The Myth of the Pacific Community

Robert A. Manning and Paula Stern

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994

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Summary:  The existence of a Pacific community is an article of faith for Washington, but the Pacific nations have only embryonic regional institutions, and there are daunting security challenges in Korea and between Japan and China. Even worse, American military and economic power in the region is waning. Yet the economic opportunities here are too great for the Clinton administration to pass up. The key to continued U.S. engagement in the Pacific should be the private sector.

Robert A. Manning, a former Asian policy adviser to the State Department, and Paula Stern, a former Chairwoman of the International Trade Commission, are Senior Fellows at the Progressive Policy Institute.

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.

Yet even now, as the Asia-Pacific's regional institutions are in embryonic form, a host of economic, political, military, and psychological trends suggest that the cherished aspiration - a common psychology of belonging, reflecting shared interests, responsibilities, values, and mutual respect - may prove to be a chimera. The Pacific community idea may be pulled apart by more powerful forces: from above by global economic integration, extra-regional political and security mechanisms, and democratization; and from below by intra-Asian and subregional economic and financial networks and by local security dynamics that are supplanting the U.S. balancing role. For the United States, there is a particularly unfortunate bit of timing at work here. Not only do these conflicting pulls make the very term "Pacific community" an elusive concept, but U.S. power in the Asia-Pacific arena is declining at a historical moment when the American stake in the region is rising.

Trade, investment, and a Pacific coastline do not necessarily make for a broader sense of community. As a recent report warned, might the Pacific "remain more of a rim than a community"?1 It is perhaps instructive, as that report points out, that there is no Asian word equivalent to "community." Indeed, APEC's decision to include Mexico and Chile among its members, while excluding Russia, India, Vietnam, and Burma, reveals profound ambiguity about ...

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