Why do we want an Asia Pacific Community?
Author: Alison Broinowski, ANU and University of Wollongong
We will soon know the reactions in the region to Richard Woolcott’s fishing expedition on behalf of the Prime Minister’s ‘2020 Vision’. The former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs has already said interest in an Asia Pacific Community (APC) is surprisingly widespread, negative reactions few, and willingness to discuss it almost unanimous.
What he will not be able to identify is a government in any Asian country that says an APC should replace the notional East Asian Community.
One reason is historical. The idea of an Asian or East Asian Community (EAC) has a much longer gestation period than most of us realise. If we begin in the late 19th century, we find religious and cultural scholars in India and Japan proposing the superiority of their civilization and the benefits of Asian unity, and declaring ‘Asia is One’. In the 1920s-30s, Rabindranath Tagore and Sun Yixian (Yatsen) and other opinion leaders were attracted by the nationalists’ aim, led by Japan, to create an ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. After World War II, Indians and Indonesians led newly independent and non-aligned countries in calling again for the ‘Asianisation’ of Asia and predicting ‘some sort of Eastern Commonwealth’.