vision Group EEC European Economic Community EU European Union FDI Foreign direct investment FTA Free trade agreement FTAAP Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific G-8 Group of Eight GDI Gender-Related Development Index GDP Gross domestic product HDI Human Development Index KEDO Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NGO Nongovernmental organization NPT Nonproliferation Treaty ODA Official development assistance OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development OSCE Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe PPP Purchasing power parity PSI Proliferation Security Initiative ROK Republic of Korea (South Korea) SAR Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR) SARS Severe acute respiratory syndrome UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme WTO World Trade Organization I Overview 1 East Asia at a Crossroads Tadashi Yamamoto and James Gannon Ten years have passed since the Asian economic crisis exposed the dark side of the region’s growing interdependence. Since then, the region’s economies and wellbeing have only become more interconnected, and regional leaders have embarked on a drive to build up a framework for greater regional cooperation and integration under the rubric of an East Asia community. This is not an entirely new movement; there have been a series of halting efforts to construct some sort of regional community since at least the 1960s. However, there has been a palpable feeling that these efforts have been infused with a greater sense of purpose over the last decade. The result has been the emergence of a complex set of overlapping multilateral forums and mechanisms in the region, comple- mented by a growing web of bilateral economic agreements. While many of these arrangements are still nonbinding and fragile, they present a historic opportunity to reshape the region to better deal with the increasingly complex realities of an interconnected world and, hopefully, propel it toward a future in which war might be as unthink- able as it is today in Europe. In a sense, East Asia community building is now at a historic crossroads, where it can be further advanced and deepened or where it can succumb to the many disparities and emerging rivalries that characterize this rapidly changing region. In this volume, leading experts from around East Asia, as well as from Europe and North America, analyze the dynamics of regional East Asia at a Crossroads community building, which they agree is still at a beginning stage. As they note, this round of community building started in Southeast Asia and has spread outward. In the mid- to late-1990s, ASEAN expanded to include all of the countries in Southeast Asia, and in December 1997, half a year after the onset of the economic crisis, the heads of govern- ment from China, Japan, and Korea gathered with leaders of ASEAN’s member countries along the sidelines of the annual ASEAN summit for what would be the first ASEAN+3 leaders meeting. In the ensuing years, its meetings have become regularized and ASEAN+3 has started to serve as an umbrella for a range of cooperative mechanisms in the fields of finance, trade, and cross-border “functional issues.” In 1998, the ASEAN+3 leaders established the East Asia Vision Group (EAVG) to develop a set of proposals for regional cooperation, and these recommendations were then debated by a committee of ASEAN+3 government representatives meeting as the East Asia Study Group (EASG). When it wound up its deliberations in 2002, the EASG selected 26 concrete proposals for priority, ranging from the promo- tion of nongovernmental networks and exchanges in the region to the establishment of an East Asia free trade area. The process of building regional institutions was unexpectedly acceler- ated by the political maneuvering that led to the launch of the East Asia Summit in December 2005, which had been cited only as a long-term objective in the EASG final report.
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