On May 24-26, 2014 Shanghai hosted the 9th Shanghai Forum sponsored by the Fudan University and Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies.
The event is the key Chinese annual research and practice platform for discussion of Asia-related socio-economic, financial, infrastructure and legal problems with participation of leading international experts, famous politicians, business and civil society leaders, as well as guests from Europe, America and other regions.
The Shanghai Forum is co-organized by research universities from the United States, Japan, China, Singapore and Great Britain, as well as U.S. and German foundations, international corporations and think tanks.
The overall theme has been defined as “Economic Globalization and Asia’s Choice”, with the 2014 theme being “Asia Transforms: Identifying New Dynamics.” By the invitation of organizers of the Forum, RIAC Director General Andrey Kortunov made a report “Cooperation for Security in Asia-Pacific.”
A typical discussion of the security agenda in the Asia-Pacific region almost inevitably involves making comparisons between Asia and Europe with a logical conclusion that the latter is much more advanced and sophisticated in security matters than the former. A reference is made to the long history of European attempts to create a whole set of interlocking security institutions covering the continent, to negotiate legally binding arms control agreements, to implement intrusive verification and confidence building provisions, and so on. Nothing any close to this diverse and comprehensive set of security providing tools has ever been tried in Asia. The logical conclusion is that nations of the Asia-Pacific region should learn from the European experience and borrow at least some of the best European practices and models.
However, the recent crisis in and around Ukraine has become yet another dramatic manifestation of the fragility of the contemporary European security system. Indeed, none of the numerous security providing organizations was capable of intervening at early stages of the crisis, no confidence building measures proved to be efficient. The crisis was managed (or mismanaged) through a chain of telephone calls between Russian, European and US leaders and sporadic meetings of their respective foreign ministers. It took a couple of months to convene the Geneva meeting on Ukraine, and the outcome of the meeting was not a detailed Roadmap, but a very short and ambiguous statement subject to arbitrary interpretations by each of the signatories.
Moreover, the crisis revealed that the old Cold war approaches and perceptions were alive and well in Europe, and the ‘zero sum game’ mentality had not become obsolete in the East and the West. The Ukrainian crisis had a profound destabilizing impact on many ‘frozen conflicts’ in Europe and beyond; it also demonstrated that one should not underestimate the potential power of extreme right, nationalistic forces not just in Russia and Ukraine, but all over the European continent. Europe had always been proud of its thick network of civil society institutions, which should have helped to mitigate negative developments at the state-to-state level. However, the European civil society explicitly failed to perform this function taking the position of an idle bystander observing the escalation of the crisis. In sum, recent developments in Europe (like conflicts in the Balkans and in South Caucasus earlier) put under question the very foundations of the European security model, as it emerged over last twenty five years. In many important ways the security situation in Europe today is less stable, predictable and manageable than it was during the Cold war.
Regretfully, the recent unfortunate developments in Europe reflect broader problems that are not limited to the European continent only. Today we are witnessing a growing deficit of governance on a global scale, not confined to any particular region or a continent. The old bipolar system of international relations is gone, but it has not been replaced by a new one; the world is still searching for a new equilibrium. The first attempts to find an alternative to the Cold war system – namely, the US ambition to go after a ‘uni-polar world’ – turn out to be unsuccessful and even detrimental to their champions. And the Ukrainian crisis reminded all of us that even in Europe we have not yet found adequate answers to security challenges. The concept of a ‘non-polar world’ with more volatility and even anarchy in the international system can hardly look appealing to anyone except for irresponsible opportunity seekers and international extremists.
What does it mean for the Asia-Pacific region? What lessons – if any – should we learn from the European experience? Can Asia do any better than Europe? Is it feasible to imagine that the Asia-Pacific region is in a position to demonstrate its innovative nature not only in modern technologies and business practices, but also in its approaches to regional and global security? I do believe that the answers to all these questions are positive provided that all of us are ready to go beyond our traditional way of thinking and conventional wisdom of the past century. Let me share with you what I have in mind.
The traditional, XX-century approach to security gave supreme priority to legally binding, verifiable arms control agreements. That was true for both conventional and nuclear weapons. For instance, in Europe a critical change in the security situation in 1980s was associated with the US – Soviet agreement on intermediate range ballistic missiles, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, and the end of the Cold war was marked by signing in 1990 the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Two particular elements of arms control were especially important: the ‘arithmetic’ (specific numbers of particular weapons subject to control, reduction or elimination) and the ‘geography’ (particular geographical areas covered by the given agreement). These were the pillars of the traditional arms control approach that worked fairy well in the XX century.
