Asia Pacific: the case for geopolitical optimism.

• Author: Richardson, James L.

UNCERTAINTIES concerning the nature of the emerging international order are nowhere greater than in the vast region of the Asia-Pacific. Prognoses concerning the political future range from expectations that economic growth will bring democratization, respect for human rights and peace, to forebodings that latent historical animosities, cultural cleavages, demographic and ecological pressures, and the rivalries and arms races characteristic of changing power balances foreshadow a turbulent future--and quite possibly, a disastrous one.

The optimism of economists on the prospects for continuing growth is at odds with the pessimism with which strategists contemplate potential security threats, but the tensions between these two approaches are for the most part addressed quite perfunctorily. What is needed is not only to link these dimensions, but to place them in a broader political setting. The more imaginative and challenging attempts to do this, like the "clash of civilizations" thesis with its alarming implications, are often marred by Western ethnocentrism. This is true of a recent broad-ranging survey, in many ways illuminating, by Barry Buzan and Gerald Segal, writing in Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.(1)

The assumptions made and the conclusions reached by these two European authors bear close examination, for they help clarify the problems involved in contemplating the region's future.

A Pessimistic Reading

BUZAN AND SEGAL offer a uniformly pessimistic reading of the legacies of history--unresolved rivalries, above all that between China and Japan; border disputes along the Sino-Russian, Sino-Indian and Russo-Japanese frontiers; and potential flashpoints such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the two Koreas. China, determined to reassert its traditional pre-eminence, claims the right to change the territorial status quo; Japan is politically enfeebled by hostility stemming from its occupation of most of the region during the Second World War; and the smaller states fear domination by either power. Tensions are heightened by the uneven pace of economic development and uneven coping with the pressures of modernization. More generally, the historical legacies point to "political fragmentation and hostility:" as Cold War distortions unravel, suppressed historical patterns reappear. "There is little that binds [the region's] states and societies together," they conclude, "but much that divides them."

Most of the specific observations made by Buzan and Segal are right in themselves--there are indeed many sources of tension and unresolved issues, and a few potential flash-points of great concern--but overall their analysis lacks balance. It neglects successful diplomatic efforts to resolve or defuse conflicts by ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), for example, and the region's extensive economic cooperation, including that between Japan and China. It overlooks the new self-confidence in the successful societies of the region, the sense of release from centuries of Western domination, of new opportunities, and indeed of the prospect of out-performing the West. Why should these opportunities, these shared interests and aspirations, be forfeited to the pursuit of ancient conflicts in which the stakes are relatively minor? Making due allowance for special cases such as Korea and Taiwan, are the legacies of past conflicts so serious as to outweigh the common interests which have opened up in the present?

There is less to question in Buzan and Segal's account of the military balance. While they draw attention to the arms buildup in the region, they rightly conclude that it does not amount to an arms race. Except in Korea, "there are as yet no highly focused competitive arms accumulations," though they acknowledge that, should North Korea acquire nuclear weapons, the risk of South Korea, Japan and even Taiwan doing the same is particularly disturbing.(2) They properly acknowledge some significant counter-vailing tendencies, such as Japan's anti-militarist attitudes and the advantages of strategic insulation by water. That said, however, their equation of the reduction in the American military presence with a power vacuum gives currency to alarmist imagery, and while they correctly point out that the region has limited historical experience of "indigenous modern international relations," the suggestion that the situation might have a parallel in the relations "emerging out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union, where a group of wholly new states have both to find their feet and work out their interrelationships," shows a readiness to write off the diplomatic experience of several decades as well as to ignore huge differences in the two situations. As in much current strategic analysis, where argument falters, imagery is recruited to help out.

Buzan and Segal offer several reasons why increasing economic interdependence may not make for regional cooperation or remove incentives for war. East Asia's involvement in the global economy is highly uneven--the most striking case of non-involvement being the interior regions of China--and most Asian states retain extensive forms of non-tariff protection. Where there is interdependence, it is more global than regional, and where it is regional, it tends to mask relations of dominance and dependence. The dependence implied in interdependence could leave East Asia highly vulnerable--indeed "in the weakest position of all the major industrial centers"--in the event of a breakdown in the management of the global economy, a contingency which the authors consider should be taken seriously. And if it is the presence of democratic government rather than economic interdependence which renders war unlikely in the West, Asia's authoritarian political cultures render conflict and misunderstanding among them all the more likely.

Allowing that these points in themselves have some substance, the argument reads more as an advocate's brief than a balanced analysis. It is rather facile, for example, to assume that Japan's extensive trade and investment links in the region amount to dominance, and the burgeoning investment in China from Taiwan and the overseas Chinese certainly cannot be seen in this light. Even if one shares the authors' skepticism concerning the "governance" of the global economy, the political and financial influence of those engaged in global transactions appears sufficient to rule out a return to the 1930s levels of protectionism--and short of a breakdown of those dimensions, East Asia is the region best able to achieve unequivocal gains from interdependence. In the industrialized West, intensified interdependence may bring gains, but it also involves very significant costs in the form of unemployment and social polarization. Elsewhere, there is the increasing deprivation of those unable to compete in the global marketplace. It goes without saying that the region's rapid economic advance is fraught with tension, at present most visible in China, but the balance sheet needs to take account of strengths as well as vulnerabilities.

The same point applies to Buzan and Segal's discussion of the final dimension of security, "international society." No doubt security can be enhanced where it is underpinned by numerous multilateral networks and institutions, but is it appropriate to apply European yardsticks so confidently, as the authors do--especially when the limitations of the European institutions have been so painfully exposed in the former Yugoslavia? It is true that, in contrast to Europe, there are few formal multilateral institutions in East Asia, but Buzan and Segal's assessment of those few is far too negative--a point to which I shall return below. More importantly, they do not take account of implicit and informal networks which have existed for some time, nor of the widely shared Asian preference for proceeding gradually, relying on informal understandings rather than formal rules and institutions. They go on to argue that the weakness of international society reflects the prevalence of weak states in the region--a generalization that recalls the long-discarded domino theory. Allowing that there are some notable weak states, such as Cambodia, and that the political future of China is among the greatest uncertainties, the region has more than its share of strong states (the newly industrialized countries), and the states of Southeast Asia have consolidated to the point that their security policies are driven more by external than internal concerns.

Given Buzan and Segal's premises, their conclusion would indeed follow: East Asia's future would be determined by power politics much more than by interdependence. But there is no reason to concede their premises. This does not mean that the alternative prognosis--peaceful interdependence--has been rendered plausible. The authors raise legitimate and fundamental questions concerning that prognosis: it is their answers to those questions that, lacking balance, fail to convince.

Historical Legacies

THE LESSONS OF history are open to contradictory readings, and a concentration on earlier patterns can blind observers to the potential for innovation. What was there in the previous five centuries of European history, for...