The mooting of diplomatic proposals for new regional structures has gained momentum in recent times. In June this year, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd unfurled a grandiose plan for constructing an ‘Asia Pacific Community’ that would subsume existing formations like APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), ASEAN + Three (Association of Southeast Asian Nations together with China, Japan and South Korea) and the East Asia Summit (ASEAN + Three combined with India, Australia and New Zealand), a vision he restated in Singapore on 12 Aug on occasion of the 29th Singapore Lecture.

Rudd’s claim is that the present institutions are incapable of holistically tackling regional governance issues ranging from security and trade, to disaster response and energy shortages. By envisaging an overarching mechanism of the ‘Asia Pacific Community’, he is positioning Australia as a farsighted power that is alive to the accumulating power in Asia and its likely fallouts.

Rudd’s logic is that as Asian economies continue to grow and amass power, there needs to be a new collective forum to manage the ensuing tensions and competition. So ambitious is the scope of his suggested ‘Asia Pacific Community’ that he mentions disputes in Kashmir, the Taiwan Straits and the Korean Peninsula as all falling under its problem-solving rubric.

Apart from the personal motive of being immortalised as a futuristic thinker, Rudd’s proposal is linked to the new ‘balanced’ foreign policy that Australia is assaying between the two poles of China and the United States. Rudd’s admiration for China and his intention to wean Australia away from too close an embrace of the US can be consecrated through a new initiative such as the ‘Asia Pacific Community’, where Canberra could feel more comfortable as a middle power in a sea of other powers. In a large inter-regional grouping, there would be little need to make tough choices of the ‘you are either with us or against us’ variety.

Critics have lambasted Rudd’s idea as grandstanding and gimmickry that duplicates what the East Asia Summit already aspires to do. That Rudd prefaced his proposal with an admiring reference to the European Union as a model invited harsh rebukes from politicians in Australia and elsewhere. Asia, after all, is an inchoate and compartmentalised continent with diverse political systems, cultural zones and identity circles. Unlike Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America, Asia has never been a compact land mass with one dominant linguistic affinity.

Regional unions do not thrive merely on pragmatic recognition of joint problems and opportunities by member states. To succeed, they require common civilisational bonds, which Asia sorely lacks. Realistically, Rudd’s attempt to position himself as a visionary might end up as one more imaginative foray in diplomacy that fell by the wayside as Asian powers jostle politically among themselves even while challenging the Western-dominated international economic order.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has joined Rudd in the race for floating novel diplomatic concepts. In a just-unveiled strategy document, he has taken on the mantle of stabilising a huge chunk of the planet “from Vancouver to Vladivostok.” Dubbed as the ‘Euro-Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ (EATO), Medvedev is inviting North American and European countries to sign on to a network of security pacts with Russia based on pragmatic national interests rather than ideological considerations. To Medvedev, ‘ideology’ is shorthand for NATO’s alliance of democracies that is encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Medvedev is dangling EATO as an option to European states that find themselves torn once again between the two competing powerhouses of the US and Russia.

The more antagonistic relations between Washington and Moscow become, the greater is the pressure on European countries to take sides. On one hand is European dependence on Russian energy supplies, and on the other hand is their reliance on the American security blanket. EATO could be a deus ex machina for Europeans to break free of the stranglehold of a new Cold War and manage an equidistant posture. Like Rudd wishing to escape the Sino-US feud through an ‘Asia Pacific Community’, EATO could prove attractive for European middle powers.

Medvedev’s blueprint, much like Rudd’s, is an offering of a newcomer on the world stage who wants to be recognised as a leader in his own right rather than as a puppet in the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. However, Medvedev has complicated his EATO idea by adding the ingredients of Asian powers into the already overcooked multi-cultural broth.

Stage two of the network of security pacts would be an invitation from Moscow to, inter alia, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and India join EATO. How such a mélange could coexist or be convinced of any advantage in coming together raises questions about the feasibility of Medvedev’s dreams. Like Rudd’s overshooting brainchild, Medvedev’s tall talk could turn out to be another damp squib.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been promoting his own inter-regional concoction known as the ‘Union of the Mediterranean’, which was formally established in July 2008. This scheme originally aimed to bring together European states bordering the Mediterranean Sea and North Africa in a new partnership to handle common problems like energy, counter-terrorism, immigration and trade. Sarkozy desired France, as the mover, to be the lynchpin of this odd marriage and live up to its long tradition of acting as an independent power that is neither fully pro-American nor willing to be overshadowed by Berlin in the EU. In true Gaullist fashion, Sarkozy was hoping to assert the greatness of France through the route of the Mediterranean.

As in the cases of Rudd and Medvedev, Sarkozy’s project has run into rough weather, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisting that the entire EU should be included in the ‘Union of the Mediterranean’. Detractors say that Sarkozy is embarking on pompous diplomatic chimeras to counter his fast declining popularity ratings at home. Conceptually too, like the Australian and Russian propositions, a Mediterranean Union lacks cultural or political homogeneity to be able to develop into a genuine security community. The very frame of a common Mediterranean identity is fraught with contestation. A Union of the Mediterranean that genuinely brings together Arab North Africa and Christian Europe would be a miracle.

So, is there no significance in the flurry of new formulas for inter-regional institutions other than the vainglory of its progenitors? The timing of these proposals is important because all of them have come in a period when world power configurations are undergoing a shift towards multi-polarity. The prolonged impasse of the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations has also increased the worth of bilateral and regional economic cooperation as opposed to global deals.

The unconventional associations that Rudd, Medvedev and Sarkozy are trying to sell reflect an unsettling phase in the international system where new self-confident powers are emerging in Asia and triggering doubts about the merits of iniquitous free trade.