Exporting the EU Model
Steps are being taken in various regions of the world to establish free-trade zones and cross-border political alliances. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mercorsur in South America, and the Organization of African States (OAS) are all attempting to create the beginning of a transnational political model to harmonize their markets and gain some global advantage in developing regional economies of scale.
NAFTA is least likely among the experiments to develop into a full-fledged political union, at least along the EU lines. The United States is so much more powerful than its two trading partners, Canada and Mexico, that it would be impossible to create anything remotely resembling a partnership among relatively equal players. The U.S. GDP is nearly eight times the size of Canada’s and Mexico’s combined GDP.
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The only way to imagine a regional political union even occurring would be if both Canada and Mexico were to become the fifty-first and fifty-second states, which, though far-fetched, is not entirely impossible. Even though Canadian sensibilities are far more closely aligned with Europe than with the U.S., the economic necessities of a regionalizing world may force Canada to increasingly give up its sovereignty and become an extension of the U.S. There is also the possibility that Canada might eventually join the European Union. After all, Hawaii and Alaska joined the United States of America even though they are not part of the country’s contiguous geography. Mexico, although far poorer than the U.S.—it ranks as the world’s tenth economic power—could potentially be absorbed into the United States as Mexican immigration over the next half century transforms a large portion of America into a Hispanic cultural diaspora, further blurring the lines between the two countries.
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But the absorption of Canada and Mexico into the United States, creating, in effect, a superstate, would only make the U.S. more of an oddity in a globalized world where other nations are pooling or giving up much of their sovereignty and becoming part of transnational regional political organizations. What’s more likely to happen is that the three countries of North America will move closer toward a free-trade zone but fall short of creating either a superstate or a transnational political space.
China and India face even greater obstacles in a world where the nation-state model is less able to accommodate global commercial and cultural forces. The very idea that either of these two nation-states could effectively contain and manage more than a billion people, each under the aegis of a singular national identity, is hard to comprehend in a world where crosscutting identities and loyalties are pushing people into more flexible networks of convenience. Chances are that both India and China will at least partially deconstruct into more semiautonomous local regions and that these regions will establish their own trans-regional and global commercial and political networks. Both nation-states could simply disappear altogether under the weight of fractionalization, leaving their respective regions the tasks of reconstituting themselves into transnational political unions, more along the European Union lines.
The most likely candidate region to follow on the heels of the European Union is the East Asian community, with or without China’s participation. The region has been flirting with the idea of an Asian version of the European Union for more than thirty-five years. In 1967, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand established the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the objective of furthering economic and social cooperation in the region and providing a measure of collective security from outside interference.
In 1976, the countries that make up ASEAN signed the Declaration of ASEAN Accord, which committed the member states to “the early establishment of the Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality.”
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The parties agreed to “noninterference in the internal affairs of one another” and provided for the creation of a ministerial high council to mediate disputes between member states and recommend measures to resolve conflicts.
Brunei Darussalam joined ASEAN in 1984, followed by Vietnam in 1995. Laos and Myanmar joined the association in 1997, and Cambodia in 1999, bringing all ten Southeast Asian countries under the ASEAN umbrella.
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In 1998, the ten member countries of ASEAN joined with the republics of Korea, Japan, and China to form the East Asian Vision Group (EAVG). In 2001, EAVG issued a report entitled “Towards an East Asian Community: Region of Peace, Prosperity and Progress.” The vision group made a number of recommendations that, if carried out, would pave the way toward an Asian version of the European Union. The key proposals fall into six categories: economic cooperation; financial cooperation; political and security cooperation; environmental cooperation; social and cultural cooperation; and institutional cooperation.
The authors of the report called for establishing the East Asia Free Trade Area (EAFTA): promoting development and technological cooperation among the signatory countries; realizing a knowledge-based economy across the region; establishing and strengthening mechanisms for addressing threats to peace in the region; broadening political cooperation with respect to national governing issues; amplifying the East Asian voice in international affairs; institutionalizing multilateral environmental cooperation within the region and on a global level; establishing poverty alleviation programs; adopting programs to provide greater access to basic health-care services; implementing a comprehensive human resource development program focusing on improvement of basic education, skills training, and corporate building; promoting regional identity and consciousness; and cooperating on projects in the conservation and promotion of East Asian arts and culture.
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The report noted that “in the past, political rivalries, historical animosities, cultural differences and ideological confrontations posed barriers to cooperation among East Asian nations.”
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On the other hand, the report also observed that “East Asian nations share geographical proximity, many common historical experiences, and similar cultural norms and values.”
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The report’s authors said they envision “the progressive integration of the East Asian economy, ultimately leading to an East Asian economic community.”
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An East Asian economic community would be a formidable economic and political force on the world stage. The combined land area of East Asia (including China, Korea, and Japan) is 50 percent larger than the United States. Its GDP would approach the European Union’s and the United States’. The volume of East Asian trade is already larger than that of the United States, but only 40 percent of the EU’s.
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With a population of two billion, it would represent one-third of the human race.
China is the wild card in any attempt to forge an Asian union. Because of its sheer size, China might simply try to dominate and intimidate its neighbors, forcing them to submit to its suzerainty as it has so frequently done in the past. The formation of an East Asian economic community with the potential inclusion of Japan and South Korea could serve as a counterweight to Chinese hegemony in the region.
