PROGRAMMES

Towards an East Asian Renaissance

Perspective with Melanie Yip
Email RSI Crew
February 11, 2006

A prosperous and peaceful East Asian Community is a realizable goal, said Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong in his opening address at the 4th Asia-Pacific Round Table in Singapore.

Progressively, there are billions of Asians climbing out of poverty. There is also a unique set of circumstances to enable Asians to scale the mountain of prosperity. Globlization and the IT revolution are helping to open closed societies and connect economies.

Many East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand are enjoying a standard of living comparable to Europe's. The possibility of the entire East Asian community attaining Europe's present standard of living between 2030 to 2050 is not impossible.

GCT: The key driving force of East Asian integration must remain the commercial logic of the market that sees in diversity, potentially profitable synergies. I see the architecture of East Asian integration as flexible and multiple overlapping networks, rather than institutionalised bureaucracies in the manner of the European Union. But without displacing the central role of the market, I also believe that the next stage of East Asian integration will necessarily require a more active role for states.

An active role will include accepting autonomy, and responsibilities. Autonomy can mean the freedom and ability of East Asians to decide their own future, and evolve their own community to interact with communities elsewhere. The recently concluded East Asian Summit in Kuala Lumpur was one good example of how this can be approached.