Facing Asia in the new millennium: Brian Lynch provides a New Zealand perspective on efforts to create an East Asian community.

• Author: Lynch, Brian

It is timely to do a stocktake of New Zealand's relations with Asia, particularly of the way the relationship has evolved over the past 60 years and where its future direction might lie. By any measure, the change has been remarkable. It is a bit like switching the eyepiece of a long-distance and sharply focused telescope, targeting a few discrete objects, for the panoramic view through a wide-angle lens.

As a few New Zealanders felt in the mid-1940s, a lot did in the mid-1970s, and many of us do today, we could now be an the edge of another seismic shift in the relationship. Without wanting to over-play the geological metaphor, one senses the tectonic plates of regional politics and its infrastructure are on the move again. How far might that process go? Where is it headed and with what eventual consequences? These are crucially important questions for New Zealand.

Inevitably there are differing assessments of the current political tremors in the region: what they all mean, whether they will in fact lead to fundamental landscape changes; whether that should even be encouraged to happen.

The wider Asian group of nations and their near neighbours in Australia and New Zealand are facing a defining period ahead. By my reading there is a certain inexorability about the process. A definite momentum can be discerned, even if at a quick glance it may at times be barely perceptible. Of one thing we can be sure: if a major reordering of Asia's regional architecture does in fact occur, New Zealand will be swept up in it in ways that would have been unimaginable six decades ago, or even 30 years ago.

Harsh realities

At the end of the Second World War, New Zealand had to contemplate, absorb and come to terms with some harsh realities. They posed an unwanted challenge to us as a fledgling on the global scene. It was one of reconciling the European segment of our recent national past with the new awareness thrust on us by the lessons of the conflict: namely, that our destiny was no longer one immersed in the comfortable cocoon of common heritage and shared interests, which had helped to overcome the separation of distance from colonial points of origin. It would be rather a future determined largely by the inescapable facts of our physical location.

The post-war era was a painful growing-up and maturing experience for New Zealand, one that many adolescent states have gone through on the path to nationhood. We like to believe it was character-building. Certainly, as a nation it was identity-forming.

The 'Emerging New Zealand' process is continuing to unfold. It is being driven by a number of factors. Three come readily to mind. One is a keener and increasingly focused appreciation that our place in a globalising world is a modest one. If as a country you account for 0.24 per cent of the world's population and 0.27 per cent of global trade, it is best not to entertain too many illusions of grandeur. Few other nations deem it prudent to step aside when they observe New Zealand on the march.

No immunity

Nor, however, can we afford the luxury of a fortress mentality. This is the second point. Despite the constancy of our geography, New Zealand has no immunity to the ebb and flow of global forces. Accompanying that heightened sense of 'place' in the context to which I have referred is the realisation that we are as dependent today as at any time in the past two centuries on making our way and earning a living in an uncertain and uncompromising international arena.

Experience has shown that means, more often than not, joining with a group of 'like-minded'--if we really want, that is, to influence the thinking and behaviour of others on the things that matter most to us. This acceptance that we do not wield a big stick in any shape or form but work most effectively in concert with congenial partners is very relevant to the New Zealand perspective on present trends and developments in Asia.

And thirdly, of huge significance, too, is the reality of the society in New Zealand we are becoming. It is not necessary to look only at the composition of our national sports teams to be aware of how diverse our population is growing to be. The annual honours boards of academic achievement; the ethnic representation on local and city councils, in the judiciary and at the highest levels of state representation; the cultural mix now engaged in private sector performance and governance: all these indices benchmark the broad-based, truly multicultural society now well on the way to being a pervasive fact of contemporary life in New Zealand.

Constructive effort

That evolutionary process is one to which the contribution of people of Asian origin is constructive and profound. They make up a relatively small portion (7 per cent) of our current population, but that share is expected to rise by 145 per cent in the next fifteen years. It takes another genuinely multicultural...