Rejuvenating APEC: Mark Talbot, reviewing New Zealand's hosting of APEC in 2021, argues that it reinvigorated the organisation.

• Author: Talbot, Mark

It is quite a dizzying thing to try to encapsulate Aotearoa New Zealand's leadership of APEC in 2021. The reason is that it was genuinely a whole of government effort, involving the prime minister and half of her Cabinet and more government agencies than I can count. For this first time in history, New Zealand was forced to host a diplomatic process from the very beginning to the very end virtually: there was not one face-to-face meeting in our entire APEC host year. There were three buckets of achievement. First, we left APEC in a better place than we found it; second, we were obliged to contend with COVID-19; and third, we made a uniquely New Zealand contribution to the regional discussion.

I introduce APEC with four numbers. The first is 21--the number of economies inside APEC, ranging in size from the world's three biggest economies (the United States, China and Japan) right down to the smaller economies like Brunei Darussalam, New Zealand (the second smallest economy) and Papua New Guinea. APEC accounts for 60 per cent of global GDP, so it is quite a unique place at the table that New Zealand gets being able to be there with the big boys

The second number is one billion--the number of people who have been lifted above the poverty line. GDP per capita has doubled in our region since APEC was founded. Prosperity has grown faster in the Asia-Pacific region than in any other part of the world, partly thanks to the APEC effect. This region's model of trade and investment integration, buttressed by market-based economic reforms, has helped the region's governments to get the right recipe for economic success. And since APEC accounts for well over 70 per cent of New Zealand economic flows, that economic growth has been enormously beneficial to us, and has under-pinned a lot of our growth in the last few decades.

My third number is 320 plus, the number of APEC meetings in any given year, culminating in the leaders' summit in November. APEC's knockers call it a perfect excuse for a conversation or, worse still, aging politicians enjoying cocktails. I kind of roll with the punches on these nasty little jibes because the truth of the matter is there is a whole lot of value that comes from those cocktails, and it comes through the conversations that we have. APEC is an organisation with a secretariat, for sure, but my experience, and I know that of other colleagues, has been that its effectiveness really lies in the fact that it is a process. It is a series of meetings where people come together, exchange ideas and build a community of shared views around the right economic choices that will drive all of their economies forward. And, of course, they do deals bilaterally in the margins of APEC.

The fourth number, and a really significant one, is 1989. This is the year in which APEC was founded. It also happens to be the year the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed two years later, and in 1992 Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, predicting that Western liberalism would be universalised. The European Union came into being in 1993, and the World Trade Organisation emerged in 1995. So it was a period in history when liberalism was triumphant.

Unwinding order

In reminding ourselves that APEC is a creature of that unipolar moment, it is important to consider how quickly that era of peak liberal internationalism began to unwind. The 2000s were a decade bookended at one end by 9/11 and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and at the other end by the global financial crisis and the beginning of what became the Great Recession, a period when the precepts of market liberalism were found wanting and in which schisms were developing in unequal societies in the developed world. In particular the base was laid for a retreat from openness. Then in the 2010s we had the emergence of nationalist populisms in the United States and the United Kingdom, whilst leaders in Beijing and Moscow consolidated power around themselves.

If we were talking about the triumph of liberal democracy in 1989, we are certainly not talking about that now. Rather than unleashing...