WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

The Asia Pacific region has too many regional organisations, yet they still cannot do all the things we require of them. This matters because the large adjustments which the world will have to make to the rising power of China and India will be managed more easily and effectively if their neighbours can help shape the emerging landscape. Instead of focusing on what we've got, we should look at what we need.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

Four elements are necessary in any effective regional architecture. We must be able to facilitate trade and investment; help build an East Asian community; promote regional security; and permit heads of government to discuss common problems. The complication is that a different group of countries and a different definition of the region is best suited to each case.

The best solution would be to leave APEC with its economic role but decouple the leaders’ meeting from it; preserve the ASEAN Plus 3 forum; develop a new security body, perhaps around the institutionalisation of the informal Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore or widening the membership and role of the Six Party Talks on North Korea; and establish a new Heads of Government meeting independent of both APEC and ASEAN. This is a difficult but by no means impossible task. The APEC leaders’ meeting in Sydney is a good place for the conversation to begin.

A CROWDED FIELD

When the leaders from 21 Asia Pacific economies meet in Sydney for the APEC leaders’ meeting in September, they will be elbowing for attention and relevance in an overcrowded field of regional organisations. Our problem is that there are too many regional forums, yet they still cannot do all the things we need.

This proliferation of regional institutions in Asia and the Pacific is a new development. Until the early 1990s Asian regionalism was vestigial. Even the oldest of the sub-regional organisations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), covered only half its potential membership.

All that began to change once the rigid divisions of the Cold War were removed. APEC was established in 1989, its first leaders’ meeting was held in 1993 and ASEAN expanded between 1995 and 1999 to include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.