Between ASEM 2 and ASEM 3 a profound re-structuring of the East Asian economies has taken place. The rules now governing Asia’s political economies have been so thoroughly re-written that new liberalism is now the new development orthodoxy. Structural Adjustment has been severely imposed and has according moved the region from crisis to the recovery. According to the World Bank " East Asia’s recovery has gained momentum...is now creating jobs at a quickening pace...external balances remain favourable’. In other words it is back to business as usual in Asia - or is it?

The evidence on the ground from civil society actors throughout the East Asian region is that the effects of the crisis are still intense in the destruction of people’s livelihoods whether as workers who are being laid of or as farmers whose produce is being made worthless by the massive import of agricultural produce.

This was the starting point for the ASEM 2000 People’s Forum which was organised around the theme “Solidarity and Action Challenging Globalisation”. An additional reason for addressing neo-liberal globalisation was the fact that the economic pillar of the official ASEM is very much constructed on a commitment to further “rapid libleralisation of trade and investment” which further re-enforces the tying of the East Asian economies into the paradigm of economic globalisation.

The situation in East Asia is also reflected globally. The number of people living in poverty that is, on less than a dollar a day increased from 1.1 billion in 1985 to 1.2 billion in 1998, and is expected to reach 1.3 billion this year.(1) According to a recent World Bank study, the absolute number of people living in poverty rose in 1990s in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa all areas that came under the sway of adjustment programs.(2)

The unrestricted flow of speculative capital in accordance with Washington Consensus Doctrine was what the governments of East Asia institutionalised in the early 1990s, under the strong urging of the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department. The result: the US$ 100 billion that flowed in between 1993 and 1997 flowed out in the bat of an eyelash during the Great Panic of the summer of 1997, bringing about the collapse of the East Asian economies and spinning them into a mire of recession and massive unemployment from which most still have to recover.

In several workshops during the ASEM 2000 People’s Forum, analysis and discussions led to the conclusion that the ASEM’s economic interventions in the post-crisis development debate is focused on engineering and legitimising neoliberal reforms. In the meeting between representatives of the ASEM 2000 People’s Forum and the Senior Officials of the ASEM, this message was made very clear. Delegates indicated that the neoliberal juggernaut driving economic co-operation in the ASEM process was highjacking the other developments in ASEM which could now also take a bold initiative in the political dialogue given the new conjuncture on the Korean Peninsula which has profound implications for peace and security in the region.

The more than 800 delegates from Asia and Europe representing social movements, trade unions, people’s organisations, women and human rights organisations who participated in the ASEM2000 People’s Forum also addressed the question of what is the alternative?

Ideas of an alternative route to the future de-globilisation which are being formulated based on discussions in the Third World, and especially focused on Asia, were articulated during the ASEM 2000 Peoples Forum by Walden Bello.

I am not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. I am speaking about:

– reorienting our economies from production for export to production for the local market;
– about deemphasising growth and maximizing equity in order to radically reduce environmental disequilibrium;
– about not leaving strategic decisions to the market, but making them subject to democratic choice. (3)

The ASEM 2000 People’s Forum concluded with articulating a ’People’s Vision’ which is also being popularised as the ’Spirit of Seoul’. This vision calls on the peoples of Asia and Europe to push for the replacement of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO as the unacceptable and de-legitimised architecture of the global economy and to urge the ASEM Governments to decisively turn to the pursuit of a paradigm of economic development that can eradicate poverty and usher in a sustainable future for the peoples of Asia and Europe.

Notes

1) Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Inequality and Poverty Trends in the Era of Liberalization and Globalization, Paper delivered at the United Nations Millenium Conference, Tokyo January 19-20, 2000; see also number of Worlds poor unchanged in the 1990s, Reuters August 3, 2000.

2) Cornia.

3) Walden Bello, From Melbourne to Prague: the struggle for a deglobalized world, in Prague 2000; Why we need to decommission the IMF and the World Bank, Focus on the Global South, September 2000.

4) Brid Brennan wishes to thank Gareth Api Richards and Walden Bello for their ideas and contributions to this article.