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Trans-Atlantic versus trans-Pacific
alliances
By Purnendra Jain and John
Bruni
America's insistence on disarming Saddam
Hussein and in all probability engineering his fall in
the process, with or without UN Security Council
backing, is most likely to produce a seminal moment in
the development of the international order.
It
would be a moment as important as the collapse of the
Iron Curtain and as critical as the implosion of the
USSR in the early 1990s. Disagreements over Saddam's
Iraq have so far helped undermine NATO, produced deep
schisms within the European Union and broken the unity
of purpose of the UN Security Council. All of this even
before war has been declared.
The "hyperpower"
of the United States, driven by a unilateralist
administration in Washington, is witnessing a backlash
from a world that has been largely complacent about US
power and its role in global affairs over the past
decade. No longer does Washington have a blank check to
dictate terms to its junior allies and inconsequential
friends, at least not in Europe.
The old,
vaguely thought out process of European integration
under the tenants of the Maastricht Treaty is dead. A
new European Union is forming based around a
Franco-German core with the possible inclusion of the
Russian Federation. Such a situation would see a
politically active and economically dominant Germany
couple its strength with that of France and Russia, both
strategically significant powers, that are nuclear armed
and permanent members of the UN Security Council. Should
the embryonic development of this new power arrangement
in Europe survive its first test of will with the US
over Iraq, it might very well become the new locus of
power in international affairs providing post-Cold War
America with its first strategic counter-balance.
What would make this situation possible is the
centrality of Germany's role in Europe. No longer
ideologically or militarily threatened by traditional
flanking powers France and Russia, Germany now finds
itself as an indisputably integrated part of European
economic life, acting as the continent's economic engine
and linchpin, and, for the first time since its birth as
a modern nation-state in 1871, a country without fear of
invasion or subversion.
Happy to defer Europe's
"hard-power" military decision-making to others more
comfortable with that role, such as France, and
separating itself from its militaristic past, Germany
has a renewed sense of confidence in being able to
present itself as the repository and dispenser of
European "soft power". Soft power being the non-coercive
way of influencing international affairs by attracting
interest in adopting and integrating a particular
nation's cultural, educational, technological and other
economic norms into another country's developmental
framework.
In the Asia-Pacific, however, the
situation is very different. Old Cold War bilateral
alliance structures such as the US-Japan, US-Australia
links stand largely unaffected by the turmoil over Iraq.
Japan, unlike fellow former Axis power Germany,
has to successfully rehabilitate itself from its wartime
past. While a critically important center of Asian
economic activity, it still has not integrated itself
into East Asia to the same degree that Germany has
integrated itself into Europe. Deeply insecure about its
strategic and cultural position in Asia, Japan has opted
not to move away from the safety and certainty of the US
strategic umbrella in spite of being the only country in
the region that has the economic capacity for truly
going it alone and reshaping the region's strategic
landscape in new and innovative ways. Envied and
resented by many, Japan's future prospects to play a
positive and decisive role in Asia look bleak.
Then there is fellow "cultural outsider" within
the Asia-Pacific region, Australia. Long considering
itself too small a player on the international scene to
be of any real significance, Australia has wedded itself
to the US so strongly in recent years that any thought
of strategic action without US consent or support is
considered impossible to take seriously.
Ergo,
the strategic landscape in East Asia seems caught in a
time warp where American power will count for a long
time yet. Asia-Pacific states will continue to view
American engagement in the region as paramount to their
security. Japan and Australia, the two liminal states
that make up the foundation of Washington's presence in
Asia-Pacific, themselves riven by fear and anxiety,
especially over the fates of North Korea and Indonesia
respectively, will no doubt continue to facilitate
America's ubiquity in the region. China, while trying to
position itself as a great Asian power, is still a
generation away from achieving the strategic and
economic strength needed to successfully rival the US in
the western Pacific.
What has made Germany's
role in Europe so vastly different from Japan and
Australia's role in Asia-Pacific is the fact that
post-war Europe had a number of strong multilateral
institutions that bound together a number of
nation-states, many possessing similar demographic
sizes, industrial capacities and levels of national
socio-political development. In the Asia-Pacific,
however, Japan and Australia stood out as the only
countries with well-developed economies,
social-political institutions and technological prowess.
It was only during the late 1970s that other
Asian countries began developing in ways that might have
been considered loosely similar in outlook and
performance to Japan and Australia, and even then there
were huge disparities in their political and economic
development. Coupled with weak multilateral
institution-building, represented by the Association of
Asian Nations (ASEAN - 1967), Asia-Pacific Economic
Forum (APEC - 1989) and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF -
1994), East Asia never had the basis for regional
integration commensurate to Europe.
Unable and
unwilling to forge its own destiny, Asia-Pacific cannot
be expected to act as an alternative regional power
center that could break out from under the strategic
umbrella of the United States, or, at a minimum,
seriously challenge American interests and conventions.
Purnendra Jain is professor at the
Center for Asian Studies at Australia's Adelaide
University; John Bruni specializes in strategic
studies and is a visiting fellow at the Center for Asian
Studies.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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