Author: Claude Barfield, AEI

Recently, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Philip Levy and I published an International Economic Outlook, entitled ‘Tales of the South Pacific: President Obama and the Transpacific Partnership.’ In this analysis, we made the case for the Obama administration to move with dispatch in asserting U.S. leadership in the construction of a new Asian economic architecture that would be broad and inclusive. And we argued that the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) agreement was an ideal vehicle through which to achieve this goal.

Since then, bolder moves by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have increased the urgency for the Obama administration to advance a strategic vision of the U.S. role in a nascent Asian economic architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Hadi Soesastro (CSIS, Jakarta) and Peter Drysdale (ANU, Canberra)

The idea that regional architecture in Asia and the Pacific is not up to the tasks it now needs to serve has been around for some time. It has been inspired in part by worries about the untidiness in the competing structures — across the Pacific, of APEC, and within East Asia, of ASEAN +3 and the East Asia Summit (EAS). There has also been a hankering after ‘robust’ regional institutions modelled on the arrangements in Europe or North America, however unsuited they are to Asia Pacific circumstances.

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What is different about the thinking that led to Prime Minister Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal is that these worries are incidental to its main strategic motivation. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Luke Nottage, Australian Network for Japanese Law

Imagine a transnational regime with these institutional features:

• Virtually free trade in goods and services, including a ‘mutual recognition’ system whereby compliance with regulatory requirements in one jurisdiction (such as qualifications to practice law or requirements when offering securities) basically means exemption from compliance with regulations in the other jurisdiction. And for sensitive areas, such as food safety, there is a trans-national regulator.

• Virtually free movement of capital, underpinned by private sector and governmental initiatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University and Meiji University

At the fourth East Asian Summit, held on 25 October in Thailand, the leaders of Japan and Australia had the opportunity to air their ideas about the future form and function of East Asian regionalism.

As Acharya notes Australian PM Rudd and Japanese PM Hatoyama appear to have competing visions about how to re-order the region. But, at this stage, if only because both proposals share a level of deliberately in-built vagueness, it’s not easy to tell. Hatoyama, for example, seems ambivalent – or at least unsure – on what role the US ought to play in the region. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Razeen Sally, ECIPE

This is the season for regional-integration initiatives in Asia. Two new initiatives were tabled at the East Asia Summit in Hua Hin. The new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, wants an East Asian Community. The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has proposed an Asia Pacific Community.

Both ideas seek to further regional economic integration, but their membership and content remain unspecified. There is talk of folding the ‘noodle bowl’ of free trade agreements (FTAs) in Asia into region-wide FTAs: a Northeast Asian FTA, comprising China, South Korea and Japan; an ASEAN Plus Three (APT) FTA that would unite northeast and southeast Asia; and an ASEAN Plus Six FTA that would subsume APT and India, Australia and New Zealand. There are also east-Asian initiatives on financial and monetary cooperation. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Drysdale, ANU.

Yesterday in Washington, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the US-ASEAN Business Council. It was an occasion dignified by tributes from two former US Presidents and presentations from former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.

Lee’s speech traversed the implications of the shifts in world power and the institutional changes that are under way or in contemplation, and deserves close study, especially for those who are students of how thinking in Singapore might develop towards the Rudd and Hatoyama proposals for renovating regional architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Amitav Acharya, American University

The just concluded Fourth East Asia Summit (EAS) in Thailand will long be remembered as the venue for seemingly competing ideas from Australia and Japan for reorganizing regional cooperation in Asia. But will it also be known for having altered the course of Asian multilateralism?

At one level, the two proposals, Australia’s Asia-Pacific Community, and Japan’s East Asian Community, are timely. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: William Tow, ANU & ASI

The newly elected government of Japan has already released its vision of how a regional community-building process could be pursued.

