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USF Center for the Pacific Rim Copyright 1988 -2007 USF Center for the Pacific Rim The Occasional Paper Series of the USF Center for the Pacific Rim :: www.pacificrim.usfca.edu Pacific Rim Report No. 49, August 2007 The ‘Pacific Century’ Revisited: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives [1] by Edward D. Melillo, Ph.D. and Thomas S. Wilkins, Ph.D. This issue of Pacific Rim Report focuses in significant part on the rise of China and a Chinese-led ‘Pacific Century’. We are pleased to feature it as part of our Center’s ‘China focus’ in this report series. The article was co-authored by Edward D. Melillo and Thomas S. Wilkins during the 2006-07 academic year when they were in residence at the USF Center as Kiriyama Visiting Research Fellows and as a result of their respective research projects. Edward D. Melillo is currently visiting assistant professor of history at Oberlin College. He is a specialist in the history of the Pacific World, global environmental history, Chinese history, and 19th century US history. Melillo received a Ph.D. in 2007 from Yale University with a dissertation on the trans-Pacific ecological and cultural relationship between Chile and California during the 19th century, the topic of his further research at USF as a Kiriyama Fellow. His book on Pacific origins and the role of Chile in the making of 19th century California is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Thomas S. Wilkins is assistant professor of political science at the University of Salford in the UK where he specializes in international security studies, international relations, and military history. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in 2006 with a dissertation on coalition warfare and a framework for analysis of such warfare. He is currently finishing a book on “Systems of Alignment in the Asia-Pacific”, the topic of his research at USF. Tom Wilkins will continue as a Kiriyama Visiting Research Fellow at the USF Center in 2007-08 and will teach a course on the international relations of the Asia Pacific. We gratefully acknowledge the Kiriyama Chair for Pacific Rim Studies for the support that has made possible the publication of this issue of Pacific Rim Report. Introduction: The Shifting Fortunes of a Concept Since the 1800s, the prospect of an impending ‘Pacific Century’ has energized explorers, politicians, activists, financiers, and academics. In this article we investigate from different disciplinary perspectives the ways in which the concept has been employed to predict future trends, reflect present realities, and assess historical patterns. Indeed, according to Mark Borthwick, director of the U.S. Asia Pacific Council, although the notion of a ‘Pacific Century’ is “used most frequently with reference to the future, the term more accurately reflects the past.”[2] In addition to evaluating previous treatments of the Pacific Century idea, we offer two contrasting, but related, perspectives on the directions in which this potent concept could be taken. We jointly conclude that the Pacific Century is more than just a “catchphrase for an Asian economic renaissance.”[3] Instead, we suggest that it offers a powerful analytical lens from which to review the development of international relations in the Pacific region. In order to demonstrate the possibilities of this new vantage point, we focus on China’s role in shaping past and future Pacific Centuries. The consensus behind the notion of a Pacific Century is “that the center of gravity of the global economy is shifting towards the Pacific Region, and that an increasingly integrated Pacific Region is emerging.”[4] Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter contend that “the concept of the Pacific Century…reached its zenith in the late 1980s,” when employment of the term became ubiquitous.[5] In this instance, it was the dramatic rise of Japanese economic power that caught the world’s attention.[6] But Tokyo’s ‘economic miracle’ was soon followed by the emergence of economic powerhouses such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. With confidence in the maverick Asian ‘Tiger economies’ at an all time high, articles such as a piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review entitled “‘93: The Pacific Century” assured readers, “As we enter 1994, the economic progress that has made Asia the envy of the world shows little sign of retreat.”[7] In similar fashion, the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a television series entitled The Pacific Century and based on books by Mark Borthwick and Frank Gibney.[8] The notion rapidly achieved wide currency in popular and academic circles as analysts began to advocate the idea that the Pacific Basin was becoming the focal point of global economic growth. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon put it, “Encompassing half of the landmass of the world, home to 42 percent of world population, and constituting 57 percent of world GDP and 46 percent of world trade, the [Pacific] region is indeed on the rise.”