East Asia Forum Dialogue: The Main Points
The external shocks from the American financial crisis and the sharp rise in the price of energy and food will not significantly disturb the immediate trajectory of Asia’s rapid economic growth.
Healthy international payments and foreign reserves make Asia resilient to external shock but there are material medium term risks if regional policymakers do not embrace structural economic reform and macroeconomic regime change to deal with inflation and economic imbalances. Economic cooperation arrangements in the region can assist in both tasks.
Asia’s growth is changing the structure of the world economy and shifting global economic power and ultimately strategic weight towards China and India.
Economic and political changes in East Asia and the Pacific challenge the primacy of America power and America’s ability to re-assure China and Japan about strategic intentions.
These developments underline the gap in the framework for regional political and security dialogue in Asia and the role that such a dialogue could play in helping to manage the long-term change in the structure of Asian economic and political power.
The scale of Asia’s impact on the global economy means that there is urgency in energizing a regional caucus to deal with Asia’s global responsibilities – in trade policy, on the financial and macro-economy, and on climate change.
Pressures for political change and democratization are present throughout the region, including in China, where a representative political system will be difficult to establish but important to successful globalization.
Broader and deeper regional cooperation on non-traditional security threats through policing cooperation, institution-building, health and disaster management is required.
ASEAN is the fulcrum of Asian cooperation arrangements, including APEC, ARF, ASEAN+3 and the East Asian Summit (EAS) but, with the rise of the bigger powers in Asia, this might change.
There is no longer any clear separation between Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia in the theatre of economic or political and security affairs.
Priority now attaches to a more effective multilateral regional framework. One option is a framework that includes some of the principal players (the US, Japan and China); another is to build political and security dialogue onto established arrangements like APEC or the EAS process.
Strategic priorities include:
• Strengthening regional cooperation arrangements to support structural, financial and macroeconomic reform in APEC and EAS
• Regional initiative on climate change
• Active development of the EAS agenda for economic and political cooperation
• Promotion of regional political and security dialogue in frameworks like APEC or EAS that incorporate Australia’s strategic interests.
The full 16 page digest can be found here.
Update: here are some photos of the event.
Mohamed Ariff, Justin Lin, Ross Garnaut and Hadi Soesastro
Surin Pitsuwan
Richard Cooper, Tsutomu Toichi and Ross Garnaut
Kevin Rudd and Andrew MacIntyre