Aotearoa and Asia over the next 30 Years: An outsider perspective

Thitinan Pongsudhirak addressing the Asia Summit at Legislative Council Chamber, New Zealand Parliament

Mana Whenua, Sawaddee krub: special guests, senior dignitaries, sector leaders, fellow speakers, Foundation Trustees, Honorary Advisors, Young Leaders, and Friends: Good morning! I am honoured and humbled to deliver these keynote remarks on the occasion of the Asia New Zealand Foundation’s 30th anniversary.

I think I was picked for the part merely because the organisers wanted an outsider perspective – and not any outsider but one who has come the longest way – from Thailand via the UK where, just the other day, I walked past Oxford’s Wellington Square before coming here to Wellington the capital of the great small faraway land called Aotearoa. 

In preparation, I asked the Foundation for samples of past addresses and they sent me no fewer than 15 sets of speeches and remarks to pore over – thanks very much!  A good number of those who delivered these speeches are with us this morning either in this chamber or via VDO link – thank you very much. Now I think I know enough about the Asia New Zealand Foundation to teach a small course!

Of all the materials I went over, I would like to pick up on Honourable Philip Burdon’s 2007 mention of tangata whenua and pakeha from the foundational Treaty of Waitangi, informed by Richard Nottage’s remarks on the Foundation’s 20th Anniversary ten years ago and infused with my own views about what’s happening in New Zealand’s neighbourhood, where we all live and depend on, for our livelihoods. 

I take tangata whenua to mean the indigenous and Pakeha to mean the indigenised. My takeaway from former Minister Burdon’s remarks in 2007 is that the indigenised – meaning those who came from outside to Aotearoa – kept coming and kept indigenising. As immigration and indigenisation grew, multiculturalism grew along with it. This is what New Zealand is made of, and it is what New Zealanders have to work with as best they can while navigating the neighbourhood.

When the Foundation turned 20, His Excellency Richard Nottage provided a reflective and in-depth overview of what began in 1989 as a cabinet initiative to examine trade patterns with Asian economies and ended up as the Asia 2000 Foundation of New Zealand, or Asia 2000, in 1994. It highlighted the decisive roles played by both Ministers Burdon and Sir Don McKinnon. 

The interest and concern back then were focused on East Asia, not the Asia-Pacific, let alone the Indo-Pacific. In the 1980s, East Asia was rising and thriving, particularly the Newly-Industrialised Countries, or NICs, comprising Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, Those were the days of the ‘tiger’ economies in a once-famous flying geese formation, led by Japan, and including up-and-coming economies of Southeast Asia, namely Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. China was still in the back of the pack, Vietnam not in sight. 

The decade of East Asian economic boom in the 1980s culminated in many ways with the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, which featured Australia as an instrumental driver. Indeed, the Asia 2000 Foundation, the forerunner of the Foundation we are celebrating today, was far-sighted and fit for purpose for the long haul. Its founding fathers, backers, sponsors, and supporters knew that this great small two-island country’s future is inevitably and unavoidably entwined and interwoven with Asia in its various conceptions, whether as East Asia, Asia-Pacific, or Indo-Pacific. 

We could broadly say today that global economic prosperity that was driven by trade, investment, and technology in a globalised world that once made borders and maps seemed unimportant, has had a good run for most of the past three decades.

We can see that the principles and pillars of APEC, for example, epitomised that globalised world. Few countries benefited as much from it as New Zealand. But 30-odd years on from the late 1980s, the world is changing and reverting to its old ways of confrontation and conflict, of war more than peace, where borders and sovereignty matter more and more.

From the United States-China technology and trade war and the Russian aggression against Ukraine to Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea and elsewhere, not to mention the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, the international system is going in the wrong direction, where it is less rules-based, less open and liberal, less multilateral, less cooperative, and less orderly.

The new buzzwords are deglobalisation, de-risking, de-coupling, where economic activity is increasingly determined by geopolitics and geoeconomics, where economic security, tariffication, trade diversion, tech competition, supply-chain reconfiguration, and various protectionist measures have superseded trade liberalisation, open and freer trade in a borderless world.

This paradigm shift from a more hopeful and prosperous world based on an orderly post-war set of rules and attendant institutions to a system of increasing self-help through unilateral, bilateral and minilateral manoeuvres adversely affects New Zealand as a small trade- and export-dependent economy.

In a trade-unfriendly world, Kiwiland will be hard-pressed to find ways to grow its economy and secure its prosperity. Being faraway might mean being out of harm’s way but ultimately there is no escape if the world goes back to a wider war like the past. New Zealand may not be in the thick of geopolitical tensions, but it is not far off. If global conflict returns in full force, it will likely still find its way to these shores. 

Moreover, New Zealand’s relative geographical isolation was a clear disadvantage during the recent pandemic. Being packed and bunched with other countries, as Thailand in mainland Southeast Asia found, necessitated reopening and living with the pandemic while keeping it out as much as possible. In short, a peaceful, cooperative, enmeshed, liberal and open world has been how New Zealand best thrived but that world appears to be unravelling and breaking down. What, then, should New Zealand do?

In my role as one of the Foundation’s Asia Honorary Advisors, I would like to proffer three suggestions. (I could offer more but 3 is a nice number and time is limited.)  

