In mid-November of 2011, Indonesia will host the sixth East Asia Summit (EAS) in the newly built Nusa Dua Convention Center in Bali.
Based on the Kuala Lumpur Declaration of 2005, this year’s summit will continue to be a forum for dialogue on broad strategic, political and economic issues to promote “common security, common prosperity and common stability”. The EAS is welcoming two new members — the US and Russia — into the East Asian community.
Although the US is not a part of the East Asian map, the US’s abstraction from East Asian political, security and foreign policy mapping will eviscerate a fundamental element of the East Asian community building process, which is the EAS’s paramount goal.
Meanwhile, Russia — currently the world’s largest oil producer and partly bordered by North Korea, Japan and China — is geographically strategic for the rest of East Asia.
For example, on Jan. 1, 2011, the Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean oil pipeline began operating, exporting Russian crude oil to Asia-Pacific markets (Japan, China and South Korea).
In the midst of the world trying to devise a new global order following the 2008 global financial crisis, which sheds light on the shifts of global economic power to the east and south, and East Asia trying to strike a dynamic equilibrium of power, where should the EAS’s place be in this evolving and increasingly convoluted regional and global architecture?
Formulating this year’s EAS agenda must be strategic, and there will be conflicting interests with the formulation.
For example, while the US wants nothing less than bringing security issues, including securing free navigation and avoiding any power’s dominance in the South China Sea, on the table, China will do anything to avoid this.
There are also regional challenges that need to be contained, like
the Thai-Cambodia border conflict and other territorial disputes, the Korean Peninsula, maritime issues, terrorism, piracy, transnational crime, pandemics and natural disasters.
The old functional agenda, including education, finance, energy, disaster management and the prevention of avian flu, will be continued since there are already existing mechanisms for those areas created at previous summits.
Two new items are likely to be added to the agenda: connectivity, which is being lobbied by China,
and a dynamic relationship between traditional and non-traditional security, which is being lobbied by
the US.
The new agenda is appreciated for two main reasons. On the one hand, connectivity is consistent with the Master Plan of ASEAN Connectivity.
Physical connectivity is imperative to connect ASEAN (Southeast Asia, more generally) with China (Northeast Asia, more generally) and to build an integrated East Asian community. The plan includes the construction of the Singapore-Kunming rail link that may be extended to as far as Surabaya in East Java.
The ASEAN Connectivity agenda will also include institutional and people-to-people connectivity, including regulatory reforms and education.
The interplay of traditional and non-traditional security is a timely and pending issue with the ongoing territorial disputes and other non-traditional security issues such as maritime piracy that are encroaching in the Indian Ocean.
As the host of the EAS 2011, Indonesia supports the inclusion of geopolitical security issues.
To what extent this is politically feasible is still a question, but it is likely that the security issue agenda may overlap with the agenda items of the ASEAN Defense Minister’s Meeting-Plus (ADMM+), whose member states are the same as those of the EAS.
These include humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacekeeping operations, maritime security, military medicine and counterterrorism.
At the conclusion of the 2011 ASEAN Summit, ASEAN leaders reiterated the importance of the 2002 Declaration of Conduct and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as means to peaceful dispute resolutions.
Enacting a regional code of conduct for the South China Sea border dispute and pressuring the US to ratify the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the US has signed, will be more challenging issues.
Nevertheless, the EAS should strengthen the commitment to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation signed by all EAS members.
The inclusion of new members provides an invaluable opportunity to hold policy dialogues on energy security.
Asia’s surging demand for energy may inflict rivalries on energy resources instead of cooperation. From the Sino-Japan contestation over oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea for the past decade to Chinese activism in the Indian Ocean, which causes anxiety in India, EAS leaders must seek paths to cooperation and find a win-win solution.
With Russia as the largest oil producer and China as the largest oil consumer, the EAS could facilitate a discussion on energy prices. On top of this, Japan’s nuclear crisis also sheds light on the importance of holding dialogues on nuclear security.
This bipolar dominance of the US and China should be avoided. In his recent visit to Indonesia, Premier Wen Jia Bao reiterated that ASEAN should remain in the driver’s seat.
The EAS is built on cracking ground because of the Thai-Cambodia dispute. Therefore, Indonesia should act softly and slowly but decisively.
