Asia Rising: Who is Leading?

The following sections are included:

• About the Author

• Acknowledgements

• Preface: Who Leads Asia?

• Contents

It's a time of hype in China-Southeast Asian relations. During the past year, the prime ministers of Malaysia and Thailand have vigorously denied that a rising China was or would be a threat to Asian stability and prosperity. David Kang argues in the journal International Security that Southeast Asian states may even be bandwagoning with China.

The following sections are included:

• Security Order

• Role of China

India and China are often described as “historic rivals” in their bilateral relationship, or “natural rivals” for the leadership of Asia. India is also described as a “balancer” of China in Southeast Asia.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, China's then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping said: “Some developing countries would like China to become the leader of the Third World. But we absolutely cannot do that — this is one of our basic state policies. We can't afford to do it and besides, we aren't strong enough.

The East Asian Community is a timely and visionary idea. But it also faces daunting obstacles, especially in the current climate of mistrust between China and Japan.

In 1999, while recovering from the Asian financial crisis that wreaked havoc on his country's economy, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's then prime minister, claimed that had a regional monetary fund existed, “the East Asian currency crisis of 1997 and 1998 would not have occurred, would not have endured and would not have gone to such ridiculous depths”.

While attending an international conference in Seoul recently, I sat next to a young Korean university lecturer. On coming to know my Indian origin, he told me: Many young Koreans are now interested in Indian culture, especially Indian religion, philosophy and film. Surprised, I asked why. His answer was simple: Koreans increasingly fear Chinese cultural (as well as geopolitical) domination. Hence, they turn to India.

Indians celebrate August 15 as the date the curtain finally came down on the British Raj. In Japan, the date marks the official end of what the Japanese call the Greater East Asia War (World War II). The coming August 15 could be a turning point in Japanese domestic politics and its relations with its neighbours: China and South Korea.

The United States security strategy for Asia today is widely known as “hedging”. According to the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006, “shaping the choices of major and emerging powers requires a balanced approach, one that seeks cooperation but also creates prudent hedges against the possibility that cooperative approaches by themselves may fail to preclude future conflict”.

The historic Asia-Africa Conference held in Bandung in 1955 has received renewed attention due to Indonesia's decision to host a summit of Asian and African leaders in Jakarta to commemorate its 50th anniversary.

Fifty years ago, the Asia-Africa Conference held in Bandung represented the largest ever conclave to date of new states entering the post-war international system. What were its major implications for international and Asian regional order?.

As Indonesia hosts a summit of Asian and African leaders to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic 1955 Bandung Conference, it is worth recalling how worried the western world was when Sukarno, the Indonesian president, hailed the summit as “the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind”.

Two events in Asia serve as a powerful reminder of the challenges facing Australia in relating to the region. The first is the 50th anniversary of the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, being now being held in Jakarta; and the second is the East Asia Summit to be held sometime this year. Australia has not been invited to either gathering (although it was apparently invited to the Jakarta meeting as an observer)..

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, but especially after the October 2002 Bali bombings, much has been said about the threat posed by terrorism to Asian security. Yet surprisingly, there is little agreement on the extent of the terrorist threat or an understanding of some of the unsavoury implications of the war on terrorism.

As the regional and international community struggles to cope with the fallout of the Indian Ocean tsunami, the disaster has important consequences for regional and international relations.

The international response to the Indian Ocean tsunami has been prompt and generous, and some Asian countries Japan, China, Singapore and India made special contributions. But in general, Asian countries have a long way to go in becoming significant providers of humanitarian assistance in the region, not to mention in the international community at large. Most of the world's major disaster and humanitarian aid agencies, whether secular or religious-based, are based in the West. While Asian countries have their own private humanitarian groups, Asia lags in developing international or regional foundations and charities that can provide humanitarian assistance within and outside the region. Asia also lags in private international giving, which is now a significant international trend. For example, in 2000, international donations by American private charities, religious organisations, foundations, universities, corporations and money sent to relatives amounted to more than $35 billion three times as much as US government aid. At the official level, Asian intergovernmental regional organisations have not really addressed the issue of humanitarian assistance. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) responded to the tsunami by promptly convening a high-level meeting to consider relief and reconstruction. But ASEAN has developed no financial or logistical mechanism of the type that allows the United Nations, the EU and international non-governmental organisations to cope with complex humanitarian emergencies. The tsunami shows the need for Asian governments and their regional institutions, which have traditionally focused on trade liberalisation or security issues like interstate tensions, to focus on human security for the people (as opposed to states or governments), paying attention to non-military threats to survival and well-being, including poverty, environmental degradation and disease.

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, the competing policies in counter-terrorism remain mired in confusion. The military approach has produced mixed results and increased radicalisation. The legalistic approach in Europe needs greater focus and more intelligence-sharing and co-operation to work. There is no international process to develop a diplomatic, intelligence and economic strategy to tackle the problems at its roots. All the while, the moral high ground needed to prevail has been largely lost and with it any hope of real gains.

The Israeli attack on Lebanon and the ceasefire creating the perception of a Hezbollah victory in the minds of Muslim radicals worldwide could rekindle the hitherto diminishing threat of terrorism in Southeast Asia, or even raise it to new levels. Until now, regional security analysts have disagreed on the extent of the external links of Southeast Asian terrorist and extremist groups. One school saw terrorism in Southeast Asia as internationally-linked and inspired, especially to Al-Qaeda. Others have disputed this, and instead stressed the fundamentally local nature of the phenomenon, rooted in ethnic and separatist conflicts that are a well-known feature of Southeast Asia's postcolonial political landscape. Indeed, most if not all the so-called terrorist groups in Southeast Asia are found in sites where there have been longstanding ethnic or separatist conflicts, as in southern Thailand and southern Philippines. In Indonesia, radical Islamic groups are much more influenced by their animosity towards rival local ethnic groups, such as Poso and Ambon, or their dream to create the Islamic State that they have long sought (as with the old Darul Islam and its offshoot, Jemaah Islamiyah) than to fight the US. In southern Thailand, despite the occasional discovery of Al-Qaeda tapes or manuals, the claims of an international connection have proven spurious.

