ASEAN and the Asia‑Pacific in the 1990s

Abstract

I shall not in this paper discuss the various concepts of an Asian-Pacific commu nity as put forward by scholars and non-scholars alike. Such range on the one hand from the widest one that any nation that has any conceivable relation with the Pacific Ocean can be members, and on the other to one that would confine membership to the market economies of the five advanced nations of Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Papua New Guinea and the countries of the South Pacific. Nor will I trace the various developments towards the concrete realization of this Asian-Pacific community. Such developments have been primarily in the non-governmental sphere (since 1984, the ASEAN states have initiated a governmental dialogue between their foreign ministers and their counterparts from the five advanced countries of the Asia-Pacific, a dialogue known as ASEAN Plus Five), though such efforts have not led to anything remotely comparable to the European Economic Community or even anything resembling the cohesion of ASEAN. The literature is reasonably plentiful on both and is quite accessible.1 Nor will I discuss the political aspects of any proposed Asian-Pacific commu nity not only because it is controversial ? some fear that it could be turned into an anti-communist bloc or even a military alliance after the fashion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)2 ? but because all the excitement gener ated about the Pacific century derives not from politics but economics. At any rate, I do not foresee any profound transformation of the political balance now maintained by the United States and the Soviet Union in the Asia-Pacific, though there may be varying degrees of adjustment of the relative strengths of both in the 1990s. And indeed, proponents of the Pacific century have waxed eloquent on the economic aspect! On a somewhat hyperbolic level, some predict that the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries will see the global centre of economic gravity shifting to the Pacific just as in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century this gravity had moved to the Atlantic from the Mediterranean where it had begun. This talk of a vast quasi-Hegelian movement, with the time of progress perhaps implied though not explicitly stated, is a particular addiction of some Japanese writers3 somewhat caught up with the notion of their nation as being in the forefront of world history. On a more specific level, many refer to the