Too often, we see East Asia only from an economic perspective, marveling at the undeniable success of China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and South Korea. Yet these nations have another story to tell, one that owes less to current economic performance than to much older instincts: nationalism and ethnic resentment, the forces that kindled World War I in Sarajevo. Today, those forces underlie disputes in places that we ignore or know nothing about, such as the Senkaku Islands, the Dokdo Islands, and the Spratly archipelago. And those disputes may spark military conflicts between rival Asian countries.
Such thinking goes against the theory that trade must soothe centuries-old enmities, that commerce annihilates even the temptation of war. Isn’t this the lesson of Jean Monnet’s brilliant vision, the European Union? Wars disappeared in Europe when replaced by trade. And Asian countries certainly cooperate with one another commercially; the products that we buy after they’re exported from one Asian country or another are actually composed of pieces that travel from factory to factory in China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Read Full Article »