Where East & West Meet

It is impossible to calculate wisdom. You can count the number of people in a room, add up the amount of peer reviewed publications, or years spent living among different cultures, even an average IQ. If you were minded, you could use these metrics to get an idea of whether you were surrounded by knowledge. Wisdom is unscientific – it’s understanding, an acceptance of different perspectives, fairness, integrity, realism and idealism (sometimes simultaneously), the ability to deal with complexity yet find clarity.

The Ditchley Park and Asia Pacific Foundations gathered in Vancouver recently to consider “The Asia Pacific – An Agenda for New Challenges”. The subject may seem un-surprising. Discussions about the growth of Asian economies, and the strategic shifts this causes, have been ubiquitous in government, academia, and media for a decade or more.

But ‘new’ is the key word. Issues of socioeconomics and governance, trade and investment, and strategic security, have moved into a new phase. Many of the Asian economies have now risen, and continue to do so. This is no longer a projection. In China’s case in particular this has already brought large-scale urbanisation. The middle-class has emerged and swelled. Challenges of water, food, energy and environmental security, as well as demography, are already at hand.

Double-digit growth is slowing (although I consider ca 7% still strong), potentially leaving un-satisfied public expectations in its wake. In parts of China, and other Asia Pacific countries, many have been left behind, creating greater inequality. Growth may create wealth, but it does not automatically address distribution. This in turn places further pressure on society and government.

A widely accepted answer to some of these challenges is to increase trade and investment integration, facilitated by a network of bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). An ability to use TLAs is clearly helpful. These can also be positive drivers of social and regulatory reform, raising standards of behaviour from production to governance; as well as delivering the opportunity for businesses to increase productivity and profit.

Yet FTAs must be considered in the context of international security architecture. Whilst driven by socio-economic aims (if you are a purist), they also have the potential to either dissipate or embed geo-political tensions. And unless handled well, FTAs have the potential to make domestic socio-economic challenges more acute.

If all this seems academic, distant even, it is worth challenging the perception that Pacific Asia still lies around 120 degrees east; that these are issues over there. Pacific Asia is now part of the global fabric. It is in Washington DC and Ottawa and London. It is in Vancouver, a city where east and west meet. On a rostrum in Stanley Park, I’ve watched military veterans and Canadian Royal Air Force Cadets parading – the veterans greying and Caucasian like me; the cadets, young and eager and majority Asian. In the Yukon, the Filipino population has tripled in the last few years. HSBC’s Canada HQ is here.

We must also ensure these new dynamics augment rather than replace longer established relationships. Canada still has the world’s longest bilateral border, with the US. And it is still connected to Europe, with daily direct flights from its furthest major city to London. It has not spent years negotiating a complex trade deal (CETA) with the EU for nothing. These realities are no less important. What has changed is the location and impact of Pacific Asia.

On all of this, different opinions and options are easy to come by; conclusions and recommendations are not. Like rivers taking the fastest course to the sea, the straightest path may not represent the best way forwards. Yet ensuring we make the correct decisions, can only be achieved with wisdom – engagement with each other, ensuring common interpretations, and looking deeply at the complex rather than ignoring it. Whilst the potential for costly errors remains great, as one of the Ditchley delegates said in closing, “good diplomacy can handle all of these issues.”