KUALA LUMPUR. (RIA Novosti political analyst Dmitry Kosyrev.) The inaugural East Asian summit came on the heels of the first Russian-ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur on December 13, which discussed the current issues of Moscow's political and business partnership with 10 Southeast Asian nations.
December 14 saw a historic event: the forum laid the groundwork for a new international institution.
Addressing both forums, President Vladimir Putin spoke about different aspects of Russia's relations with Southeast Asia. At the East Asian Summit (EAS) he outlined the concepts of Russia's future cooperation with the community of states, which is gradually taking shape in this part of the world. The gist of his speech was as follows: as the only nation with huge and so far untapped hydrocarbon resources in Asia, Russia could guarantee power supplies to Asia and the Pacific.
Countries represented in Kuala Lumpur are obviously eager to have access to Russian energy carriers. Japan and China are engaged in intricate struggle for the itineraries of Russia's "Eastern" oil and gas pipelines, and India has markedly increased its investment into Russian power engineering. These three countries are all parties of the East Asian forum.
At the forthcoming G8 summit in Moscow Russia will talk about supplying the West with energy carriers, having a well-developed network of gas and oil pipelines, at least, in Europe. But in the East, Russia will have to start this talk by outlining models of partnership on huge expanses of the East. This is what Putin suggested in Kuala Lumpur on a par with Russian technologies to prevent natural disasters and deal with their aftermath.
Moscow has a good claim for equitable participation in forming a unified region which, as the Malaysian New Straits Times wrote, will account for up to 40% of the world GDP by the year 2040.
Russian membership in the future summits is a diplomatic effort which is not very clear to the uninitiated. The East Asian summit, a brain-child of Malaysian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, had its trial session here, and the region's diplomats will discuss at length different aspects of the project launched in Kuala Lumpur and its future participants.
Apart from ASEAN, the current forum included from the very start China, India, Japan, South Korea, as well as Australia and New Zealand. The ideological affinity of the latter two to ASEAN was a source of disputes.
Should the new structure be involved in the economic integration of the Pacific if there is APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), a forum which includes the United States and Latin American countries, but leaves out India?
India's growing ties with ASEAN emphasize that the East Asian summit is a strictly Asian forum, rather than Pacific. Russia fits in well here, as is seen from its growing mutual understanding and cooperation with India, China, and ASEAN.
This emerging community is looking at ASEAN, a forum of 10 nations, which are involved in growing cooperation, and whose virtually free trade within the Association has already reached $220 billion, generating zones of rapid integration along its perimeter. A project of free trade and development dubbed as 10+3 (ASEAN plus China, Japan and South Korea) is becoming a major zone. But there are many others as well.
This emerging family will concentrate on ways of forging closer partnerships, and enhancing its cultural and political community. Russia would like to be part of the process and has applied for membership in the new organization last July. Almost all ASEAN countries voted for it. A reservation was made to the effect that Moscow did not meet one criterion of membership referred to as "substantive" cooperation with the region's countries. Russian diplomats argued that at least in the sphere of counterterrorism its cooperation with ASEAN was much more "substantive" than that of other countries with more intensive trade with the Association. This is not to mention Moscow's potentialities in the energy sector.
The U.S. was conspicuously absent at the summit and tried to make up for it by diplomatic effort. But questions of membership are decided at the East Asian summit by ASEAN 10 members, which was reaffirmed in Kuala Lumpur. The existence of many differences on most diverse problems within ASEAN is another matter. Objections of even a small country mean a great deal in the Association, which makes decisions by consensus. For this reason President Putin made a 20-minute speech at the forum not as a fully-fledged member but a guest of Malaysia, the host country.
At the final news conference, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badavi mentioned again that Russia wanted to become an EAS member and said that government officials of the region's countries would discuss the relevant technical issues. The next summit due to take place on the Philippines in a year would be attended by the same conferees, he said.
Hence, the fight for the Russian membership and for the essence of the summit as such will go on. But judging by the hints made in Kuala Lumpur, Moscow has recently taken several major steps toward the rapprochement with the world's most promising region.
