Future of the expanded East Asia Summit

Continued from Saturday (January 21) [http://www.dailynews.lk/2012/01/21/fea04.asp]

Text of speech by Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd at the Asia Society, New York, January 13, 2012

Dr Kissinger in his recent book On China argues for the development of a Pacific Community:

“The argument that China and the United States are condemned to collision assumes that they deal with each other as competing blocs across the Pacific. But this is a disaster for both sides… the concept of a Pacific Community in a region to which the US, China and other states all belong and in whose peaceful development all participate would make the US and China part of a common enterprise. Shared purposes – and the elaboration of them - would replace strategic uneasiness to some extent. It would enable other major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived as joint, rather than polarised between ‘Chinese’ and ‘American’ blocs.”

This very much reflects Australian thinking when we launched the concept of an Asia-Pacific community in 2008.

Our argument was that an APc could have evolved by adding a political and security arm to APEC – although the absence of India and the presence of Taiwan, Hong Kong and a number of other states made this highly problematic. The second route was to expand the membership of the East Asia Summit (already made up of ASEAN plus the three North East Asian states, as well as India, Australia and New Zealand) to include the United States and because of the Russian Far East, Russia. The advantage of this route was that the EAS already had a wide mandate including security and economic matters.

Historic opportunity

In 2011, this vision came to fruition at the Bali Summit of the EAS where for the first time in the history of Asia – China, the United States and all the other principal states of the region have sat around a common table at summit level to deliberate on the region’s future.

This also represents an historic opportunity to begin crafting a common vision for Asia’s future.

At this inaugural Summit, leaders spoke about how to deal with the long-standing problem of the South China Sea. ASEAN is now developing a code of conduct on the South China Sea in collaboration with China. This is a positive development.

Agreement was reached on a joint Australian-Indonesian proposal for a common regional strategy to deal with future national disasters. This is a major priority for our region - when the next big one hits, we must be able to say that we are better prepared. It is also an important area of potential soft security cooperation between the emergency services and the armed forces of the region - and therefore has the potential to evolve as a confidence and security building measure among us all, including China and America. Leaders also tasked EAS Finance Ministers to meet for a second time in 2012 – another practical step forward in crafting an agenda for financial collaboration for the future.

The Eurozone crisis demonstrates the need for comprehensive and systematic engagement between our respective financial systems given the global financial volatility that continues to prevail – and the capacity of a financial crisis to rapidly bring on a broader economic crisis.

Finally, further steps were taken by East Asian leaders in other areas of social and environmental policy collaboration, with regular ministerial meetings on education and collaborative work on climate change and sustainable cities.

President Obama in Bali called for an expansion of the focus of the institution. We agree. This has been a good beginning, but comes after decades of regional drift and the absence of a core institution to help drive a collaborative agenda for the future.

Nuclear devices

None of us are naive about the capacity of nascent institutions to deal with strategic distrust built up over the decades.

There will be many testing times ahead. But on the broader regional agenda we have made a solid start. As Churchill said, “to jaw-jaw always is better than to war-war”. First, the habits of regular leaders’ level dialogue on an open agenda for which security policy dialogue is considered entirely normal, is itself inherently normalising. Otherwise, purely bilateral summits are often few and far between, during which drift can occur, misinterpretations can become entrenched and crises arise. Second, the fact that security dialogue can occur between the United States and China in the company of those directly affected by the outcomes of that dialogue (namely, the countries of Asia themselves) of itself begins to build the habits of collaboration rather than defaulting to conflict. The concept of common security is as much a habit as it is a concrete doctrine on a set of specific actions.

Third, as Dr. Kissinger again reminds us, the future of Asia will be shaped to a significant degree by how China and America envision it. That is true. But the rest of us in Asia do not simply see ourselves as collateral damage if it all goes wrong. The rest of the region shapes that common strategic vision for the future because this region is also our home.

Fourth, we should not be deterred from tackling truly difficult challenges when they arise. North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme and its proliferation practices are not simply matters for those participating in the six Party Talks. Given the range of North Korean rockets and the nuclear devices they already possess, all of us are affected, whether we like it or not. Finally, collaboration over time can build transparency, confidence and trust. Greater transparency of military budgets and military exercises and increasing the number of confidence and security building measures can contribute to building that trust.

Common security

Major differences in the respective national interests and values systems of China and the United States will, however, be with us for the foreseeable future.

But there is something in China’s concept of a ‘harmonious world’; which the US, the rest of the region and the rest of the world can work with.

The concept is compatible with the future evolution of the multilateral rules-based order. Including the evolution of the rules-based order for the Asia Pacific.

If a common strategic vision ultimately proves to be elusive between the United States and China, then common strategic co-existence within the framework of agreed norms should not.

On these questions, Australian policy remains optimistic and Australia will continue to be positive participants in our regional processes to evolve a concept of common security for the future.

These are truly historic times.

History has seen many peaces before – some lasting, others not.

Pax Romana, Pax Brittannica, Pax Americana – all however underpinned by a single nation possessing dominant economic and military power. The task today is whether together we can craft something which the history books of the future might call Pax Pacifica - a peace that will ultimately be anchored in the principles of common security, recognising the realities of US and Chinese power as well as the continuation of US alliances into the future.

If we manage to craft such a common future together, then not just our children but the world at large will thank us all for learning the lessons of history, not simply repeating them.

Concluded