Chapter 13. ‘Architectural alternatives or alternatives to architecture?’

Prime Minister Rudd’s proposal to establish an APC was formally announced, somewhat unexpectedly, on 4 June 2008 at the annual dinner of the Asia Society AustralAsia Centre in Sydney (Rudd 2008a). Speaking before approximately 500 guests, Rudd called for the establishment of ‘a regional institution which spans the entire Asia-Pacific region—including the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and the other states of the region’. The scope of this institution should be broad-ranging, he suggested, and ‘able to engage in the full spectrum of dialogue, cooperation and action on economic and political matters and future challenges related to security’. Rudd designated 2020 as the year by which this vision for an APC should be implemented. He appointed Richard Woolcott, a former secretary of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, as a high-level envoy charged with taking the proposal to the capitals of the wider region for further discussion.

At least four motivations appear to have underpinned Rudd’s APC proposal. First, the plan needs to be viewed in the Australian domestic political context. Since his election in late 2007, Rudd has signalled a renewed focus on Asia as a major pillar of his government’s foreign policy approach. Comparisons with his regionally focused Labor predecessors, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, have, however, been almost inescapable. Given the role these leaders played in helping to establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) process, the APEC Leaders’ Meeting and arguably even the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum (ARF), Rudd has big shoes to fill here, especially when the regional agenda is already so full. Even the Asia credentials of his immediate predecessor, John Howard, have been reviewed fairly favourably, with Howard and his Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, given much credit for securing Australia a seat at the East Asia Summit (EAS), as well as executing a simultaneous strengthening of Australia’s bilateral relations with the United States, China, Japan and Indonesia (see Wesley 2007). Having consistently criticised the predominantly bilateral orientation of his predecessor’s approach to the Asian region, Rudd’s imperative to be seen to be moving towards a more obvious multilateral perspective thus also constitutes part of the explanation for his APC initiative.

Second, the fact that Rudd’s Asia Society speech was made immediately before visiting Japan and Indonesia is revealing. During his early months in office, Rudd had come under increasing criticism at home and abroad for what some commentators regarded as an unhealthy bias towards Beijing (Sheridan 2008a). ^[1] The Prime Minister’s fluency in Mandarin, his longstanding scholarly interest and professional experience in China, coupled with the fact that he visited China—but no other Asian nation—on his first major overseas trip outside of Australia’s immediate neighbourhood all contributed to this perception. Commentators have tended to cast this preference in zero-sum terms, as if Rudd’s interest in China comes at the expense of Australia’s ties with Japan, India and South-East Asia. The Asia Society speech thus appears to have formed part of a larger effort to counter this mounting criticism. Much of the speech itself was devoted to discussing what Rudd explicitly termed Australia’s ‘critical bilateral relations’ with Japan and Indonesia. The order of the wording that Rudd employed when sketching out his vision for an APC—listing Japan ahead of China—was also highly symbolic.

Despite the emphasis given to the symbolic purposes of the APC proposal, Rudd clearly intended it to be more than merely an expedient political gesture. In tandem with his Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, Rudd has continued to revisit the proposal during high-profile speeches (see, for example, Smith 2008:19–22; Rudd 2008b). This also reflects the third consideration motivating the APC proposal: a growing sense of trepidation that Asia’s institutional landscape is evolving in ways that could be increasingly unsuitable for the implementation of any effective regional ‘architecture’ and the sense of regional consensus that must ultimately underpin it.

A large part of the problem here stems from the fact that Asia’s great powers have shown an increasing tendency to use regional institutions not as sites for cooperation, but as instruments of competitive influence: Beijing through ASEAN+3 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO); Moscow through the SCO; Washington in APEC and through its own ad hoc mechanisms such as the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI); and Tokyo through the ARF and, increasingly, through the EAS as it strives to check China’s growing influence in the ASEAN+3 grouping. Taken together, this has created a situation in which, as Lowy Institute Director, Allan Gyngell (2007:1), recently observed, ‘The Asia-Pacific region has too many regional organisations, yet they still cannot do all the things we require of them.’ The APC proposal might thus also be read as a genuine attempt to remedy these ‘design flaws’ in the region’s emerging ‘architecture’.

