Asia cannot allow its insecure past to influence its future

Worse, these long-simmering spats are boiling over at a time of growing economic uncertainty and social unrest.

But pioneering Singapore diplomat Barry Desker remains confident about the region's future.

“I’m not so pessimistic about Asia,” he says, noting how much surer, calmer and richer the region is today compared to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was pockmarked by communist elements and aflame with anti-colonial protests.

Desker, 65, is dean of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), in Singapore. Recalling just how insecure Asia was in 1970, when he first started out at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), he said: “Southeast Asia in the 1970s was a cockpit of controversy ... the picture did not look promising. Yet today, its situation is probably more hopeful than in southeastern Europe, which was ravaged by conflict after the Cold War ended and with Yugoslavia splitting up.”

Southeast Asia was once known in diplomatic circles as “the Balkans of the East”. But it avoided being “Balkanised” or riven by ethnic strife, notes Desker.

This was in part thanks to Asean, the regional grouping that, among other things, welcomed once-communist Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos into its fold unconditionally in the 1990s.

“You had a coming together of diverse states, particularly because Asean took them in without any conditions or a process where they learnt about the nature of the organisation that they were coming into, and the need for consensus among members.” 

That consensus, however, is being increasingly rattled by some of its members’ competing claims in the South China Sea, a body of water that China claims as its own too. In 2009, for example, Vietnam and Malaysia put in their claims, based on an extended continental shelf, which prompted China to submit in May that year at the UN its “Nine Dashed Lines” map, demarcating about 90 per cent of the sea as its entitlement.

By doing so, Desker says, China risks “undermining the goodwill” it has amassed in Asia. In fact, he argues, China’s muscle flexing on the issue is what led to the recent US “pivot to Asia”.

So might all this be leading to “Cold War II”, with China replacing the former Soviet Union in a global face-off with the US?

It’s too early to make such an assertion, Desker says. “My view on those who argue that a Cold War is in an incipient stage is that one should not look only at the maps of the past to derive the maps of the future. The future is in our hands and we can help to shape it and we need not be led by the flow of events in the past.”

By asserting its Nine Dashed Lines, China is now in a Catch-22 situation: on the one hand, if it does not fend off claimants, its increasingly nationalistic population will see its leaders as shrinking Chinese territory; on the other, China is party to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), and its insistence that it owns most of the South China Sea would go against Unclos and anger its neighbours. Either way, China cannot win. 

Can’t it, though?

The key to ending the impasse, Desker says, is for China to engage all claimants to the disputed sea and to reach a consensus with them. Up till now, though, China has been bent on dealing with claimants one by one.

The South China Sea spat would be better dealt with through some form of adjudication, if not arbitration, and certainly through more consultations beyond just bilateral talks, he reckoned.

Desker has a longer view on the region than most people: he headed the Singapore Foreign Ministry’s Southeast Asia Section in the early 1970s. He rose to become ambassador to Indonesia from 1986 to 1993. 

Asia, he muses, is a perennial lightning rod for conflict, having been bedevilled in the 1960s and 1970s by attempted coups in Indonesia and Thailand, communist insurgencies in Malaysia and Indochina, and protracted battles such as the Vietnam War. Fortunately, the region had Asean and its commitment to consensual decision-making, which has helped keep the peace for 45 years.

Of course, he allows, “when there were difficulties in reaching a consensus, the ‘Asean Way’ meant the lowest common denominator (view) would hold”.

Might that Asean spirit of consensus be dissipating, though?

In July, for the first time in its history, Asean’s 10 members could not agree on a customary joint declaration at their summit in Phnom Penh. That was because they locked horns over one paragraph in the draft declaration concerning some members’ claims in the South China Sea.But since the Phnom Penh summit, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa has quietly visited all other Asean members to get their consensus on a stand on the South China Sea, based on six principles.

Asean is poised to issue a joint declaration on this issue when its ministers meet in New York for the UN General Assembly. Desker stresses, however, that Asean wants no part in negotiating the South China Sea issue, but it is pushing for negotiators to abide by a code of conduct to resolve the conflict as peaceably as possible.

Asia, he says, is where the world’s most pressing concerns will play out from now on. Trade across the Pacific Ocean is already much greater than that across the Atlantic, and global decision-making will soon follow suit. This also means Asia could become a ground for future conflicts. So “the test for diplomats is how one could help to avoid such an outcome”.

Away from territorial tensions, the region has longer-range problems that require concerted action to tackle. Can its many diverse communities form a cohesive society? Can it close the growing urban-rural gap, even as more Asians crowd into cities? Can its governments really involve their increasingly vocal netizens in decision-making? Last but not least, can it free its people from the middle-income trap, in which the middle class grows too comfortable to want to be more competitive?

Desker says such challenges are so great that they require seismic shake-ups in many areas, including enabling more of the region’s children to complete at least secondary school so they can better seize opportunities to do business or innovate.

“The difficulty in this is that the tendency has been to be very comfortable with what we have, and want to improve only incrementally.”