Date: July 8, 2010, 15:40~17:40

Venue: Grand Ballroom, Westin Chosun Seoul

 

Moderator: Tadashi Yamamoto

 

Can we get started? We’re missing a couple of people, but we’re five minutes into the session time, allocated session. So, let me start. If I may, I would like to say at the onset, I tend to run these things rather informallyso, please feel informal yourself. And so, it’s about time we interact. Because we have done enough of exchange of ideas in the morning, and statements, and so forth, I think we can relax, and it still happens that we have two “relaxing” kind of characters to start the discussion. So we should be able to do that.

 

We are to talk about the East Asian Community and this is the same theme we took up in the morning, in Group 2. My inclination is, I ask two panelists to make a presentation, and I think I should be honest to say that the time limit will be fifteen minutes. I may be disrupting organizers’, kind of , design, but from the experiences from this morning, people went beyond seven minutes limit, and I think just as well be honest and say fifteen minutes, but not more. Is that okay?

 

Two things that I just wish to register. There was a very interesting cluster discussion, took place just before this meeting, in between morning and then this afternoon session, and I attended that one. A couple of things. It was very noticeable in fact, I would say that two missing elements in the morning discussion were taken up rather seriously and actively in the cluster discussion. One is the kind of the role of civil society organizations. Civil society, I don’t think that there was much discussion in the morning about the role of NGOs. In fact, in my personal view, you can hit back at me, but we tended to talk about the government’s role basically and G8, G20, and so forth, and not much about actors, the civil-side actors of businesses and so forth. That, I think, I’ll just put on the table, something which might be useful in this discussion as well. Second one is that we talk about East Asia Community when we talk about East Asia Community. We ought to be talking about underpinnings of that community. The community is not made up of contract papers. But, in my view, it has to be underpinned by “real people,” and I tend to argue that the civil society organizations can be very useful underpinnings of that kind of East Asian Community. I’m demonstrating that this is a very opinionated moderator but I will stop with that. I just wish to throw these two elements into the discussion. Hopefully that might be useful, and without any further due, I would like to call on, I am sorry, David. I am sorry, I have to look up my own paper to guide myself. David, you have fifteen minutes.

 

Presenter I: David F. von Hippel

 

Okay, thank you very much. I am very happy to be invited to make this presentation. I was invited a little bit late as a replacement for another panelist, so I hope you will give me the license to focus on the things that I understand a little better. And if I fail to mention some of the very important elements of issues for and against community that you know well but I don’t, that’s not because they are not important. It’s just because I don’t understand them as well as I should.

 

So my memo here is “Issues for and against the Community: Security, Economy, Energy and Human Security Issues,” and the way I am going to approach this is to give you a very short introduction based mostly on what’s in the memo, factors supporting and opposing cooperation in East Asia, and sampling of some of the issues where East Asian cooperation would help to address some of the national and regional problems that we see before us; then present a sample methodology for assessing future cooperation options, sort of multi-attribute energy security analysis we’ve been using for some years developed in concert with colleagues in the region; and then a brief listing of questions for discussion. Along the way, I will show quite a number of images very briefly that illustrate some of the areas where I think there is further ground for cooperation and where looking at those cooperation options from quite a number of different perspectives is very useful.

 

So, I will start out with some challenges to cooperation. First of all, as we learned in the session this morning, it is very clear to everyone that there is a history in this region of conflicts and conquests, both old and relatively recent that slows down the construction of a community. But, it is its underpinning. There have been policy choices and direct intervention by others, most notably the United States that tended to pull potential participants in community in different directions: different political and cultural perspectives, and legal systems that make certain types of cooperation difficult; economic competition between nations; different perspectives on ideas from outside the region; and different geopolitical aspirations by both within and outside this region by countries that might be part of the community.

 

And then there is the inter-linked nature of many of these regional problems: environment and energy, and socio-cultural and political elements to many of these problems. Then various factors supporting, see the next slide, some of the regional and global circumstances that offer East Asian countries good lessons and opportunities to cooperate include energy resource sharing. That Russian Far East region has vast energy resources that ideally could help to fuel the population centers of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. But getting together on those is non-trivial exercise. There are various opportunities for cooperation on technology development, renewable energy, energy efficiency, pollution control. They can address trans-boundary air pollution, climate change, acid rain, and so using clean development mechanisms as financing opportunity is also a possibility.

 

Conservation of shared environmental resources, whether they are marine resources, rivers, seas, biodiversity, avian flyways, there are a number of problems to be solved by cooperation in the environmental area. Nuclear fuel cycle cooperation to reduce the impacts and costs of building nuclear, not necessarily the power plants themselves, but dealing with the waste and making sure that those costs including those related security of nuclear materials are well dealt with in a way that enhances trust and transparency...(Continued)

 

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Moderator

Tadashi Yamamoto

 

Presenters

David F. von Hippel

Brad Glosserman

 

Participants

Malcome Cook

Ralf Emmers

Xiao Fu

James Gannon

Jing Gu

Jennifer Lee

Sook-Jong Lee

Nikola Mirilovic

John Schaus

Andrew Shearer

Daqing Yang

Tiehlin Yen

Kiho Yi

Feng Zhu

 

Observer

Chaesung Chun

Dongsun Park

 

Prepared by the Asia Security Initiative Research Center at the East Asia Institute. The East Asia institute, an Asia Security Initiative core institution, acknowledges the MacArthur Foundation for its generous grant and continued support. The East Asia Institute takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the Korean government.