However, today this model is not likely to remain particular efficient either in Europe or in Asia. In the contemporary world the sheer number of specific weapons is no longer of critical importance – qualitative factors are getting more significant than quantitative ones; the security balance is defined not by the ‘arithmetic’, but rather by the security ‘algebra’ - the efficiency of C3I infrastructure, accuracy, firepower and other non-numerical parameters of weapon systems. The security ‘geography’ is losing its central importance as well being replaced by such parameters as mobility, rapid deployment and power projection capabilities. In our nomadic world military power becomes nomadic as well, which immensely complicates any arms control negotiations. Furthermore, technological breakthroughs generate new types of weapons (e.g. drones or modern sea based cruise missiles) that are very difficult to locate, verify and to include into an arms control equation. Finally, legally binding agreements might face a lot of obstacles and procrastinations in the process of ratification by national legislations caused by complicated and controversial domestic politics.
It seems that today we should move away from traditional arms control toward a new model of security cooperation. This new model can be tested in the Asia-Pacific region and, if successful, can be applied in future to other regions of the world. The new model, in my view, should be based not on physical reductions of particular types of weapons, but rather on practical steps leading to more predictability, transparency and more coordination of defense postures of major players in the region. Trust generates security, not the other way round. To have more trust we need to know more about each other security concerns, aspirations, intentions and decisions. Specifically, I mean consorted attempts (1) to reconcile our respective threat perceptions, (2) to release more information about our defense R&D and procurement plans, (3) to make public more detailed defense budgets, (4) to increase the scale of mutual observations to our military exercises, (5) to upgrade both the mil-to-mil contacts and cooperation in defense industries’ field. If we assume that security concerns of major powers in the Asian-Pacific region mostly coincide, such ‘soft’ approach to security cooperation in the region might prove to be more practical and realistic than the traditional ‘hard’ arms control focused approach.
Needless to say, this approach will require a lot of commitment and patience. Given the sensitivity of security matters it is hard to imagine that everybody will be ready to go transparent and public on these matters. However, there are some cases, when this model was tested in Asia and proved to be spectacularly successful. Let me refer to the Russian – Chinese border accommodation, which arguably remains the most significant conventional arms reduction agreement in the world. As we know, Russia and China did not negotiate particular numbers of troops, tanks, artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers, combat aircraft and helicopters to be stationed on each side of their common border. Instead, they started with building confidence, resolving remaining territorial disputes, sharing defense information, launching joint military exercises, promoting cooperation in defense industries, etc. The ultimate result of all these activities is that today the border is drastically demilitarized and the probability of a trans-border Russian-Chinese conflict is as low as that of a US – Canadian military clash across the Great Lakes. From a traditional point of view, this arrangement is by definition inferior to a standard legally binding ‘hard’ arms control agreement, but the reality is that neither side feels less secure with a ‘soft’ arrangement that it has.
Another important task that we face in the Asia-Pacific region today is the task of merging our respective development and security agendas. For a long time these two agendas have been kept separate: the idea has been not to jeopardize economic cooperation in the region by linking it to security problems that we still have here. As a result, today we face a paradoxical situation: the Asia-Pacific region is a region of a very deep economic interdependence with the highest levels of intra-regional flows of goods, technologies, finances in the world, and, at the same time, it is a region with the fastest growing defense expenditures, the nuclear proliferation threat, booming arms trade and unresolved territorial disputes. It might well have been the right decision for the second half of the XX century, which can partially explain the phenomenon of the Asian economic miracle.
But is it possible to keep the security and the development agendas separate from each other for an indefinite period of time? I doubt it very much. Not only because unresolved security problems may become a serious obstacle on the way of further economic integration, but also because the XXI century security agenda in the Asia-Pacific region is getting more and more saturated with economic and social matters. Most of the problems that we inherited from the previous era – territorial disputes, national grievances and animosities rooted in our common history, problems of divided nations, - arguably do not have an explicit economic or development dimension. But emerging challenges – cyber security, food and environmental security, migrations and energy security, trans-border crime and drugs traffic - do have such a dimension. Even threats of political radicalism, religious fundamentalism and terrorism are closely linked to demographic, social and economic developments in our region.
To integrate the security and development agendas in the Asia-Pacific is a formidable task, which will require log term coordinated efforts of all responsible players in the region. Each of our countries has its own list of problems to address. However, without security development remains fragile and constrained, and without development security is unsustainable. Let us work together to bring these two dimensions of regional international system into harmony with each other. Maybe, we will be in a position conceptualize and implement innovative patterns of security – development integration that will serve not just our region, but other parts of the world as well.
