APEC and East Asia
The biggest external challenges for APEC are new competitors in East Asian regionalism, and its future relationship with the emerging East Asian community. The “East-West divide” within APEC has existed since its foundation. In the 1990s, APEC’s Asian members were more interested in development and technology cooperation, while Western members perceived it more as a vehicle for promoting trade liberalization. Domestic politics and rising nationalism also suggested that there were different and competing priorities between the “East” and “West” within APEC. The failure of the EVSL and American indifference toward the AFC, however, dramatically reduced enthusiasm for using APEC as a trade negotiation platform. On one hand, it prompted East Asian members to turn to bilateral and Asian-only multilateralism on trade and investment issues. On the other hand, Washington, which originally saw the utility in using APEC as a tool for trade liberalization during the Clinton Administration, began to shift its attention to the Global War on Terror after September 11, 2001. This was a major blow to APEC’s original goal and dialogue agenda of promoting sustainable growth. Searching for its relevance in future regionalism has become a serious challenge for the forum.
In recent years, there has been an increasing number of initiatives, arrangements, and projects on regional community and institutional building in East Asia. These regional measures include bilateral and sub-regional trade agreements, regional security dialogues (such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and Six-Party Talks), regional economic and business fora (such as the Boao Forum and the Asian Cooperation Dialogue), and regular meetings of East Asian leaders (for example, ASEAN+3 and the East Asian Summit). Although some of fora and arrangements are still at an embryonic stage, there should be no question that they will eventually grow to be strong candidates for leadership in regional institution building. It will be a challenge for these East Asian “candidates,” as well as for APEC, to answer how to remap the Asia-Pacific. East Asians have to decide how to proceed with institution-building in the Asia-Pacific region: should the community be for East Asian nations only, or should a trans-Pacific community be built? It is difficult even at this early stage to forge a common vision about the structure and goal of future regional institutions, but ASEAN+3 and the East Asian Summit have already offered more promise in addressing regional economic and governance issues in East Asia than APEC.