Where formal, legal agreements are harder to achieve, even in Europe, people have tried to build security through more informal mechanisms intended to create greater openness and transparency. This is evolving as a hopeful feature in arms control in the Middle East and is one of the few areas of success for the CSCE. The essential argument for openness is that it avoids the necessity of identifying adversaries formally and makes it easier to solve problems of loss of face, because states are required to make concessions to common sense rather than to sworn adversaries. The claimed value of openness is said to be that the more all sides know about the military planning of others, the less paranoia is likely to get the better of them. The logic seems impeccable.

And yet East Asians have even found this minimal form of security building to be enormously difficult. As a result, East Asia's level of international society, at least as manifest in the extent of its formal security accords, is less developed than anywhere in the world, bar only Africa. To take a striking example, while East Asia has some of the most prosperous, literate, and sophisticated societies in the world, the region's governments cannot bring themselves to publish basic data on defense doctrine and military spending.

Various explanations have been offered for this seemingly odd behavior. It has been suggested that East Asians do not need formal transparency because they have informal ways of reducing risks. The ASEAN Regional Forum and other regional dialogues concerning the South China Sea have been held out as examples of how the informal system works. But when the arrangements are tested, as they were in the case of China's seizure of Mischief Reef from the Philippines in January 1995, few of the informal mechanisms seemed to operate. Or did they?

Living With China

What happened in January-February 1995 illuminates how security thinking really operates in the region. China had agreed with ASEAN in 1992 that it would not change the status quo in the South China Sea, and so it was clever enough to seize territory where it only had to use force against fishermen. Precisely because there was no mechanism to ensure transparency (e.g., regular surveillance of disputed territory), China was able to create new facts on the ground (when it is above the tides) without a formal challenge or any military response from the Philippines. When the Philippine government eventually discovered the violation of its territory, it faced the difficult task of compelling a Chinese withdrawal rather than simply deterring action. Not surprisingly for such a weak country, the Philippines chose not to mount such a physical challenge. Neither did the Philippines formally request that either its ASEAN allies or the United States come to its support. The result was that no leader in the region (including the normally outspoken Australian Foreign Minister, who was touring the region at the time) chose to speak out against the Chinese action.

It is true that this sort of behavior did keep the peace, but it was the peace of appeasement. It was easy to demonstrate that East Asians could avoid war through informal means, but then so could Neville Chamberlain. The very informality and lack of openness in the policies of the states of the region was critical in ensuring that nothing was done to meet the Chinese challenge. Had there been greater transparency, these states might have been confronted with tough choices. In the event, they were able to pretend that none existed.

The mischief on the reef in 1995 suggests that there is a deeper explanation for the absence of even minimal measures of transparency in East Asian arms control. It seems more likely that all states in the region recognize that they face a possibly overwhelming security challenge from China in the coming years. The ASEAN states in particular seem to have calculated that there is nothing much they can do to halt China's acquisition of territory that it claims as its own. They have thus preemptively chosen discretion over valor. They calculate, although it may be a self-fulfilling calculation, that the United States will not protect them from China, and know that they are too weak on their own to confront China. In short, this is a strategy where obfuscation rather than clarity has become a virtue and therefore even minimal formal agreements on security have been avoided.

This explanation should not be seen as excessively cynical, for it operates in other aspects of ASEAN states behavior. For example, there have been more than two decades of ASEAN promises of greater internal free trade, but the percentage of intra-ASEAN trade--something between 20 and 25 percent--has remained stubbornly unchanged. The reality behind the rhetoric is that economic policy, as with security policy, aims to serve narrow national interests. These are all new states, many of them still weak, whose governments still see themselves as active state builders. They recognize that their prosperity depends on the ability to make headway in a competitive world economy, which in turn requires them to pay lip service to the virtues of openness and interdependence. But the reality is that they distrust both virtues and suspect that openness, in particular, is a way for the more developed world to weaken and control them.

Not all East Asians behave as do the ASEAN states. South Korea and Japan take a more robust attitude toward China and both are keener to develop genuinely multilateral security measures. (Seoul and Tokyo have expressed sharp displeasure at China's nuclear tests, and have been very active in pushing for a UN Conventional Arms Register and for transparency measures.) Interestingly, both are more developed states and in many senses have been modernizing for longer than most Southeast Asians. Of course, both South Korea and Japan have some way to go in opening up to the global market economy, but at least in security terms they have seen more virtue in transparency. Could the explanation for the differences between Northeast and Southeast Asia have more to do with levels of development? It is certainly a plausible argument that the more advanced development of democracy in Northeast as opposed to Southeast Asia has something to do with the longer experience with economic modernization and the emergence of a vocal middle class. The larger size and power of Japan and South Korea may also have something to do with their propensity to take a more robust attitude toward China. (This may also help explain why, of all the ASEAN states, Indonesia and Vietnam are by far the most critical of China.)

To be fair, Southeast Asians do face a more objectively difficult security problem than do Northeast Asians. Southeast Asian states are generally smaller and weaker, and, with their ethnic compositions messier and domestic insecurities higher, they have what one may fairly call more complex patterns of worry. Worst of all, they are first in the firing line as China extends control over disputed territory. In the absence of any countervailing power, the Southeast Asians have chosen the realpolitik strategy of pre-emptive kow-tow, formerly known in the European cultural zone as "Finlandization", and now to some political scientists as "bandwagoning."

Security in Asia, Not Asian Security

Of course there are differences in the way states approach security, but these variations are usually better explained by the specific conditions of the region rather than by culture. In other words, the problem has to do with the security of East Asia as a region, not East Asian security.

In the case of East Asia, the most striking feature of the region is the looming power of China and that, more than culture, explains most of the distinctive aspects of contemporary East Asian security problems. But the difficulty of dealing with Chinese power, while understandable, is a bit embarrassing under the circumstances, and thus many East Asians prefer to take cover in cultural explanations for their timidity.

They may also do so because they are emboldened by their economic success to believe that they have found some unique secret of security success. Of equal, but less often stated, explanatory importance is the fact that cultural arguments provide cover for regimes that feel fragile and fear political pluralism. Those who insist that Asian security is culturally defined often fail to grasp the fact that societies, and especially modern societies, are composed of people with multiple identities. Indeed, it is the essence of the evolution of stable societies--in East Asia, as elsewhere--that as they modernize, they also evolve into complex civil societies with tolerance for differences among identities. East Asians, like other new members of the developed world, should seriously consider whether what they are about is not creating something that is a rival to the West, but rather adding new features to the mŽlange that is loosely called "the West", or the modern world. Appeals to simplistic nationalism, or even more simplistic regionalism, are often heard in modernizing societies that are not sure of their place in the world but know at some level at least that their values are rapidly changing. It is the mark of a modern society that, as it develops a well-grounded civil society, it leaves much of this narrow ethno-speak behind. With current rhetoric about East Asian values in mind, one may profitably recall Elena Bonner's eloquent reply to Alya Solzhenitsyn: "Don't give me that Russian people shit! You make breakfast for your own children, not for the whole Russian people!"

Essay Types: Essay