New group for 'Asian century' shuns U.S.
International Herald Tribune
December 12, 2005
Seth Mydans

KUALA LUMPUR Officials from around East Asia focused on Myanmar as a regional summit meeting began here Monday, but the broader theme this week will be the evolving shape of Asia as economies grow and alliances shift in the decades to come.

When the 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations gathered for their annual meeting. they made their strongest demand yet for political and human rights reform in Myanmar.

The meeting of Southeast Asian leaders was due to expand Wednesday into the Pacific region's inaugural East Asia Summit.

Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar of Malaysia told reporters after the meeting Monday that he would soon travel to Myanmar as a representative of Asean.

"We want to see something very tangible, like perhaps the release of the detained people," he said, in a clear reference to Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who is under house arrest. "Enough of talking; we want to see some action."

As Asean leaders deliberated on the Myanmar question, more leaders were arriving for the first East Asia Summit, at which 16 nations are to inaugurate a continent-wide association whose far-reaching ambition is balanced by its lack of immediate substance.

It will be the largest association of Asian leaders - representing nearly half the world's population - as well as the first to include China and India together. It will be the first in the postwar era to exclude the Pacific region's most powerful participant, the United States.

Many people deride it as bloated and ineffective, including the man who first proposed it more than a decade ago, former Prime Minster Mahathir bin Mohamed of Malaysia, who said it had been diluted and diverted by the inclusion of non-East Asian nations.

But despite built-in tensions and contradictions that could hobble any effective action, the new group does embody a broad and, some say, necessary vision for the future.

"We have little choice but to construct a new architecture for East Asia," former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong of Singapore said recently. "If East Asia does not coalesce, it will lose out to the Americas and Europe."

He added: "The key question is not whether East Asia will integrate. It is how quickly and the form East Asian regionalism will assume."

The world will be a different place in 30 or 40 years, with Asia at the forefront, said Daljit Singh, a visiting senior fellow at the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The new group is a response to this change.

"Its significance is that it symbolizes the Asian century, the coming of age, in a sense, because by 2050 Asia will have three of the four largest economies in the world," he said in a telephone interview.

These three - China, Japan and India - will be represented at the summit talks, along with the 10 Southeast Asian nations plus South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Russia has been allowed to attend as an observer.

The exclusion of the fourth big economy, the United States, is also a signal of changing dynamics, Singh said, but its presence remains strong through close allies, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Their participation, along with that of India, balances the influence of China, which has sought to use the new group as a platform for its growing presence to the exclusion of the United States.

The question of America's role has emerged as an early issue dividing this widely disparate group. Already there are tensions among the members as China continues to seek a dominant role, India presses for greater influence and the Southeast Asian nations struggle not to be overwhelmed.

The inclusion of three geographically distant and culturally distinct nations - Australia, New Zealand and India - has been controversial. Asean, which constitutes the core of the group, comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam as well as Myanmar, also known as Burma.

In effect, this 38-year-old association is a smaller scale model for the East Asia Summit, with its disparities in economic strength and political structure. Acknowledging these from the start, Asean has adhered to a careful, low-key policy of consensus that has blunted its effectiveness.

Significantly, it has begun to abandon that policy with Myanmar, which has resisted gentle pressure to ease its repressive policies and open its political process.

The expanded 16-member group will account for about three billion people and a fifth of global trade. Both figures will rise steeply in the years to come.

But with scale comes increased diversity, bringing together nations as rich as Japan and as poor as Cambodia; as democratically open as India and as closed as the Communist regime in Laos. Its members will be as small as Brunei, with a population of less than 400,000, and as huge as China and India.

As Goh of Singapore noted, the future shape of Asia is already emerging through a network of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements.

The vision of the East Asia Summit, as conceived by Mahathir of Malaysia, was of an exclusively East Asian grouping - a caucus without the Caucasians, as he called it.

Ultimately, its backers say it could be the core of a regional economic group like the European Union. "It's not such a stretch to imagine a free trade area reaching from northern China to the west of India, to Stewart Island in New Zealand," said Foreign Minister Alexander Downer of Australia, which has pushed to expand the definition of Asia to include it.

But most analysts do find that a stretch; Asia is far more diverse and fractious than Europe and nobody is predicting a union any time soon.

Washington opposed the idea of the East Asian Summit and formed the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 1989, where it has been a key participant.

The expansion of the group to include non-Asians and close partners of the United States has defeated its purpose, said Mahathir, adding:

"Australia's views do not represent the East, but the views of America."

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