Yet Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been vigorously promoting his own vision of a regional architecture for the past eighteen months. The Australian leader could caution the Hatoyama government on the dangers of going too far, too fast in promoting any one grand vision for regional order-building. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Drysdale

This week’s lead is from Ambassador Richard Woolcott, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s special envoy on developing the Asia Pacific Community concept. Woolcott’s piece is also featured in the second issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ) [pdf]. In the first issue of EAFQ, I noted that there was no effective and collective Asian response to the global financial crisis. Its regional structures were still not up to the task of effective global participation. Much in the last six months has changed the drivers of regional initiative on the global stage, as the essays by Young, Soesastro and Dobson in this issue of EAFQ make clear. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Richard Woolcott, PM’s special envoy to develop the APC

Why did Kevin Rudd put the proposal for an Asia Pacific Community forward in the first place, on behalf of Australia?

What is Rudd’s actual proposal, given that although the broad objective is clear, he is still developing his ideas on the detail of the arrangements he would want to pursue?

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jonas Parello-Plesner

China and India (Chindia) is on everybody’s lips when talking about rising Asia.

Then what is KIA? A car, most people would reply. Yet it could also be the new brand-name for Asia’s middle powers; (K)orea, (I)ndonesia, and (A)ustralia. They are Asia’s 4th, 5th, and 6th largest economies. All three are often dwarfed by the big power play between China, India and Japan and the region’s –and the world’s – superpower, the US.

Yet look at Indonesia’s population as the world’s third largest democracy, Korea’s economy, and Australia’s size – a continent in itself. They are solid middle powers. Relocate them to Europe and they would be large countries on most accounts. In Asia, they are too small to be big, but too large to be small.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jia Qingguo, Peking University

Since the end of the Cold War, many have considered what should be done institutionally to secure peace and prosperity in Asia. Some argue that the existing bilateral military alliances offer the best chance for sustaining peace and prosperity in the region. Others argue that multilateral cooperation mechanisms are a better alternative. Many believe the existing matrix of various bilateral and multilateral arrangements presents the best we can hope for in the region. But some argue that none of these is good enough. Instead, they propose the idea of an alliance of democracies, meaning the US, Japan, India and Australia—an alliance which Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso described euphorically as an ‘Arc of Freedom and Prosperity‘. So far, the third argument appears to have prevailed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW and ADFA

In a speech delivered to the Shangri-la Dialogue in late May, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd once again advanced his proposal for an Asia Pacific Community this time calling for a one and a half track conference to be held in Australia later this year. There has been widespread academic and diplomatic scepticism of the proposal since it was first promoted in an address to the Asia Society in Sydney in June last year.

Veteran Singaporean diplomat Barry Desker declared the proposal ‘dead in the water’ shortly after Rudd spoke. More recently, the retired ABC foreign correspondent Graeme Dobbell, writing in a Lowy Institute blog, argued that the Prime Minister had cut his losses and ‘moved on’ by demoting the ‘c’ in community from upper to lower case. And, as the East Asia Forum has revealed, The Australian got it wrong when it asserted that Kurt Campbell, in his confirmation hearing for appointment as Assistant Secretary of State, had opposed the idea.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Gary Hawke

An Asia Pacific Community – though not in the sense intended by Kevin Rudd – is already being built. Its content can be traced in the work of the Economic Research Institute of ASEAN and East Asia, the Asia Development Bank, APEC and analogous institutions in the political-security field.

This community does not require stimulation, let alone direction, from a new Australian prime minister. The clearest message given to Rudd’s envoy, Dick Woolcott, as he tested reaction to Rudd’s speech was that the evolution of any Asia Pacific Community should be entrusted to existing institutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Hadi Soesastro, CSIS, Jakarta

The Asia Pacific region is fast becoming a core area, if not the core area, in the international system. A new regional architecture is required to help frame the cooperation with the Asia-Pacific core as well as shape regional strategies towards global issues. As a soon to be released PECC report suggests: ‘So long as the multilateral architecture fails to incorporate Asian economies in a manner central to systemic issues, these economies will remain secondary players on global issues and sometimes even regional issues. The world cannot afford this.’

The need to reassess Asia Pacific’s regional institutional architecture has been under discussion at the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) since 2006. A PECC Task Force will publish a report on the subject within the next month. The relevance of this exercise was underlined by Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in his address to the Asia Society AustralAsia Centre in Sydney on 4 June 2008, when he suggested a new vision for an Asia Pacific Community. Has the moment arrived for a significant transformation in Asia Pacific’s institutional architecture?

There are four basic functions that a regional architecture needs to address. Read the rest of this entry »