Stream K-Dramas at OnDemandKorea

East Asian community may arrive sooner

This is the last in a five-part series exploring how best to realize an East Asian community of reconciliation and communication in the 21st century. — ED.

By Lee Geun

One can find magnets not only in the natural world, but in the human world as well. Just like magnetic forces pull materials like iron, some mysterious but powerful magnetic force in the human world pulls people, money, resources, and ideas toward its center.

In the human world, those spaces within which magnetic forces are functioning are called groups, societies, communities, nations, regions, and empires. People are pulled together to create a society, and societies are pulled together to create a region and a nation. At the same time, some societies or nations repel each other, again like magnets, to produce enemies and "others".

The question is what constitutes magnetic forces in the human world? The answers are many. Common language, history, and culture, common ethnic background, common material and non-material interests, common responses to threats, shared ideas of destiny are some of the popular and frequently heard answers. In artificially creating a community, therefore, the community builders need to find at least some of such common grounds to begin with. The stronger the common grounds are the easier and the faster the community building will become.

East Asian Community building has been criticized by many as lacking in common grounds among the potential members. Even if such common grounds had existed in the past, pundits are saying, they broke apart due to recent historical animosities and ideological differences among key players such as Korea, China, and Japan. The legacies of the Cold War and the U.S. military presence in the region in the form of bilateral alliances are said to have prevented the U.S. allies, namely, Korea and Japan from narrowing emotional and psychological distances between them and China.

If we weigh both the facilitating and preventing factors of the East Asian Community on the scales, in the eyes of many realistic people, the negatives are still much stronger than the positives. That means East Asia, however that space may be defined and confined, has yet to find enormous magnetic forces to overcome either the historical inertia or other magnetic forces that have been pulling the major players of the region away from Asia.

But do we really need the East Asian Community in the first place? Countries in the region have had record-high growth rates in the absence of a Community for the past half-century, and have not had any major wars among themselves since the Korean War. People are traveling with relative ease, only except to and from North Korea, and Korean and Japanese pop-stars are attracting thousands of fans around the region. Korean baseball players are playing in the Japanese League and Chinese singers are members of prominent Korean pop groups. If holding negotiations to create the East Asian Community levies more fines in terms of transaction costs and political tension than benefits accrued, why do we bother to have one?

Well, things are not that simple. As the global economy contracts and international economic competition gets fiercer, we need bigger and more stable markets with a huge growth potential. The East Asian Community will bring that market. When we are to have several more regional or global financial crises, we need to secure the friendly lender of the last resort. The 1997 financial crisis has proven that the International Monetary Fund as well as the U.S. was not entirely credible. The East Asian Community brings such safety nets. If every country in the region becomes a member of the Community, including North Korea, prospects for peace and stability in the region will improve tremendously. East Asian countries will be more competitive in terms of standard setting as East Asian standards can easily become global standards considering the sheer number of people following its principles.

Simply speaking, we need a large and wide roof when it's raining. We have seen that most of the countries that lent umbrellas to us when it was sunny took the umbrellas back when it began to rain.

Theoretically speaking, the strongest magnetic forces that pull countries together are opportunities for prosperity and security. When there are such opportunities in abundance, countries will run toward them. In the past, the U.S .offered such opportunities to many countries in East Asia as well as Europe. Other countries or regions will pale in comparison with the U.S. Many countries in Asia and Europe rapidly fell within the U.S. orbit, the strongest magnet in the world. However, like the natural world, nothing lasts forever in the human world. Europeans found that integrated Europe might offer more opportunities than the U.S. in the face of fierce economic competition from Japan and the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s.

The European Union charged itself with a fresh but powerful magnetic force of a larger single market and Europe-wide confidence building. Again, with the beginning of the 21st century arrived another powerful regional magnet in Asia. China, a country of 1.3 billion people began to accelerate its economic growth since the 1980s and all of a sudden forgot how to hit the brake.

The Chinese market is ever expanding when other global powers suffered from the 2008 global financial crisis. The number one trade partner for two Asian powers, Korea and Japan is now China, not the U.S. American charm has much disappeared with the unilateralism of the Bush era, and the greedy behavior of Wall Street.

If the U.S. does not rebound quickly from the "great recession" and the quagmire in the Middle East, one never knows if the U.S. would be willing to sacrifice the lives of her sons and daughters in the Asian theatre. China is gearing up to pull Asian countries while America may be shrinking in terms of its charm, market opportunities, and most importantly, international commitments. The popular and influential Tea Party movement in the U.S. these days sounds too nationalistic and exclusivist.

East Asian Community building at the moment requires three conditions. (1) Strong magnetic forces coming from within Asia; (2) Weakening magnetic forces of the U.S. toward Asian countries, particularly the U.S. allies, and (3) Extra-regional threats or challenges such as financial crises and economic competition. The Chinese market becomes increasingly attractive to Korea and Japan, the U.S. is rapidly losing its material base to continue its international commitments, and the integrated global economy has been producing incessant crises. The East Asian Community led primarily by China together with Korea and Japan may be in the offing sooner than we expect.

The writer is professor of international relations at the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University. Formerly, he was a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and also served as president of a private think-tank, Korea Institute for Future Strategies. He is an advisory committee member for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Unification, and the Presidential Council for Future and Vision. His research areas are Asian international relations, International Political Economy, and soft power.
______________________
The influence of "hallyu" or the Korean wave has changed how beauty is defined in Southeast Asia. A cosmetics corner of Korea's AmorePacific Laneige is located on the first floor of a department store in Shanghai.
/ Korea Times file

Advertisement

❎ Try Ad-free