China and East Asia 2004

Alternative Futures?

Given the size of the aforementioned problems, one wonders why Northeast Asia basically has been at peace since the End of History. Realists would explain this with relatively stable military balances on the Korean Peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait. Economic Liberals would point to the great extent of mutual complementarity and interdependences. Institutionalists would expect both to gradually translate themselves into mechanisms that could soften the impact of the kind of strategic realignment that one expects to take place in Korea.

At the same time, however, domestic dynamics have played an ever increasing role in intraregional relations with both authoritarian government and democratisation lending themselves to new nationalisms. These may be mutually exclusive as in the Taiwan Strait or mutually reinforcing as in Korea, yet it remains true that they weaken both traditional power balances and new interdependences while not necessarily providing for alternative peaceful settings.

Rather than making the PRC new regional hegemon at the US's expense, these domestic dynamics leave China with little choice but let itself be regionally engaged while trying to slowly free all of East Asia, if not the Far East, from Washington's embrace. Peking's recent diplomatic activism in Korea and free trade proposals made vis-à-vis Asean and Central Asia, while pointing into such a direction and somewhat benefiting from the Bush administration's more military approach, would still have to deal with a number of uncertainties. Among these one would mention the continuusly weak foundations for meaningful regionalisms, and the continuously weak weak foundations of the PRC itself both of which, as can be observed from the Taiwanese and partly from the Japanese cases, are both origin and result of domestic dynamics that remind us of early 19th century Europe rather than Pacific century Asia. At the same time, the newly industrialised part of the region has been changing faster than China itself so that expectations to use it as a bulwark against political globalisation could well be mistaken. If there is sufficient time and if the PRC witnesses a basically peaceful evolution, it could at some point inspire an alternative to Pax Americana. Otherwise, East Asia would face an unpleasant choice between Washington and Peking and would not necessarily opt for Peking.