Asians: Drawing Together to Confront Their Own Problems
International Herald Tribune
March 5, 2001
Patrick Smith 

It is difficult to say how Kim Dae Jung will manage his summit session in Washington this week. But the South Korean leader's essential message is easier to imagine, and it is one that the rest of Asia is likely to appreciate.

President Kim will hail the U.S. security alliance, and he will surely put the best face possible on his decision last week to stand with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, against U.S. plans for national missile defense.

But his perspective should not be mistaken. Many of Asia's problems, he will implicitly urge the Bush administration to recognize, are best understood now as precisely that: Asia's problems. Asians prefer their own solutions, in whatever form, for the many political, economic and social challenges confronting them.

South Korea's "sunshine" policy toward North Korea is one clear demonstration of this new reality. But Mr. Kim's leadership on the North-South question is indicative of a broader phenomenon.

You see it in diplomacy and in domestic initiatives, in improved bilateral ties and in the expansion of international groups such as the Association of South East Asian Nations. The running theme, as scholars put it, is that "local dynamics" are filling the vacuum left bythe grand alliances of the Cold War era.

The Bush administration would do well to understand this. Whatever else Seoul sees in cordial ties with Mr. Putin, the Russian leader's display of respect for President Kim's imaginative thinking is surely part of it.

Few Asians assert that the United States should be pushed to the sidelines as they develop a post-Cold War framework of relationships. That is netiher possible nor desirable. But they see a community of interests taking shape across the western end of the Pacific. Outsiders can call it regionalism, although few Asians do. The term applied here is Asianism.

What does Buddhist Thailand have in common with Islamic Malaysia or Indonesia? What does Japan share with any of them? These were legitimate questions once.

The notion of common interests had some unfortunate advocates when it emerged a decade ago. Shintaro Ishihara, the Japanese neonationalist, was one, Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia another. The "Asian values" argument gained numerous adherents.

This was sentiment without substance. And it discredited an idea that holds as many benefits for Asia as a unified Europe does for the French, the Germans and the Italians, even if the result will look different and be harder to achieve.

"It's no longer an 'ism,"' says Akihiko Tanaka, a professor of international politics at Tokyo University. "There's now a strong sense that a community within East Asia is becoming more important to Japan."

And to the rest of the region. At some point this year, Singapore and Japan will sign a free trade agreement. Other agreements are coming.

A summit conference of leaders from "ASEAN plus three" — the add-ons being Japan, China and South Korea — is now an annual event on Asia's calendar. Last year the 10-nation group signed the Changmai Initiative to provide emergency currency protection. This is flesh on the frame of an idea.

Now an Asian version of Davos is taking shape. And the new government in Bangkok is again urging an Asian Monetary Fund, an idea that Washington shot down as fast as you can say "hegemony" when Tokyo proposed it after the financial crisis broke in 1997.

Asians need mediating institutions such as these. It is yesterday's thinking to assume that this region or any other will globalize according to a single formula. There is nothing anti-anybody in any of this.

Yet Asians are proceeding with remarkable diffidence. "Anything that looks 'anti-American' will be counterproductive," Mr. Tanaka says.

This is a measure of Washington's long habit of deflecting the useful initiatives of others. It also suggests the balance that Mr. Kim will have to strike this week in Washington.

Mr. Smith is a veteran foreign correspondent who writes a foreign affairs column for Bloomberg News. He contributed this comment to the Interrnational Herald Tribune.

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