How serious is the possibility that the member states of the Southeast Asian nations might forge an Asian version of the European Union, with or without the participation of Japan, South Korea, and China? The Asian Development Bank, for one, thinks that the prospect is likely enough that it prepared and published a report, in 2002, on the costs and benefits of a common currency for ASEAN. The report concluded that “although the constraints on the adoption of the common currency by ASEAN are formidable, the long-run goal of a common currency for the region may be worth considering seriously, especially because, judged by the criterion of an optimum currency area, the region is as suitable for the adoption of a common currency as Europe was prior to the Maastricht Treaty.”
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As of late 2003, ASEAN found itself at a historic juncture. Already well along the way toward creating an East Asia Free Trade Area, the member countries have now embarked on a serious discussion around the prospect of creating an ASEAN economic community, similar to the EU, by 2020.
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A full-fledged common market would mean a free flow of trade in the region as well as free mobility of labor and capital. Closer political cooperation and a pooling of national sovereignty interests within a larger transnational union are likely to follow suit.
No one doubts the commercial advantages of Asian countries pooling their economic interests. The question remains whether there is enough of a common bond beyond pure pecuniary interests to suggest that a more integrated political partnership is doable and viable in the long run. For all of the conflicts between nationalities and governments in Europe over the course of the past two millennia, there is at least some common philosophical, theological, and cultural bonds that Europeans share, including Greek science, Roman law, Christianity, the Renaissance and Reformation, Enlightenment science, and the first and second industrial revolutions.
In the fall of 2003, I attended a gathering in Seoul, South Korea, of government ministers and business leaders, academics, and CSOs from across Asia, on the subject of how best to create an Asian union similar to the European Union. The sponsoring organization, the East Asian Common Space, has been one of the key players in advancing the idea of a transnational governing body for Asia. I put the question of community to some of the members of the association’s executive committee. Koji Kakizawa, the former minister for foreign affairs for Japan, pointed out that the historical influence of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism in East Asia provided a common philosophical, theological, and cultural context for uniting Asian people and that, in many ways, Asians were even better prepared than Europeans to advance the European Dream of inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, quality of life, deep play, and peace because of their shared worldview.
Richard E. Nisbett has written an insightful book on the topic of “how Asians and Westerners think differently,” entitled
The Geography of Thought.
His account of the Asian mind gives credence to the idea that Asian peoples and countries might be even better suited than Europeans to create network governance, a transnational space, and a global consciousness.
Nisbett points out that the Western mind sees the world more as objects in isolation, while the Eastern mind views the world more as relationships that exist within an overall context. The Western mind puts a premium on the individual, the Eastern mind on the group. In the East, individual identity is inseparable from the group relations of which one is a part. In Confucian thought, writes philosopher Henry Rosemount, “There can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others. . . . Taken collectively, they weave, for each of us, a unique pattern of personal identity, such that if some of my roles change, the others will of necessity change also, literally making me a different person.”
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The Eastern mind is also conditioned to appreciate a world full of contradictions. The Western mind, and especially the American mind, is quite different. We tend to see the world more in rational terms and act to resolve or overcome contradictions, believing them to be impediments to pure knowledge and progress. The Eastern mind, notes Nisbett, takes the view that “to understand and appreciate one state of affairs requires the experience of its opposite.”
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The whole, in this schema, lies in the relationship that exists between opposite forces. Together they complete each other.
Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism all concentrate on the whole rather than the parts—what we in the West call a systems approach. “All three orientations,” says Nisbett, share “concerns about harmony, holism, and the mutual influence of everything on almost everything else.”
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The idea that every event is related to every other event makes the Asian mind more interested in the relationships between phenomena rather than the phenomena in isolation.
The constant attention to relationships also makes Asians more sensitive to the feelings of others, according to Nisbett. American parents concentrate on objects and prepare their kids to think in terms of expropriation, acquisition, and property relations—a “mine vs. thine” mentality. Asian parents spend far more time with their kids focusing on feelings and social relations, to help children “anticipate the reactions of other people with whom they will have to coordinate their behavior.”
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It’s not surprising, given their more holistic orientation, that Asians emphasize harmony of humans and nature. While Enlightenment science is based on the idea of remaking nature to suit man’s image, the Eastern way, says political scientist Mushakaji Kinhide, “rejects the idea that man can manipulate the environment and assumes instead that he adjusts himself to it.”
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In practice, Asian peoples have become as adept as Westerners at manipulating and despoiling the environment for short-term commercial ends. The difference, however, is that whereas in the West, the exploitation of nature is part and parcel of the Enlightenment worldview, in the East, current environmentally harmful policies are, at least, at odds with the traditional Asian notion of humanity’s harmonious relationship to the natural world.
Given their preoccupation with relationships, Asians are understandably less interested in discovering the truth than in knowing “the way.” It’s knowing how to relate to “the other,” not how to acquire “the other,” that’s ultimately important. If “the way” seems suspiciously close to Whiteheadian process philosophy, it is.
Because of their emphasis on harmonious relationships and the good of the whole, Asians are more likely to emphasize the success of the group rather than the self-interest of the individual. Indeed, in Chinese, Nisbett reminds us, “there is no word for ‘individualism.’ The closest one can come is the word for ‘selfishness.’ ”
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