The way forward: Peter Kennedy provides a New Zealand perspective on patchwork governance.

• Author: Kennedy, Peter
• Position: Report

Neither the European Union nor Asia has the concerted impact upon global governance that might be expected of them, given their economic and political strength. The European Union tends to focus more on its immediate neighbourhood, whilst the leading economies in Asia, such as Japan, have favoured the role of 'status quo' powers. The biennial Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM), the first of which was held in 1996, ought to provide a context in which the pragmatism of Asia could mix with a more globally focused Europe to produce shared leadership of benefit to both. The next meeting will take place in Italy in October.

**********

In FRIDE's study of European foreign policy challenges in 2014, (1) Dr Giovanni Grevi makes the comment that 'there is a need to move beyond a definition of the neighbourhood as a region centred on Europe', acknowledging, however, that an alternative paradigm is not easy to define. He refers to the shifting dynamic from attraction to transaction, noting that most governments around Europe are asking what the European Union can do for them, not what they can do to move closer to Europe. The second aspect he touches on is the need to extend the narrow geographic definition of the European Unions neighbourhood to a broader geo-political area. This recognises that a major handicap of the European Union is that it tends to think in regional rather than global terms, and this has to change. Despite that, however, there is a perception amongst some--even in Asia--that Europe, perhaps because of the success of its experiment with regional governance, tends to be more confident when it comes to expressing positions on global governance. No lesser person than Kishore Mahbubani, with his colleague Simon Chesterman, argues that:

The challenge to redesigning global governance is that Asians are generally 'status quo' powers. The rising powers are reluctant to lead, and the falling powers are unable to lead. (2) It is a nice comment, if you are prone to divide all powers into either rising or falling when looking for leadership. But there are significant powers that are neither rising nor falling, that might be described as 'current powers', where leadership is, or has been in the past, apparently lacking. The classic case in Europe was Germany, which was a major economic power for the second half of the 20th century, but chose--even as it contributed mightily to the establishment of the European Communities--to take a low profile approach to regional let alone global leadership. The term 'apparently lacking' is used deliberately because behind the scenes Germany exerted much of the power that we see more openly today. A 'tough on the issue, tough on the person' approach, as the 2002 German Globe study described it, was fundamental to the high performance direction of the German economy both in good times and bad.

German dominance

Today, in the 21st century, there is no doubt...