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ConClusion Pritam Singh and Michael Wesley THE coming century will not, as many commentators claim, be the Asian century, but the Asia-Pacific century — the period in which not just China and India, but also Vanuatu, Nauru, the Solomon Islands and Niue will march, arm in arm, to the place in the global sun that population (China, India), quality of resorts (Vanuatu), density of incontinent pigeons (Nauru) and some other, unrelated things (Niue) have made theirs by right of birth. That is why Kevin Rudd’s idea for an Asia-Pacific community is so brilliant. APEC, ASEAN, ASEAN Plus Three, the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asian Summit aside, the need for more and better institutions in this region has never been more acute. By 2020 each country must aim to be attached to at least 10 region-wide institutions. Laos, Mongolia and Papua New Guinea, for instance, must strengthen their triangular dialogue over water scarcity and fish, making sure not to exacerbate Chinese fears of “encirclement” by an alliance of fish-poor quasi-autocracies. Bhutan, Bangladesh and Brunei must form a trilateral security summit around the fact their names all start with B. There must be a quadrilateral dialogue over food security, and a seven-course degustation menu to go with it. The Six-Party Talks must be subsumed within the ASEAN Regional Forum and turned into a bi-annual cocktail event. The Indian Premier League must be expanded to include Japan, Indonesia and Australia in a concert of cricket- and non-cricket-playing democracies: where negotiation through diplomatic channels on the great issues of the day may have failed, negotiation through sledging will almost certainly succeed. Exhibiting an acerbic wit that would not have gone down very well with international relations specialists, let alone the Rudd administration, which seemed to recommend a European Union-style body for the Asia-Pacific, 361 362 Pritam Singh and Michael Wesley Aaron Timms’s tongue-in-cheek op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald of 11 June 2008 (“Asia-Pacific — Too Cool to be Just Square”) provides a useful reality check on the envelope of multilateralism, “community-building”, and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. In an era of regionalism and multilateralism, the ambitious nature of a trilateral study to string Australia, ASEAN, and India into coherence was destined to be challenging. Australia, the ASEAN countries, and India all emerged into foreign policy independence in the aftermath of the Pacific War, but despite seminal early collaborations, such as the Colombo Plan and the Bandung Conference, each went its separate ways during the second half of the twentieth century. Australia, despite being interested at an early stage in forging an Asia-Pacific institution with the newly independent, non-communist states of Asia, instead gravitated under the shadow of the Cold War towards a close identification with the Western alliance — a position repeatedly criticized by Indian policymakers. The non-communist states of Southeast Asia elected to come together to form a cohesive and resilient regional community. This project absorbed them in fleshing out and maturing their intramural relations at the expense of engaging external players such as Australia and India. India became a leader of the non-aligned movement, and, therefore, highly suspicious of the regionalism or alliances of the Cold War, and was later embroiled in a series of disputes and rivalries on the subcontinent. But with the start of a new century, these habits of foreign policy have become less pervasive, and Australia, ASEAN, and India have each discovered a much more compelling interest in one another. Three factors, in particular, have driven this process. Two of these — the changing logics of regional organization and the rise of serious transnational threats and risks — form the basis for the chapters of this volume. A third — the growing regional influence of a rising China — is referred to repeatedly by several of the volume’s authors, but not addressed specifically as a specific cause for the emerging triangular rapprochement among Australia, ASEAN, and India. But in considering the rise of China explicitly, we can see much more clearly why the subject matter of this volume is of enduring importance for policymakers and scholars. China represents for Australia, ASEAN, and India, a beguiling combination of opportunity and challenge. Each has seen its trade and investment flows with China boom, and now increasingly sees its own prosperity tied to China’s continued economic development — and weathering of the global financial crisis. But each is also challenged by...

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