Economic Regionalization and Pacific Asia

Abstract

Recent efforts to analyze the geographical underpinnings of the international economic order have increasingly focused on three key world regions: western Europe, North America, and Pacific These regions are treated as the centers of gravity of the global economy, with the power to dictate its future course. Pacific Asia is the newest to be thought of as a world economic force, and the term Pacific Asia is not widely accepted. Instead, many analyses either focus on Japan or consider East Asia and Southeast Asia separately. With the growing interconnections among Japan, the newly industrialized countries (NICs: Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore), the members of the Association for Economic Cooperation and Development (Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brunei), and China, the geographical scale must be broadened when addressing questions of economic regionalization. It is not yet clear how many of the countries in the eastern part of the Eurasian landmass should be included in such undertakings, but by most reckonings all of the above-mentioned countries are at the core of emerging economic developments in the region [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The need to look beyond Japan comes at a time when western Europe has taken important steps toward establishing a more integrated political economy as the European Union and when the North American countries are making initiatives toward a similar goal with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the interconnections emerging in Pacific Asia are interpreted as a move toward the establishment of another economic bloc (Kim 1992). Such a vision is being fueled by predictions that the industrialized countries are headed for a great three-way competition among western Europe, North America, and Pacific Asia for dominance of the global economy (Garten 1992; Thurow 1992). According to this scenario, Germany, the United States, and Japan will be the focal points around which integrated, inward-looking economic spheres will emerge. For this to happen, however, Pacific Asia will have to consider itself an integrated trading bloc and define its interests accordingly. Many observers doubt that Pacific Asia is following this course (Holloway 1990). Given the currency of tripolar geoeconomic visions, however, it is important to gain a better understanding of the prospects for an exclusionary form of economic integration in Pacific Studies examining trends in investment and trade in the region do this, but there is also a need for broad-based considerations of the factors that could impede or promote the emergence of a Fortress Pacific Asia. This article examines crucial cultural, historical, demographic, political, and economic elements that are likely to affect the establishment of a formalized, strongly integrated economic bloc in Pacific The analytical point of departure is the European experience, because western Europe has clearly taken the greatest strides toward such a bloc in modern times. Making reference to Europe is not meant to suggest that the European experience provides lessons that can be directly transposed to other contexts. Instead, the European experience is acknowledged as a possible source of some important lessons about the types of forces that can affect integration initiatives. In light of recent political and economic developments, the European experiment with integration itself is in some doubt. Yet even if progress toward further European political-economic integration stalls, it is unlikely that the linkages which have flourished during the past three decades will be severed. Hence the European experience can be instructive for attempts to understand the phenomenon of international economic integration in the late twentieth century. The rise of the European Union cannot be ascribed solely to economics (Lorenz 1992). Economics, of course, were anything but irrelevant; the extent of intra-European trade in the 1950s and the strong economic complementarities that existed among the founding members of the European Community were key ingredients in the formalized cooperation initiatives that followed. …