Europe, Headlines, Human Rights

ASEAN-EUROPE SUMMIT: Trillion Dollar Trade Dulls Rights Principles

Angeline Oyog, Mario Dujisin and Teena Gill

PARIS, Feb 28 1996 (IPS) - The economic imperatives alone ensure the European Union will not allow rights issues to block its longed- for dialogue with east Asia this week. But gestures of support for human rights are a European habit, one not easily suppressed.

Europe goes to the landmark summit in Bangkok on Mar. 1-2, largely on Asia’s terms. “The summit is an event in itself, a recognition by Europe of the power of Asian economies and of Asia in its own right,” said Jean-Marie Bouissou, research director of the National Foundation of Political Science, Paris.

While growth in Europe averages at about three percent, the Asian ‘tiger’ economies have maintained GDP levels of eight percent since the mid-1980s. By 2000 Asia is expected to account for half of the world’s trade and one-third of the world’s production.

“Relations between Asia and Europe have reached a turning point,” says Juan Prats, Director General for External Relations at the EU’s executive Commission. “The Bangkok meeting will give a strong impetus to a future Euro-Asian dialogue.”

Entering the forum in the confident manner of ‘tigers’, East Asian leaders like Thai Prime Minister Banharn Silpa-archa warn that “sensitive and irrelevant” issues like child labour, human rights and Indonesia’s occupation of the former Portuguese colony East Timor, should not be raised at the Bangkok summit.

And at a recent pre-summit meeting in Jakarta, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said if the EU raised such issues, he could think of at least “ten issues that could be seriously embarrassing to the European side”.

“Europe certainly has weaknesses with regard to the treatment of migrant workers, minorities, the aged, unemployed and victims of armed conflicts and displacement,” noted Vitit Muntarbhorn, a law professor at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

But the EU is undeterred. These questions are “difficult” but cannot be avoided in discussions with Asia, it says. “We are going to Bangkok with a constructive spirit,” said a Commission spokesman in Brussels, but “we intend to bring up all areas of mutual interest.” The question is, how?

“The sensitive subjects that cannot be raised during the official summit of heads of states and governments,” said Christian Lechervy, a French specialist on Asia, “will be taken up at more discreet forums including the post-Ministerial meetings.

“What we would like to do is try to enhance the understanding in a correct and accurate way about the importance of this issue to both sides,” said Shumpei Tsukahara, head of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, in Thailand this month.

Yet Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Guterres is still determined to raise the issue of Indonesia and East Timor at the summit. The French and British are voicing concerns about use of prison labour in China and child labour in other parts of Asia.

Resistance to placing trade ahead of rights is strong in Europe. “There exists in the EU a double standard in matters concerning human rights,” noted former Portuguese president Mario Soares this week, condemning the attitude of the EU’s “faceless technocrats”.

“It is lamentable that the EU cannot have a single moral line; one that would require us to condemn Indonesia’s invasion of Timor as we did Iraq’s attack on Kuwait in 1991,” he added.

“The truth is,” added Joaquin Trigo de Negreiros, a Lisbon analyst, “that Germany, the United Kingdom and France are banking on capturing the gigantic markets of Asia, so have no desire to arouse the susceptibilities of Jakarta”.

This is not quite so. Practices such as child labour, aside from being morally wrong, give child-employing nations a production cost advantage that Europe would like to rebalance.

Yet cynical advantage apart, Europe deploys a high-flown vision of union that requires its external alliances to be seen to be much more than a matter of cash transfers. Europe’s left-of-centre political parties also insist that the grand European Union project must be more than just a unbridled triumph for free enterprise.

“The grandeur of the European economic scheme must be matched by a no less inspirational social vision,” former Commission president Jaques Delors once told IPS. The EU expects no less from its external trade alliances.

But Trigo de Negreiros is not wrong either. Public concerns about labour or social rights have not stopped European private business from welcoming Asia open armed into the European and global trading environment.

Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the Paris-based Centre for Studies on International Perspectives and Information (CEPII), notes there “is no real connection between the number of U.N. rights and labour conventions Asia ratifies and its integration into global trade as measured by its level of export growth.

“Except for the Philippines which has ratified seven of the nine basic U.N. labour conventions, the countries of east Asia stand out, both in terms of the low number of conventions they have ratified and in terms of their high levels of exports.”

Francoise Lemoine, an economic analyst with CEPII, further cites the example of trade between China and Europe, which has increased trade in spite the unresolved issues of human rights between them.

China provided 16.5 percent of Asian exports to Europe in 1979, but despite the human rights outcry that followed the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China’s export share had increased to 18.1 percent by 1993. Similarly China’s share of all Asian exports to Europe rose from 6.5 percent in 1979 to 23.4 percent in 1993.

The U.S. experience with China in this field is instructive for Europe, added Bouissou. Unilateralism without dialogue led the U.S. to fail in its efforts to square Most Favoured Nation trading status for China with its domestic concern for human rights.

“The EU’s attitude of trying to start a dialogue with Asia must be contrasted with the U.S. attitude,” said Bouissou. “Europe seems to have learned from the U.S. debacle.”

Finally, a 1994 EU policy paper, Towards A New Asia Strategy, makes it clear that a failure of dialogue will only strengthen the hands of “those who view Asia as a threat rather than as a valuable partner” and raise the spectre of a trade bloc war.

As a result the issue of human rights will be raised, but diplomatically. In this the EU has the support of rights groups like the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

While it is extremely concerned about violation of workers’ rights in nations like China and Burma, it notes that other countries in Asia are gradually granting more rights to workers and it too does not want to see a “slanging match” in Bangkok.

Europe and Asia must develop a joint social agenda, argued the ICFTU’s Stephen Pursey. “There must be discussions on social and labour issues,” he said. “If not, this will hold up deeper relations between the two regions on trade and investment.”

Asia bought goods worth over 100 billion dollars from Europe in 1994 while Asian exports to the continent were valued at 145 billion dollars.

As a bloc, Asians now account for 23.2 percent of the EU’s total trade, ahead of the United States’ 17.4 percent share. These bottom lines will speak volumes at Bangkok.

 
Republish | | Print |

Related Tags



personal finance turning money into wealth 8th edition