The first of these is to get over the hyphen. Over the past decade or so, since I took up the honour of being the Sir Howard Kippenberger Chair at the Victoria University of Wellington’s Centre for Strategic Studies, I have campaigned to make Kiwi friends and colleagues and the general public realise that the era of the prosperity-driven Asia-Pacific is gone.

I likened the hyphen in the Asia-Pacific to New Zealand’s location. As a geostrategic framework, the Asia-Pacific has run its course and has been replaced by a more security-oriented Indo-Pacific.

Trade, investment, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific was second nature to New Zealanders. Now the only major country still routinely talking about the Asia-Pacific is China because Chinese leaders see the Indo-Pacific as a US-led geostrategic shackle to keep their country down. 

One time, I gave a public seminar around here in Wellington shortly after the Permanent Court of Arbitration based on international law ruled in July 2016 in favour of the Philippines against China’s South China Sea maritime expansionist claims and incursions.

I sensed back then that New Zealand still had a hard time letting go of the Asia-Pacific. But after all these years, I think many New Zealanders now get it that the world has changed. With its hyphen roughly representing the South China Sea, the trade-unfriendly world and the security-driven Indo-Pacific is what we now have to grapple with. It is important for ordinary Kiwis to know this and find ways to prepare and work with it. 

My second suggestion is about geostrategy. It’s tough for small states like New Zealand when the United Nations is problematic, and the World Trade Organisation has languished.

Short of international cooperation and multilateralism, New Zealand needs to bite the bullet and get on with the Indo-Pacific. On trade, this means plurilateral arrangements, such as CPTPP and RCEP, as well as bilateral FTAs. When specific and geoeconomically-motivated schemes come up, such as IPEF, New Zealand has been good at not missing the boat.

So keep this up, even when the boat ends up not sailing, as might be the case with IPEF if Donald Trump returns to office. As trade creation and supply-chain integration will be harder to come by, it will be necessary to take what you can get because trade and investment will be decreasingly about efficiency and increasingly about geopolitics. 

On defence and security, New Zealand is still vulnerable despite being on the periphery of conflict theatres, such as the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, East China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula.

I don’t know how much appetite there is around here for resource reallocation – probably not a lot – but countries like Germany and Japan are moving towards two per cent of GDP on defence expenditures. Defence capabilities and arms modernisation are seen as imperative moving forward. Apart from doing what it can to bolster capabilities, New Zealand can certainly rely on minilateral alliances and alignments.

From the Five Eyes and the Five Power Defence Arrangement, minilateral alignments are not new to New Zealand. There are now criss-crossing minilaterals from the QUAD and AUKUS to the New Quad and a clutch of trilaterals, such as the US, Japan, and ROK.

New Zealand has ASEAN as a natural partner but the focus should be on the ASEAN Original Five Plus rather than the whole of the ASEAN Ten, which is undermined by Myanmar’s violent civil war.

New Zealand should stick to its staunch democratic values despite the growth of the BRICS to include autocratic regimes. More democratisation and less autocratisation is what this neighbourhood needs in the long run, and New Zealand can play an instrumental role by sticking to its values and promoting them when and where viable.

All of this is just an outsider view and I am sure that strategic planners around here are cognisant and well aware of what their country needs to do geostrategically. 

This is my third and last suggestion as we come up to time.

When I first got to know New Zealand in person – back in 2007 when I attended an Inter-Faith Dialogue masterfully moderated by then-Prime Minister Helen Clark – I felt this country had an internal peace that was absent and elusive in most other countries.

As I visited New Zealand more and more -- thanks to a succession of your ambassadors in Bangkok who sent me here for conference work – I came to admire the original compromise between the tangata whenua and Pākehā.

After my Kippenberger stint, I went back to Thailand and wrote and advocated that the Malay-Muslim ethno-nationalist movement in the deep south should be accommodated first and foremost by official adoption of the local Malay dialect as the second language.

My proposal ran up against the hard wall of chauvinist officialdom but I got the idea from here. The indigenous and the indigenised must be on the same page in a forward-moving fashion to maintain the social and internal peace that is indispensable in the posture and projection of New Zealand’s place in the world. 

I think we would all agree that the Asia New Zealand Foundation has come a long way in 30 years and, if it does not already exist, it would have been invented yesterday.

Apart from its widening range of programmatic activities and small yet significant endeavours of cultural and educational exchanges, the Foundation has also succeeded in becoming a think-tank in the Track II space its own right, thanks in part to its managers and staff. It has built more and more bridges and relationships between New Zealand and Asia.

In Thailand, New Zealand continues to be a favoured destination for secondary schools, and its capacity-building and development role in the countries along the Mekong River continues to be impactful and appreciated. Many Thais and other Southeast Asian in senior positions have been educated here in New Zealand. So that is something to keep up and expand on.

There is no exit from New Zealand’s faraway geography as its commonwealth roots loosened in the past and its future place on the outskirts of Asia entrenches.

The way ahead for New Zealand in Asia is how to be on the outskirts without being an outlier, while being at or near the centre of action, and how to be a nation that is nifty, nimble, and niched in the navigation of its near and far neighbourhood. I see that as the overarching task of the Foundation for the next 30 years.

Congratulations on getting here and best of luck in going there. Khobkhun krub, tēnā koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa – ENDS.

Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) and Professor of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

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