KUALA LUMPUR: Asia’s progress towards a European Union-style grouping is being hampered by traditional regional suspicions and growing disquiet over the motivations of economic giants China and Japan, experts said on Monday. The East Asia grouping brings together 10 southeast Asian nations plus China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand -- a gathering that represents roughly half the world’s population and a fifth of global trade.
The grouping will hold its second meeting in the Philippines from Dec 11 to 13, following the annual leaders’ meeting of the Association of Southeast East Asian Nations.
The East Asia summit first convened in the Malaysian capital last year and resolved to hold annual talks on strategic issues, such as trade and security. But the absence of specific goals has left it open to the charge that the summit would be little more than another ASEAN talk-shop.
“East Asia’s problem is one of under-ambition,” Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi told a meeting of analysts in Kuala Lumpur.
“That is to say, East Asian countries are not doing enough with the resources and opportunities they have to reinforce the environment for peace, security and prosperity.”
The summit has stumbled over some Asian nations’ fears that China would dominate political, economic and military issues, amid sharpening differences with Asia’s other regional power, Japan, one analyst said.
RECONCILING NORTHEAST ASIA: “For East Asian cooperation, the fundamental impulse was economic, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis,” said Jawhar Hassan, chairman of Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic and International Studies, referring to the region’s 1997-98 crisis.
“Now it could help reconcile the northeast Asian countries.”
But worries that efforts to build an East Asian community would be stymied by continuing bitterness between China and Japan would have to be tackled carefully, said Yoshihide Soeya, a political science professor at Japan’s Keio University.
“East Asian community-building is going to be a long process and China-Japan rapprochement is also going to be a long process, so, in my view, they should proceed simultaneously,” he said.
Besides strategic rivalry and territorial and energy disputes, a historical dispute over Japan’s invasion and occupation of large part of China from 1931 to 1945, which left deep memories of atrocities, sours ties between the neighbours.
The United States could play a positive role by strengthening the process of a dialogue mechanism in East Asia, said Yoon Young-Kwan, a professor at Seoul National University.—Reuters