The fourth factor motivating Rudd’s initiative is related more directly to Australia’s own national interest and place in the Asian region. For significant parts of its history after European settlement, Australia harboured a deep sense of insecurity towards its region. The former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs Alan Renouf, for instance, once described Australia as a ‘frightened country’ that lived in fear of its own Asian neighbourhood and sought out a ‘great and powerful friend’ to compensate for those insecurities (Renouf 1979). Harvard Political Scientist Samuel Huntington (1993:42, 1995:151–4) later described Australia as a ‘torn country’—a society divided over whether or not it belonged to Asia. While many Australians have a much more confident and comfortable view of Australia’s regional situation, echoes of the old concerns remain, although these often take the form of worries about being overlooked rather than overrun. Canberra remains fearful that it could—whether because of its size, cultural composition or geographical location—potentially yet find itself excluded from the region’s most influential institutional processes. The two most worrying potentialities from an Australian standpoint are an institutionalisation of the Six-Party Talks process into a formal and highly influential regional security mechanism without any expansion of its membership, or a deepening of cooperation between the members of the ASEAN+3 process leading to the formation of a genuine East Asian community that excludes Australia. By playing the role of entrepreneur in putting forward the idea of an APC, and by proposing this as the peak institution in the region, Canberra could thus be seen to be guarding against the possibility of its economic and political marginalisation from this part of the world.

Notwithstanding these apparently genuine motives, Rudd’s APC proposal has not met with widespread regional and domestic acclaim. Perhaps the most direct attack was delivered by the influential Singaporean commentator Barry Desker, who, when speaking before a Canberra audience in July 2008, described the proposal as ‘dead in the water’ (Walters 2008). More generally, criticism has tended to focus on four main areas. First, the harried style in which the initiative was announced was seen to have severely damaged its prospects. In the days after the Asia Society speech, for instance, media reports surfaced that Woolcott heard of his mission as special envoy only hours before its announcement (Sheridan 2008c). There also appears to have been a complete absence of consultation with other interested parties throughout the region. Little thought appears to have gone into how the new body will relate to existing structures, such as APEC, the ARF and the EAS. The inevitable dilemmas surrounding membership of the new grouping have also been glossed over. What, for instance, would be the membership status of Taiwan? Would the small island states of the South Pacific be invited to join? The hastiness of this proposal’s delivery and its consequent disregard for these obvious dilemmas not only damaged its prospects in the eyes of many, it could have affected Rudd’s Asia policy credentials.

Washington’s response to the proposal was among the more open-minded. While calling for further detail, for instance, US Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, emphasised the need ‘to be open to new ideas and suggestions’ (Flitton 2008). That the proposal was announced in the shadow of a US presidential election, however, at a time when Washington still appeared distracted by developments in the Middle East, was equally seen as a factor inhibiting its prospects. This issue of timing relates also to China. With its economic and strategic weight in the Asian region still on the rise, one could argue that it might not be in Beijing’s interest to set in concrete an institutional structure reflecting today’s power realties, when those of tomorrow could be weighted even more heavily in its favour, thereby enhancing its capacity to shape that structure.

Third, the prospects for Rudd’s proposal were seen to be further diminished by his alienation of other regional actors, including some of the leading ASEAN countries and Japan. As Desker’s comments suggest, the APC idea has not been particularly well received in some parts of South-East Asia, especially since Indonesia was the only ASEAN country mentioned by Rudd in the original list of leading participants. Canberra’s lack of consultation with its South-East Asian neighbours has added to this problem and has been read as a lack of gratitude, in particular, by those governments who were so influential in helping Australia to secure a seat at the EAS (Medcalf 2008). While it is possible that ASEAN might no longer occupy the driver’s seat of regional diplomatic processes by 2020—as economic and strategic weight shifts increasingly in favour of Asia’s great powers, and in particular in China’s direction—ASEAN retains a significant role in most of the region’s prominent multilateral processes. The blessing of the main members of ASEAN is therefore arguably critical to the success of Rudd’s APC idea. Likewise, Japan remains a leading and influential supporter of the same open and inclusive vision of regional architecture advanced in Rudd’s proposal—as opposed to the narrow, more exclusive approach championed at times by China and Malaysia (see, for example, Walters 2005). Tokyo’s wounds, however, remained raw for some time over what it perceived as Rudd’s bypassing of Japan on his first major international trip—so much so that Japanese Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda, made but one passing reference to Australia in his own major speech on the future of Asia-Pacific security (Sheridan 2008b).

A final criticism that has been levelled at Rudd’s proposal is that it threatens to exacerbate some of the same design flaws in the emerging so-called regional ‘architecture’ that it aspires to alleviate. It is seen to have the potential, for instance, to further fuel the competitive approach to institutions that is becoming a feature of great power politics in the region. Rudd was sufficiently careful in his Asia Society speech to specify that his proposal ‘does not in itself mean the diminution of any of the existing regional bodies’. Even Woolcott himself, however, was later forced to concede that comparisons were inevitable. In his terms:

The real risk in all of this, critics contend, is that Rudd’s APC proposal will become yet one more fixture on an already overcrowded institutional landscape.