Andrew Phillips is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the ANU.
My colleague Hugh White presents a provocative and lucid analysis of the hard choices that policy-makers may soon confront if a stable modus vivendi cannot be struck between the region's great powers in coming decades. But I maintain that Hugh's analysis is overly pessimistic. While China's rise and America's relative decline will inevitably beget occasional frictions, four systemic changes wrought during the past four decades of American hegemony jointly militate against these frictions resolving themselves in sustained great-power confrontation.
A consideration of these changes suggests that the coming Asian century is more likely to resemble the past forty years of strategic stability than it is to signal a return to the violent rivalry that marred East Asia from 1870 to 1970 (Hugh's stated benchmark of normality for the region, which I will dub, for convenience, the 'benchmark era').
1. Stronger states: In the benchmark era, great-power conflict was radically conditioned by the preponderance of weak states throughout Asia. These states – of which the most strategically important until 1949 was China – provided tempting targets for intervention for Japan and the European powers. Conversely, while the region today remains speckled by enclaves of instability, the past four decades of prosperity have produced a lasting strengthening of states in both Northeast and Southeast Asia.
For most of the benchmark era, China was so weak that it faced the risk of imminent dismemberment on several occasions, while Southeast Asia laboured under the unflattering label of 'Balkans of the East'. East Asia's economic revival since 1970 has favoured enduring advances in 'self-strengthening' and state-building, substantially diminishing in size and strategic centrality the local power vacuums that fueled inter-state warfare during the benchmark era.
2. The end of ideology: East Asia's strategic rivalries in the benchmark era were sustained not only by the prevalence of weak states in the region, but also by the presence of deeply revisionist states (Imperial Japan, the USSR and Mao's PRC) that sought through violence to overthrow the existing international order. Conversely, the containment of radically revisionist states and their eventual moderation (in China's case) or elimination (in the cases of Imperial Japan and the USSR) has been one of America's greatest strategic successes in the Asia-Pacific.
As Hugh himself notes, today's China embraces an exclusive rather than evangelical exceptionalism. This marks a fundamental change from the Maoist totalitarian state that harboured system-transforming revisionist ambitions, and further counsels against undue alarmism. Great-power conflicts in the absence of ideological rivalry are of course possible, but they are comparably less likely than in periods marred by systemic ideological competition of the kind that characterised the benchmark era.
3. The golden strait-jacket: Thomas Friedman's 'golden strait-jacket' has formed a favourite target for realists sceptical of the putatively pacifying effects of commerce. However, the reality remains that the region is now enmeshed in a web of mutually profitable commercial exchanges of qualitatively greater size, sophistication and complexity than those that prevailed during the benchmark era.
The benchmark era saw India and China firstly forced into a Western-dominated economic order in distinctly subordinate positions. National liberation then saw the region's demographic heavyweights experiment disastrously with autarkic economic policies that impoverished their citizens and destabilised the region.
Conversely, the Asian giants (along with their neighbours) are now being enriched through their integration into the global economy, and thus have a huge vested interest in preserving the stable international order upon which their prosperity depends. Economic interdependence does not by itself guarantee the preservation of strategic stability, as Hugh correctly points out. But it would seem equally tenuous to dismiss entirely the conflict-dampening potential of regional economic integration.
4. Regional institutions: Finally, for most of the benchmark era, regional security institutions were either ineffective (the Nine Powers' and Four Powers' treaties guaranteeing Chinese territorial integrity and great power cooperation after World War I), absent or embryonic (ASEAN following its establishment in 1967). Conversely, the past decades have witnessed the growth and maturation of a range of institutions (ASEAN, the ARF) that have increased the transparency of states' security postures, offered vital fora for regional confidence-building measures, and provided invaluable opportunities for the region's smaller players to help shape the Asian security order.
By themselves, such institutions do not guarantee strategic stability, and indeed their success has been strongly predicated on the existence of the great-power condominium that has prevailed since 1972. But as with the conflict-dampening effects of economic integration, their independent significance as mechanisms of strategic reassurance (particularly among the hitherto fractious ASEAN states) cannot be entirely dismissed.
None of the four factors alone provides us with a cause for optimism concerning the region's future, but their joint operation does in my mind blunt the pessimism that pervades Hugh's analysis. China's rise will need to be accommodated, and America's gradual hegemonic decline inevitably portends significant changes in the region's strategic landscape. But the benign legacies of American regional supremacy leave an Asia structurally transformed from the violently unstable region of the benchmark era.
For Australia and for others, foreign and defence policy may indeed be getting serious again. But a negotiation of the coming challenges should nevertheless remain informed by a sober appreciation for how far the region has evolved since the Shanghai communiqué.
