Asia Pacific Community

Abstract

Welcome to the second issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ). EAFQ has grown out of East Asia Forum (EAF) online, a platform for the best in Asian analysis, research and policy comment on the Asia Pacific region in world affairs. EAFQ aims to provide a further window into research from leading research institutes in Asia and expert comment on key areas of regional policy. This issue includes essays by leading commentators on the idea of an ‘Asia Pacific Community’, floated last year by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Richard Woolcott, Rudd’s special envoy on the initiative, reviews the findings of his consultations on this issue with hundreds of interlocutors around the region. In the first issue of EAFQ we noted that there was no effective and collective Asian response to the global financial crisis. Its regional structures were still not up to the task of effective global participation. Much in the last six months has changed the drivers of regional initiative on the global stage, as the essays by Young, Soesastro and Dobson in this volume make clear. The Asian 6 – Japan, Korea, China, India, Indonesia, and Australia – within the G20 have emerged as a regional leadership group. Coordination among the Asian 6 has been an increasingly important feature in their approach to the global dialogues, and at Pittsburgh and in the lead-up to Seoul. Together with the United States and perhaps Canada and Russia, the Asian 6 appear like the potential core of an Asia Pacific community for security dialogues, the key gap in regional architecture on which Rudd’s idea focused. Woolcott’s consultations reveal three things clearly: there will be no rush towards a new regional arrangement. There is a need to link whatever is invented to what is there now, in the form of APEC and the East Asia Summit. And more discussion is needed about what is sensible and how to do it – for which purpose Rudd has convened a meeting in Australia in December. Meetings in Tokyo and Seoul before that will make important contributions to that dialogue and the EAFQ will undoubtedly come back to the debate again. The EAFQ, like EAF online, is an initiative of the EAF and its host organisation, the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research, located in the Crawford School of Economics and Government in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. It draws on the research base at the ANU to link together over 40 leading institutes in East and South Asia in research and discourse on public policy and international affairs in the region.