[9] According to Foot and Walter, “The first half of the 1990s marked the blossoming of the ‘Pacific Dream’ when the terms future, prosperity and Asia-Pacific became almost synonymous.”[10] That dream came to an untimely end in 1997 when the world awoke to the economic devastation of the ‘Asian Financial Crisis’. As faith in the Asian economic miracle plummeted, talk of the Pacific Century all but disappeared. A few years after it was said to have begun, the era of the Asia-Pacific became the subject of obituaries in the pages of the world’s newspapers. As Robert A. Manning noted in the Los Angeles Times, the financial crisis of the 1996-97 “zapped the once buoyant confidence of Asian tigers who boasted of a coming ‘Pacific Century,’ plunging these nations into uncharted waters, with little more than the International Monetary Fund as a compass.”[11] Morton Abramowitz concurred in The Washington Post, remarking, “Asia’s economies ran ahead of their political and institutional growth, and aspirations to regionalism ran ahead of their development as nation states.”[12] Nevertheless, the underlying notion of a power-shift towards the Pacific region was not entirely extinguished by this dramatic fiscal interruption. As the financial woes of the great Asian powers have begun to recede, China has blazed its own trail toward economic superpower status. Consequently, interest in the Pacific Century ideas has reawakened. This is therefore an opportune moment to reevaluate the notion and the possibilities it harbors. Despite the newfound popularity of Pacific-Century terminology, the idea of a global Pacific destiny has an extensive pedigree. Writing in 1850, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sounded a prescient note when they contended: “Thanks to California gold and the tireless energy of the Yankees, both coasts of the Pacific Ocean will soon be populous, as open to trade and industrialised as the coast from Boston to New Orleans is now. And then the Pacific Ocean will have the same role as the Atlantic has now and the Mediterranean had in antiquity and the Middle Ages – that of the great water highway of world commerce; and the Atlantic will decline to the status of an inland sea, like the Mediterranean nowadays.”[13] On June 11, 1997, nearly 150 years after Europe’s theorists of revolution had penned their paean to the Pacific, William Cohen told a meeting of the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. that “the Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of the present, and the Pacific is the ocean of the future.” Cohen’s choice of words provided apt evidence for the longevity of an ever-popular concept. Clinton’s Secretary of Defense was quoting a statement that William McKinley’s Secretary of State John Hay had made in 1900.[14] Since the Nineteenth Century, the basic idea of a Pacific-centered future has variously been termed a Pacific Age, a Pacific Era, a Pacific Civilization, or a Pacific Community.[15] Its latest appellation, an Asia-Pacific Century, is championed by the Asia Society of New York.[16] These thematic variations each involve nuanced new permutations on a central thesis. We have decided here to employ the term ‘Pacific Century’ both as a departure point from which to frame the debate and as an umbrella term to broadly encompass the differentiations above. A generation after this major revival of the concept, we feel it is timely to revisit the notion and to consider if it still retains its value and pertinence to the study of the Pacific region in the past, present, and future. Through this process we hope to stimulate thought and debate about the Pacific Century with all of its connotations. The challenge of precisely formulating the Pacific Century concept raises a number of questions. Like so many notions in the realm of the social sciences, it is an essentially contested concept. In order to further explore its significance and offer a clearer definition of what features it might encompass we consider three dimensions that are required to make it meaningful: ideological (an ‘idea’), temporal (a ‘time’), and spatial (a ‘place’). 1. An ‘Idea’ The notion of Pacific Century is an ideological construct.[17] It bespeaks a vision of inexorable progress toward an ideal end-state. Briefly put, this means that a paradigm shift has occurred, is occurring, or will occur in international politics in which the geo-economic and geo- political center of gravity undergoes a shift from the Western Atlantic World to the Asian Pacific World. The dynamism of the Asian ‘economic miracles’ and the alleged superiority of ‘Confucian’ and ‘state-developmental’ social models act as the contemporary drivers behind this shift.[18] Though much of the argument hinges on confidence in inexorable economic progress, Borthwick argues that in recent years “political obstacles to cooperation have diminished, giving rise to ‘regionalist’ perspectives in national capitals throughout Pacific Asia.”[19] The development of ASEAN, APEC, and other international fora would seem to substantiate this claim.
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