Towards a northeast Asia security mechanism
- By Liu Ming
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china.org.cn, April 27, 2011
As the northeast Asia security mechanism will possibly be linked to the Six-Party Talks, it will have to address issues of "high politics" like military confidence-building measures, destruction of weapons of mass destruction, mutual commitments to renounce the use of nuclear weapons and military force against each other, regional denuclearization, the transformation of military alliances and the normalization of bilateral ties. So the mechanism should be pitched at a level higher than a forum but lower than a highly organized institution. It will have regular meetings and a permanent council, some rules and agreements, a clear target and direction as well as mechanisms to supervise the fulfillment of agreements. On the issue of peace on the Korean Peninsula, the binding force of the mechanism should be strong. But for more generic issues, the initial mechanism should not have a binding character.
There are three kinds of restraining mechanisms: self-regulating, supervisory and compulsory. The present security mechanisms in northeast Asia are self-regulating. They may later develop towards the supervisory level, to include, for example, peaceful and constructive intervention in the case of serious humanitarian crises. Of course, we could not accept compulsory mechanisms that would permit punitive military intervention and seriously damage other countries' sovereignty and dignity.
There are likely to be six or seven members of the northeast Asia security mechanism, including Mongolia. The decision-making bodies should be ranked into several levels: meetings of senior representatives, meetings of assistant ministers, meetings of ministers (the economic council and the peace and security council), summit conferences, and the secretariat.
Topics for discussion should be arrived at by consensus among all member states according to the situation. Taking the OSCE as an example, subjects can be classified into several types; conventional military confidence-building, non-traditional security threats and regional administration, economic cooperation, and humanitarian issues. For example, after discussing the denuclearization of North Korea and the normalization of US-North Korea ties and Japan-North Korea ties, the topics might be enlarged from energy aid to North Korea to include other non-sensitive topics, such as environmental protection, climate change, energy price coordination, energy pipeline construction, railway networks, investment, trade, maritime safety, crime fighting, training and rescue services. Once confidence is established, other security topics, such as military exercises, strategic deployment, military transparency, disputes about marine resources and strategic relations among the powers could be discussed step by step. Concerning the special case of North Korea, the economic packages could be separated from the political and security framework to ensure that economic incentives to North Korea are rooted deeply in northeast Asian cooperation.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/node_7075401.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
(This article was written in Chinese and translated by Li Shen.)
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