[asia-apec 791] Yet another APEC

[Jonathan Oppenheim]

[If a right-wing newspaper like the Globe and Mail is questioning APEC...]
 
Yet another APEC sparking questions

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THE FOREIGN DESK
Yet another APEC sparking questions

Monday, October 12, 1998

PAUL KNOX

If you thought Vancouver's Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting was wild, 
wait for Kuala Lumpur. Yes, as things stand, the whole exercise, complete with 
alternative summit and quite possibly raucous protests, is to be repeated in 
Malaysia in a little more than a month.

The question is why. All along, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has 
been a reluctant participant in APEC's plan to form a Pacific Rim free-trade 
and investment regime by 2020. Now he has slapped rigid controls on his own 
economy. And he has become a human-rights laughingstock after claiming his 
finance minister gave himself a black eye after being thrown in jail.

If there were a chance that APEC could help ease the current global financial 
turbulence, the embarrassment of shoring up Dr. Mahathir might be worth it. 
Unfortunately, the record points in the opposite direction. It suggests APEC is 
capable of causing more problems than it solves.
APEC began 10 years ago as a relatively low-level forum for business networking 
and economic idea-sharing. Since 1993, the leaders' summit has been the most 
visible component. Even its most ardent boosters acknowledge that what it 
delivers, exactly, is a bit of a mystery.

A calculation of the benefits of APEC's activities will always be difficult,; 
Len Edwards, assistant deputy minister of foreign affairs who headed up Canada's 
summit planning, told a Toronto audience last year. "This poses a real 
challenge to communications experts." The basic problem is that too much of 
APEC now hangs on the leaders. In other trade forums, representatives of 
sovereign states sign hard-bargained deals that commit entire governments
and their successors, creating a transparent international framework. 
In APEC, the leaders don't even represent sovereign states. They represent 
"economies," which means, formally speaking, that they're accountable 
to no one.

Rather, APEC is a classic mutual-admiration society, where the top priority is 
not giving offence. Can you blame Indonesia's Suharto, now ousted as leader, 
for thinking he could bluff his way through an economic meltdown, after Prime 
Minister Jean Chretien and U.S. President Bill Clinton and Chinese leader 
Jiang Zemin told the world they and he were reading from the same script?

On paper, the goal of APEC is more open economies -- free, ideally, of the 
cronyism and corruption that underlay banking systems across East Asia 
throughout the boom years.  One country that at least has charted a path 
toward that end is South Korea, with stiffer bank regulation and a crackdown 
on pricing scams that kept unproductive units of huge holding companies afloat 
artificially.

But what led South Korea in that direction? Not an elaborate photo-opportunity 
for "leaders of economies," or anything anyone said in Vancouver to its 
former president, Kim Young-sam. Rather, it was an old-fashioned exercise in 
democratic decision-making -- a December election won by longtime anticorruption 
campaigner Kim Dae-jung.

South Koreans were able to choose him, and trigger his reforms, because they 
have political choice -- something for which they fought hard during decades of 
military rule. However, APEC leaders are normally silent on the subject of 
political and civil rights. It is left to the activists at the alternative summit 
to make the link between social development, human-rights issues and economic 
progress.

So peculiar is APEC that it can lead astray a paragon of transparency such as 
Canada. Never mind the pepper spray in Vancouver. All last year, environment 
and social advocates accustomed to having their views actively solicited 
found themselves shut out of pre-APEC consultations. Meanwhile, business 
leaders had free access.  As of yesterday, Mr. Clinton was still planning to 
attend the Kuala Lumpur summit, which is scheduled to run from Nov. 14 to 
Nov. 18. So was Mr. Chrétien. But presidents Joseph Estrada of the 
Philippines and B. J. Habibie of Indonesia say they may stay away.

Ottawa and Washington are watching closely. A move to change the summit's venue, 
or to postpone it, is still not out of the question.
Beyond that, if this junk won't float, isn't it time to bail out? 

E-mail: pknox at globeandmail.ca



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