Asian Multilateralism and The Future of the American Role in East Asia
April 25, 2005 Click here to view video coverage of this conference. In contrast to Europe, multilateral institutions have been relatively underdeveloped in East Asia. Asian security, in particular, is based not on multilateral treaties like the NATO alliance, but on a series of bilateral ties centering on Washington, including the US-Japan Security Treaty and the US-South Korean relationship. All of this is in the process of changing. After the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, countries in the region began organizing new multilateral initiatives without US participation, including the Chiang Mai Initiative that links the central banks of 13 participating countries, and the so-called ASEAN Plus Three forum that links the ASEAN countries with China, Japan, and South Korea. The Chinese in particular have been very creative in proposing a host of new free trade zones and cooperative multilateral frameworks for economic cooperation in the region. The US, by contrast, has had relatively little to offer the region in terms of leadership or vision. In the security realm, legacy Cold War institutions like the US-Japan and US-Korean alliances remain the basis for a bilateral, hub-and-spoke system. Tensions between the US and South Korea have been rising, however, while Japan has moved much closer to the United States as a result of China’s rise and the Korean nuclear threat. This shift in political relationships has made possible entirely new security configurations in Northeast Asia that will have important implications for regional security and for the future of the US role there. The United States has done relatively little systematic thinking about new institutional architectures for East Asia, or indeed how to relate to the new, Chinese-led institutions that are gradually taking shape in the region. The purpose of this conference would be to explore the history, present, and future of multilateral economic and security organizations in East Asia, and how they relate to American economic and foreign policy interests. The day-long conference will be held at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC on April 25, 2005, and is sponsored jointly by the Bernard Schwartz Forum on Constructive Capitalism and the SAIS Reischauer Center for East Asia Studies. Papers from the conference will initially be published as occasional papers from the Reischauer Center, and then as a volume in the new series of publications of works from the Schwartz Forum on Constructive Capitalism to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Panel 1: Asian Multilateralism in Historical Perspective Panel 2: New Economic Multilateral Organizations Panel 3: A Multilateral Approach to Security in Asia Panel 4: Implications for American Interests For agenda, click here.
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