APEC CASE STUDY: A LESSON TO BE LEARNED

This section is the view on APEC as a specific case study after looking on how U.S., Japan, China, and other countries’ involvement in Asia Pacific region contribute to the challenges and opportunities in the regionalism process in the previous sections. In this connection, there would be ways to deal with this topic by looking at countries as a whole within an organization in Asia Pacific. So, APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) is a good poster to illustrate what are the determinants contribution to regionalism in Asia Pacific. APEC was chose as a case study because so far it’s the only institution in the region, which has the region’s name “Asia-Pacific” in its title. Is it a challenge or opportunity or both challenge and opportunity? The degree of opportunity or challenge contributed to regionalism can be a strength or weakness of an organization. For instance, if APEC has more strength, it will provide more opportunities to regional building process, and in contrast for the weakness. By doing that, many measurements will be introduced and evaluated.

APEC actually help maintaining peace and stability in the region, even though their objectives were written down so. APEC is a board economics members that bring the three China, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, for meeting and discussing together. APEC also provide opportunities for Japan to rebuild its relation with China and Korea as well as the conduit for United States to have institutionalized process in the region. The second argument that we should look at is the forum that bring all APEC members and other related member to discuss for economic growth that facilitate by the trade liberalization through the commitment of free trade and investment in the region (Hu R. W., 2009). This process can be defined as the top-down approach regionalism since this opportunity can be done inside APEC ministerial discussion but the outcome might be the prosperity of the region and beyond. The third, the good platform of confidence building measurement (CBM) in Asia Pacific is provided by APEC (Richard W. H, 2009). Although CBM is practiced in ASEAN but to Asia Pacific, APEC is the first organ that putting CBM on to its agenda for providing platform to effectively respond on priority issue that pop up in the region both political and economic. This plat form can bring power country in the region come together for dialogue discussion on regional political and economic issue. This means that the APEC’s CBM is an effective tool in bringing the opportunities of regional integration more important. Moreover, forth, the Bogor declaration in 1994 issued by APEC leaders in title of “Declaration of Common Resolve” which adopted the idea of “Open Regionalism” that has been described in the APEC’s Eminent Person Group’s 2013 report. This declaration is a merge concept with open regionalism for the purpose of long-term regional economic integration goal in Pacific Rim region by reducing the trade barriers for the free flow of goods, services, capital, and investment within the region (Coyle W., & Wang Z., n.d.), which means that the developed country should completely liberalize their economies by 2010 and while by 2020 others members should fully liberalize their economies too. So, this region-widening of economies liberalization by 2020 is consider as a good example of economic willingness based integration.

            However, according to John Ravenhill, there are two episodes to illuminate APEC’s weaknesses during its formative years. That is the APEC Investment Code with the purpose of encouraging and facilitating the sorts of investment flows, but it cannot implement its agenda. The second episode is the failure of Early Voluntary Sectorial Liberalization (EVSL) where each member cannot practice as what the EVSL is. In between, APEC also faces challenges as the emerging difficulties and those cons mostly are come from the process itself. The challenges caused by the concept of open regionalism because at the beginning there were only little members, so everything seems to be alright, but, APEC keeps expanding by including new members to the organization such as Russia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Papua New Guinea since 1995 (Hu R. W., 2009). Thus, logically analyzing, as the amount of members is bigger, the internal cohesion will also decrease. Then, it is pretty sure that the goals or target of open regionalism will hardly reach a consensus for a desirable future. Furthermore, another challenge is the growing tension within members, thus collective action is quite poor (Bendebka R, 2012). Since the imbalance of economic levels because APEC’s members consists of developed and developing countries and the diversity of political and social value show that APEC might lose its sight to the targeted goals.

            In short, the regionalism process in Asia Pacific has been altered by the contribution of APEC. According to the above investigation, APEC not only provide opportunities to the process but also some major challenges. There are many of opportunities that base on the strength of APEC such as the place for forum where discussion for solution to regional integration, standard platform of confident building measure (CBM) that bring major power come together as a whole, and open regionalism framework which economic integration by 2020 being hold. While, some challenges emerge due to the weakness of APEC in coordinating and controlling their members since the expanding size lead to poor in collective action.