The 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) just concluded in Mongolia.
DO YOU KNOW that ASEM was MOOTED BY SINGAPORE? ASEM was a big idea from a small country and ESM Goh Chok Tong played a key role. Here's what he did.
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Excerpt of Goh Chok Tong's speech at the S Rajaratnam Lecture on 17 Oct 2014:
"When I took over from Mr Lee Kuan Yew in 1990, survival and security concerns had receded.
18. We had stable relations with our immediate neighbours – Malaysia and Indonesia. Within the region, our neighbourhood was secure. The ASEAN member states, then just six of us, had also developed cooperative relations with one another.
19. So we shifted our foreign policy attention to increasing Singapore’s geopolitical and international economic space.
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26. The genesis of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) is an example of this - the value of understanding and aligning interests.
27. In the early 1990s, China had just begun to open up, but it was still very much shrouded by a bamboo curtain. At the same time, East Asian economies were growing rapidly and there was much international interest in the region.
28. While the so-called tiger economies were known to the West, few countries had direct links to the Chinese leadership, or had acquired an understanding of developments in China.
29. In October 1994, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held its regional meeting in Singapore with the theme of Asia-Europe Cooperation. That inspired me to think about linking Asia with Europe. I believed that the Europeans would be interested in forging closer links with China, the awakened dragon, and other Asian economies; and certainly, Asia wanted more investments from Europe. Singapore was well-placed to play this role; we had established strong links with the Chinese leadership, and were well-regarded as a reliable interlocutor.
30. MFA’s concept paper which we circulated to prospective members explained the strategic rationale:
“Three major centres of economic power – North America, Europe and Asia – are likely to dominate global trade and investment activities well into the 21st Century. It is vital to ensure that there are well-established channels of communication between the three centres. North America is linked to Europe through the rich network of trans-Atlantic institutions. East Asia and North America are linked by APEC and other Pacific Basin Networks. What is palpably absent is a strong high-level Europe-Asia link. This missing link needs to be bridged.”
31. The timing of my official visit to France in October was fortuitous. The French were due to assume the European Union Presidency in January 1995.
32. In a restricted meeting with French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, I outlined the ASEM proposal. He saw the strategic benefits of the proposal and agreed to bring the EU members on board.
33. In turn, I was able to canvass ASEAN leaders’ support for this a month later, when APEC held its Summit in Bogor, Indonesia. So again it was good fortune. It was an APEC Summit, but I was also thinking of ASEM.
34. At the Summit, I first sought out Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai. I explained the rationale for ASEM and then invited Thailand to host the first ASEM. He agreed. Why did Singapore not want to host it, when it came up with the idea? It’s because Thailand’s buy-in and active participation would remove any misperception that Singapore was proposing ASEM purely to boost its own international stature. After Chuan Leekpai, I briefed the other ASEAN leaders separately. They all welcomed the concept of ASEM.
35. ASEM was a big idea from a small country. We pulled it off because we did not think only of our own interests. We sold its strategic benefits to others, aligned their interests and ours, and secured their buy-in.
36. As the country which mooted ASEM, Singapore gained recognition for its strategic thinking and ability to deliver on an idea. But it would not have been possible had we not seen nor acted upon the confluence of interests between Asia and Europe.
https://www.mfa.gov.sg/
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