Last week's ASEAN summit in Cambodia was marked by multiple ironies.

ASEAN has been derided for some time now as a useless talk-fest, a dying, if not already dead, organisation. The name-calling, which began with the Asian economic crisis, turned into a mocking laugh with the growing instability of Indonesia, the Singapore-Malaysia squabbles and the terrorist threat to the region.

The following sections are included:

• A New Ball Game

• Securing Peace

• Acting as One

Unlike Europe, Southeast Asia does not aspire to be what Robert Kagan in his best-selling book Of Paradise and Power, would call a “Kantian paradise”. Southeast Asians have not forsaken military power in dealing with domestic and external threats, although they have avoided resorting to force to settle intra-ASEAN conflicts.

The following sections are included:

• Why Have an ASEAN Charter Now?

• What are the Implications of a Charter?

Most analyses of Singapore's foreign policy rely heavily on concepts that speak to its size (“small state”), vulnerability (“survival”), and realpolitik mindset (“balance” or “balance of power”).

The political turmoil in Timor Leste, which has led to the ouster of its Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri and plans for national elections for a new government, may not be exactly hot news to Indians, but it underlies a growing debate about intervention in domestic political conflicts in Southeast Asia that nations of South Asian policymakers should be familiar with.

A key goal of the Eminent Persons' Group (EPG) tasked with developing the ASEAN Charter is to promote the institutional development of ASEAN to better respond to regional crises. Three basic principles of institutionalisation should be considered:

(1) Usage: ASEAN does not lack institutions, but many of these institutions remain underused.

The following sections are included:

• Different Strokes

The leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will gather in the Philippines city of Cebu on December 10, 2006 to consider a variety of issues facing the organisation. One issue high on the agenda is the recommendations of the Eminent Persons' Group (EPG) on the ASEAN Charter. This could be a critical moment for the organisation, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year.

As ASEAN prepares to celebrate its 40th anniversary, it faces a crucial test that could fundamentally change how it has worked for the past decades.

An important transition is taking place in Asia which will profoundly affect its security order in the 21st century. For much of the Cold War period, a small but influential elite argued that authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes focusing on growth and development (“performance legitimacy”) could better ensure domestic stability and regional order than fragile and instability-prone democratic ones. While Western security thinking progressively embraced a neo-Kantian vision of world order resting on three primary pillars — economic interdependence, international institutions and liberal democracy, the dominant Asian paradigm, with neo-Confucian underpinnings, posited a positive correlation between political stability (strong authoritarian state), state-directed economic growth, and balance of power dynamics (backed by US forward military presence).

A July 2005 agreement among the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that Burma would relinquish its turn at the chairmanship has averted a major diplomatic crisis for the organisation. Western nations, including the United States and the European Union, who attend the annual ASEAN meetings as “dialogue partners”, had threatened to boycott the 2006 meeting if Burma was in the chair.

The military coup in Thailand that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra was the result of a number of immediate and long-term reasons. The immediate reason could well be that this was an opportunistic move by the Thai army to oust the prime minister when he was out of the country. But tensions were building up over a number issues: Allegations of corruption by the regime, the deteriorating situation in southern Thailand, including recent bombings in Hatyai, and the continuing political stalemate which was hurting the economy. There were ample indications that Thaksin had lost the support of the king and large sections of the army, although he did and still does have a few supporters in the military, especially among his classmates.

The recent induction of India into an existing triangular dialogue between the US, Japan and Australia marks a new stage in the growing recognition of New Delhi's place in the Asian balance of power. Although Australia denies any strategic motive behind this move, the fact that it followed the urging by US Vice President Dick Cheney during his visit to Sydney can only be seen in Beijing as a strategic bloc in forming.

The swift collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan under the weight of American military power marks the defeat of one of the more prominent ideas to emerge from the ashes of the Cold War: Samuel Huntington's thesis about a “clash of civilisations”.

The war on terror waged by the United States challenges the thesis proposed by Francis Fukuyama that the end of the Cold War leaves liberal democracy and the free market as endpoints of history. Indeed, it suggests that they are in retreat.

As Asia ponders its response to an eventual military strike on Iraq led by the United States, two key European powers, France and Germany, have indicated their strong reluctance to be dragged into war. In a much debated article in the American conservative journal Policy Review last year, Robert Kagan presented a contrast between US and European attitudes toward power and international relations. He argued that Americans and Europeans live in very different worlds and represent two increasingly divergent worldviews and strategic cultures.

The main challenges for US foreign policy in the coming years can be summed up in two words: distraction and isolation.

Distraction is caused by its military and diplomatic preoccupation with the war in Iraq, which makes it difficult for the world's sole superpower to turn its attention to regional conflicts and transnational dangers in Asia and Africa.

As the Iraq crisis continues to plague the United Nations, can regional security organisations help to strengthen the global security architecture?

Two of the most important regional organisations in the world today, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU), are looking beyond their traditional geographic areas to respond to new threats.

The following sections are included:

• Ideas Challenged

• First Things First

• Context for Success