ABSTRACT
The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum is in many ways the definitive Asia-Pacific organization. Its very name is suggestive of a more broadly conceived view of the region in question, even if it is surprisingly modest about what it might be designed to achieve. APEC’s troubled history is illustrative of the difficulty in agreeing on not only the purpose to which institutions should be put, but the very nature of the region they are supposed to represent. Significantly, there is no mention of politics in the organization’s title, nor is there any sense of what APEC actually is. As former Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, famously quipped, APEC is four adjectives in search of a noun. It has become common to attach the word “forum” to APEC, mainly because of the great sensitivity about what the words “community” or “organization” might imply about both the nature and extent of the region in question, and about the status of other existing institutions like ASEAN. From the outset, therefore, there have been competing views about what APEC should do, who should be in it, and its modus operandi; potentially conflicting perspectives that have never been satisfactorily resolved and which have severely limited its effectiveness as a consequence. However, despite its limited impact on both the practical affairs of
the “Asia-Pacific,” and its steadily declining importance, APEC provides an important, albeit inadvertent, insight into the difficulties of institution-building in a part of the world that contains very divergent political systems, economies that are wildly different in size and degree of development, and significantly different ideas about what sort of policy frameworks might be appropriate for managing domestic development and intra-regional relations. APEC also illustrates how influential ASEAN has been, even if only in effectively nullifying much of APEC’s potential. As we shall see, APEC has somewhat reluctantly borrowed elements of the ASEAN way: such was the price of ensuring
that potential East Asian members actually participated. The consequence has been to undermine APEC’s capacity to promote trade liberalization in the way many of its architects had hoped. If nothing else, therefore, APEC provides a case study in the difficulties of institutional consolidation and a reminder that size matters. The principal comparative lesson that flows from this chapter and the preceding one is that, even though ASEAN has suffered from limited state capacity and a relatively impoverished membership, it has endured and exercised some ideational influence because of its relative coherence. APEC, by contrast, began life as something of a compromise and its limited authority has been steadily undermined ever since.