Instead of making a great leap forward, it might adhere to Deng Xiaoping’s phase to “cross the river by feeling for stones”, because mutual trust can only be earned and not given.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com
Based on the Kuala Lumpur Declaration of 2005, this year’s summit will continue to be a forum for dialogue on broad strategic, political and economic issues to promote “common security, common prosperity and common stability”. The EAS is welcoming two new members — the US and Russia — into the East Asian community.
Although the US is not a part of the East Asian map, the US’s abstraction from East Asian political, security and foreign policy mapping will eviscerate a fundamental element of the East Asian community building process, which is the EAS’s paramount goal.
Meanwhile, Russia — currently the world’s largest oil producer and partly bordered by North Korea, Japan and China — is geographically strategic for the rest of East Asia.
For example, on Jan. 1, 2011, the Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean oil pipeline began operating, exporting Russian crude oil to Asia-Pacific markets (Japan, China and South Korea).
In the midst of the world trying to devise a new global order following the 2008 global financial crisis, which sheds light on the shifts of global economic power to the east and south, and East Asia trying to strike a dynamic equilibrium of power, where should the EAS’s place be in this evolving and increasingly convoluted regional and global architecture?
Formulating this year’s EAS agenda must be strategic, and there will be conflicting interests with the formulation.
For example, while the US wants nothing less than bringing security issues, including securing free navigation and avoiding any power’s dominance in the South China Sea, on the table, China will do anything to avoid this.
There are also regional challenges that need to be contained, like
the Thai-Cambodia border conflict and other territorial disputes, the Korean Peninsula, maritime issues, terrorism, piracy, transnational crime, pandemics and natural disasters.
The old functional agenda, including education, finance, energy, disaster management and the prevention of avian flu, will be continued since there are already existing mechanisms for those areas created at previous summits.
Two new items are likely to be added to the agenda: connectivity, which is being lobbied by China,
and a dynamic relationship between traditional and non-traditional security, which is being lobbied by
the US.
The new agenda is appreciated for two main reasons. On the one hand, connectivity is consistent with the Master Plan of ASEAN Connectivity.
Physical connectivity is imperative to connect ASEAN (Southeast Asia, more generally) with China (Northeast Asia, more generally) and to build an integrated East Asian community. The plan includes the construction of the Singapore-Kunming rail link that may be extended to as far as Surabaya in East Java.
The ASEAN Connectivity agenda will also include institutional and people-to-people connectivity, including regulatory reforms and education.
The interplay of traditional and non-traditional security is a timely and pending issue with the ongoing territorial disputes and other non-traditional security issues such as maritime piracy that are encroaching in the Indian Ocean.
As the host of the EAS 2011, Indonesia supports the inclusion of geopolitical security issues.
To what extent this is politically feasible is still a question, but it is likely that the security issue agenda may overlap with the agenda items of the ASEAN Defense Minister’s Meeting-Plus (ADMM+), whose member states are the same as those of the EAS.
These include humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacekeeping operations, maritime security, military medicine and counterterrorism.
At the conclusion of the 2011 ASEAN Summit, ASEAN leaders reiterated the importance of the 2002 Declaration of Conduct and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as means to peaceful dispute resolutions.
Enacting a regional code of conduct for the South China Sea border dispute and pressuring the US to ratify the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the US has signed, will be more challenging issues.
Nevertheless, the EAS should strengthen the commitment to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation signed by all EAS members.
The inclusion of new members provides an invaluable opportunity to hold policy dialogues on energy security.
Asia’s surging demand for energy may inflict rivalries on energy resources instead of cooperation. From the Sino-Japan contestation over oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea for the past decade to Chinese activism in the Indian Ocean, which causes anxiety in India, EAS leaders must seek paths to cooperation and find a win-win solution.
With Russia as the largest oil producer and China as the largest oil consumer, the EAS could facilitate a discussion on energy prices. On top of this, Japan’s nuclear crisis also sheds light on the importance of holding dialogues on nuclear security.
This bipolar dominance of the US and China should be avoided. In his recent visit to Indonesia, Premier Wen Jia Bao reiterated that ASEAN should remain in the driver’s seat.
The EAS is built on cracking ground because of the Thai-Cambodia dispute. Therefore, Indonesia should act softly and slowly but decisively.
Instead of making a great leap forward, it might adhere to Deng Xiaoping’s phase to “cross the river by feeling for stones”, because mutual trust can only be earned and not given.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com
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