Hilary Clinton’s declaration that the 21st century is America’s Pacific Century is hardly startling. Just over a century ago President Theodore Roosevelt made a similar declaration and, indeed, since the annexation of the Philippines in 1898, the United States has always lived with two windows on the world, one to the Atlantic and one to the Pacific. What has fundamentally changed, a transformation accelerated by the present global financial crisis, is the whole international scene, with the shift in economic (and political) power to an East Asia increasingly boosted by China’s, so far, peaceful rise.
November has seen this new configuration symbolically – and substantively - manifest in three multilateral summits. At the G20, which was seen as having been hijacked by the crisis in the Eurozone, Europeans were more or less told both by President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, to solve their own problems. Indeed, there was something humiliating about European leaders seeking support in dealing with a crisis that, given the political will and imagination, they have more than enough means to deal with themselves. On the other side of the globe, a rather upbeat APEC Summit involved negotiations for a Trans –Pacific Partnership and a putative free trade area (FTA) involving the US, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and, most importantly, Japan. The East Asia Summit in Bali will undoubtedly be the most important since its creation in 2005 as it will be the first to see the United States and Russia as members.
If the EU is not to remain a mere bystander to these transformations, it will need to assess the failings in its relations with Asia and develop strategies and means to meet the challenges of a US inspired Pacific Century. The overriding challenge is to find the appropriate balance and complementarities between inter-regional relations, asymmetrical bilateral ones (say, between the EU and China) and bilateral relations between individual EU member states and individual Asian countries. On the subject of inter-regionalism, none of our partners in Asia such as ASEAN, let alone a putative East Asian Community, are going to adopt EU like supranational institutions. The abandoning of the EU-ASEAN FTA negotiations clearly demonstrated this. ASEM, the biannual Asia –Europe Meeting will continue to be more about photo-ops than a serious forum. So be it, even if European pride in the export of our model is dented. Yet to deal, for example, with the world’s largest Muslim nation, and the world’s third largest democracy, Indonesia, primarily as a member of ASEAN is not only demeaning to a fellow member of the G20, but also counterproductive.
Turning, for the EU, to the other side of the coin of a multipolar world, namely asymmetrical bilateralism, here there is a great deal of room for improvement. Europeans spend so much time and effort developing intra-regional coalitions within the EU that they seem to neglect the need for coalitions externally, particularly in Asia. Thus, in the climate change negotiations as well as at the G2O, an obsession with China led to a neglect of other possible coalitions with India, Japan, and/or Indonesia.
However, for this asymmetrical bilateralism to be effective then the third strand in EU foreign relations with Asia, namely the bilateral relations between EU member states and individual Asian states, needs to be conducted in ways that are not damaging to the EU as a whole. On the economic level, EU member states will always be in competition for market share in China, India, Japan, etc, yet, as the successful ratification of the EU-South Korea FTA demonstrates, presenting a united voice can be a win-win situation. In the immediate future a united, if critical, European voice in responding to recent signs of, albeit timid, democratic reform in Burma-Myanmar would be a further sign of this promising approach. For this the British government would need to allow an increase in EU aid commensurate with the significant increase it has itself announced. With the present practice of the major member states wishing to remain in the spotlight vis à vis our Asian partners, the EU as a whole and, in the long term, the states themselves are the ultimate losers.
David Camroux is a Senior Research/Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at Sciences Po (CERI) in Paris. He is a Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, Keio University in Tokyo and the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.