Sunday, 20 September 2009
Hatoyama in charge: stars aligned for new Asian era
The inauguration on Wednesday of Yukio Hatoyama as Japan’s new prime minister could mark a turning point in Asian history. As Shakespeare said: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune’, and that tide is approaching its flood just now. Put another way, the stars are aligned in an unusually favourable conjunction for the dawning of a new age or era.
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Hatoyama in charge: stars aligned for new Asian era
By ANTHONY ROWLEY
18 September 2009
The inauguration on Wednesday of Yukio Hatoyama as Japan’s new prime minister could mark a turning point in Asian history. As Shakespeare said: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune’, and that tide is approaching its flood just now. Put another way, the stars are aligned in an unusually favourable conjunction for the dawning of a new age or era.
Let us say that this could be Asia’s ‘Monnet moment’ - after the French economist and public official Jean Monnet, who (along with former French PM Robert Schuman) was a founding father of European unity after World War II. Let us further postulate that Mr. Hatoyama is Asia’s Monnet and Chinese PM Wen Jiabao is Asia’s Schuman.
The comparison is not all that far-fetched. The new Japanese premier has stressed the need for Asian economic and political unity, and in a way that does not appear to assume (as so many of his predecessors have done) that Japan should control the process. Mr. Wen has, meanwhile, indicated that China welcomes the advent of an Asian statesman in Japan.
This is a favourable conjunction of events and the fact that the US is currently headed by a president (Barack Obama) who seems more concerned with domestic affairs than trying to manipulate the pieces in a global diplomatic chess game is also serendipitous. The path is probably clearer now for progress towards Asian unity than at any time in postwar history.
There are further favourable auguries. The global economic recession and its dramatic impact on exports has caused some Asian nations to reflect upon the wisdom of continuing to pursue a policy of export-led growth, at least to Western markets. The idea of cultivating demand within the context of an Asian community is being viewed sympathetically.
If ever there was a time for regional initiatives to take root in Asia - and perhaps elsewhere - then it is surely the present, while the rest of the world is preoccupied with its own problems. Admittedly, there is no reason for the US to actively support Asian unity now in the way that it did with Western Europe - as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism, in the aftermath of the Second World War. But fully stretched as the US is now on the home front as well as in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, it is rather like a weary Britain that was reduced to little more than a bystander as its empire crumbled after the war.
But if this blossoming of opportunity for Asia is not to flower only briefly before withering on the branch, concrete actions are needed; here again, the European experience could offer some valuable lessons for this region.
The first is that mighty oaks can from small acorns grow, and to start sewing seeds now. One history of postwar Europe recalls that ‘in 1949, Monnet realised that friction between Germany and France for control of the Ruhr (an important coal and steel region) was rising to dangerous levels, presaging a possible return to hostilities as happened after the First World War. Monnet, with a few collaborators, drafted a revolutionary proposal to pool under the control of a European Government, Franco-German coal and steel resources.’
Then French premier Schuman supported the proposal and ‘one year later, with the Treaty of Paris, six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg) founded the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was the early precursor of today’s European Union. Monnet, first president (1952-1955) of the ECSC, conceived it as the initial step towards European economic and political integration.
The ingenuity of this approach is that it began in an ostensibly non-political area (iron and steel production) and led to greater things. Asia probably does not need an iron and steel community but areas such as nuclear power development or even energy development in general could lend themselves to regional cooperation on something less than a grand scale initially.
There is no obvious equivalent of the Ruhr region over which Japan and China could fight but there are numerous territorial disputes between the two - some of then involving other Asian nations too - upon which a specially constituted regional authority could be asked to adjudicate. Anything that established the principle of regional cooperation in the way that the ECSC did would be valuable in fostering Asian unity.
This is not to say that wider initiatives, such as the establishment of a free-trade area within Asia or of monetary union within the region, should be neglected. But something more modest on which the region can ‘cut its teeth’ for cooperation would be welcome for starters.
Let us hope that prime ministers Hatoyama and Wen and other Asian leaders display the wisdom and pragmatism of Messrs Monnet and Schuman in their welcome moves towards achieving Asian unity.
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