At the Asian Summit, Expect More Symbols Than Substance 
International Herald Tribune
September 9, 1999
Gerald Segal

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum that begins Sunday in New Zealand is, like most summit meetings, important more for its symbolism than its substance.

The 1993 APEC meeting was full of the euphoria of the Pacific Century. The summit meetings of the mid-1990s actually showed some real promise in trade liberalization. But the 1997 meeting symbolized the closed minds about a financial crisis in East Asia that had almost everyone by surprise. The 1998 meeting in Malaysia marked the impotence of regional institu-tions in the face of a major economic challenge.

The meeting this year is well symbolized by its location in New Zealand: distant and detached from the main centers of regional and especially global decision-making. There will no doubt be worthy expressions of concern about the violence in East Timor. There may even be agreement at a special ministerial meeting in Auckland this Thursday on a peacekeeping force for East Timor under a UN mandate.

APEC is not intended to be a security organization, although political and military tensions in the region can be, and are, discussed on the sidelines of its meetings. But there will be no mention of the tense security standoff in the Taiwan Strait, because Taiwan, at China's insistence, takes part in APEC merely as an economic entity.

APEC is supposed to be centrally concerned with economics. Hence there will be positive, perhaps excessively positive, expressions of confidence in the resurgence of the western Pacific economies. Some may even try to claim that APEC played a role in the recovery, even though there is no evidence that any APEC initiative has had a substantial part in the recent tentative signs of growth.

Strong APEC support is expected for the Millennium Round of World Trade Organization talks due to start in Seattle in the year. This will be at the initiative of the leading free traders in APEC, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

But the days have gone when APEC could set an innovative agenda in trade liberalization. In the mid-1990s there was a real expectation that the group, which accounts for half of global trade, could set WTO agendas. Now no one expects the Asia-Pacific economies, divided as they are over many issues, to produce cohesive and credible positions on global trade.

One thing that will not happen at the APEC summit talks in Auckland is a flamboyant display by Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia, who has decided not to attend. His reasons may be domestic, as elections are looming, or they may be as Mr. Mahathir has said: This meeting looks like it will be insubstantial.

A highlight of this APEC gathering, although a fringe event, will be President Bill Clinton's talks this weekend with President Jiang Zemin of China. The Americans suggest that the meeting will mark a significant improvement in the recently traumatic relations between Washington and Beijing. Never mind that last week in Thailand Mr. Jiang launched a sweeping attack on U.S. foreign policy or that China's domestic media can easily and insincerely turn off their anti-U.S. rhetoric for short-term tactical reasons.

The Clinton-Jiang talks may result in progress on negotiations about China's terms for entry into the WTO, and there will be much evidence of the naive U.S. tendency to get back to normal relations even with powers that share no strategic agreement in any major field. The point, nevertheless, is that these matters will be discussed outside APEC confines.

Thus the enduring symbolism of the APEC summit meeting will be that the major issues of the Asia-Pacific region are not resolved in the Asia-Pacific region. Whether it is global institutions such as the WTO, or relations between nations such as the United States and China, these are the true sources of power in the modern world.

The writer is director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

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