The Myth of the Pacific Community

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

When President Clinton steps off Air Force One into the steamy tropical heat of Bogor, Indonesia, to attend November's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, there will be buoyant talk of free trade areas embellished with bold rhetoric heralding a new Pacific community. The notion of a burgeoning community encompassing both sides of an ascendant Pacific Rim has become a veritable article of faith over the past quarter-century and has been a core assumption of U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific since 1989. High profile events like the July 1993 summit for the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations (G-7) in Tokyo and the November APEC meeting in Seattle that same year let President Clinton put his imprimatur on the concept of an American-led Pacific community based on free trade and political cooperation. He articulated a view of the region not only as key to a foreign policy centered on geoeconomics, but as a market opportunity to advance his domestic agenda of revitalizing the American economy.

The Asian "economic miracle" and the attendant idea of a "Pacific century," which gave rise to the Pacific community idea, have become almost clichés. But the region's economies are breathtakingly powerful. Consider the four newly industrialized "tigers" (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), which averaged almost six percent annual growth over the course of a generation, or the Japan boom, or China's takeoff since 1979, or the "new tigers" of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and maybe even Vietnam. They are monuments to the Asian export growth approaches to development that shattered the North-South paradigm. East Asia has become an engine of the global economy and a defining part of the post-Cold War international system.