By Scott A. Snyder
Is Europe’s past destined to be Asia’s future?
Henry Kissinger offered a sobering observation last February in Munich when he suggested that the uptick in geopolitical rivalry between China and Japan reminded him of nineteenth century Europe. Mindful of the negative consequences of such a conflict for his own country, South Korea’s foreign minister Yun Byung-se referenced Kissinger’s observation in the opening to his own speech last week at a conference in Seoul, co-sponsored by the Asan Institute and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The conference explicitly sought lessons from Europe’s past experience with the establishment of Confidence and Security Building Mechanisms (CSBMs) for Park Geun-hye’s Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI), a proposal to institutionalize a process for promoting multilateral cooperation that Park is promoting as a solution to the severe distrust in the region.
The conference discussion quickly revealed multiple potential starting points for drawing European lessons for Asia: 1) Kissinger’s pre-World War I European lesson that longstanding historical grievances can magnify prospects for miscalculation and unintended escalation in the absence of mechanisms for institutional cooperation, 2) the post-World War II lessons from the establishment of the European Community accompanied by European historical reconciliation measures, principally between Germany and France, and 3) the Cold War experience of using institutions to manage crisis and defuse conflict in the four decades since the negotiation of the Helsinki Final Act. Despite the obvious recent setback in the Ukraine, SIPRI’s Ian Anthony argued that European conflict management mechanisms have contributed to prevention of escalation of conflicts that might have otherwise occurred in the absence of Europe’s extensive institutions devoted to security governance.
Many Asian observers, including most recently China’s People’s Daily, have rushed to deny the possibility of a “new cold war” in Asia. Despite Asian denials that Europe’s Cold War experience in building its own collective security institutions is applicable to Asia, it turns out that there are a number of parallels that deserve careful consideration:
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