FOUR centuries ago the Pacific Ocean was central to the global economy. Silver shipped from modern-day Mexico via Manila to China propped up the debased Chinese currency. Hardy crops such as sweet potatoes and corn introduced from the Americas helped underpin China’s epic population boom. Meanwhile, China sent its finest silks and porcelain on galleons via the American continent to the drawing rooms of Europe. It was not to last. As the centre of global gravity shifted to the Atlantic, the Pacific became a vast backwater of trading monopolies brutally enforced by gunboat. Since then, the Pacific has always been considered the "ocean of the future", while the Atlantic has established itself as the crucible of global affairs. But now, as our special report this week asserts, the Pacific’s time has come. Why?
The main reason is commerce, long part of the Pacific’s DNA. Since the 1970s, trade between the Americas and Asia has left trans-Atlantic trade standing. For half a century, a tug of war for industrial dominance has taken place between the United States, Japan and now China, helping bring billions out of poverty. The dynamism extends around the Pacific Rim. East Asia, including the countries of ASEAN, has become the world’s most integrated factory floor, with goods flitting back and forth across borders before reaching final markets in the United States and Europe. Asia is also soon to become Latin America’s biggest trading partner. Two-way flows between China and Latin America grew more than twenty-fold in the decade to 2013, and in recent years China has invested more in Latin America than in Africa.
Trade, however, doesn’t necessarily imply the creation of common values such as those that the Atlantic has developed in the post-war era to steer the world. The Atlantic Charter forged in 1941 prevented territorial aggression and promoted free trade and freedom of navigation. The Breton Woods institutions are trans-Atlantic led, and there is no Pacific equivalent of NATO. Far from it, the Pacific appears to be a theatre of superpower rivalry, nationalism, and disputed history; perhaps its most tangible shared culture is surfing. But it has shared interests, if not values. Unlike in the North Atlantic, power tends to be judged by wealth not rank. Pacific countries are early adopters of new ideas and technologies. Since the Gold Rush, it has had an entrepreneurial spirit: start-ups flourish in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. A long history of imperialism has also made it a place that prefers dealmaking rather than hard-and-fast rules; witness the clever fudge this month between China and Japan to agree to disagree over their potentially ruinous island dispute.
Overshadowing it, of course, is the rivalry and suspicion between a rising China and an America in relative decline. China has stirred up the waters with its territorial incursions on reefs and shoals in its "near seas", pushing many of its insecure neighbours closer to America. America, meanwhile, has developed policies that to China look divisive, such as its "pivot" to Asia-Pacific and its attempt to forge the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade bloc. Trade, however, should be a way to unite the Pacific, not divide it. America should encourage China to join negotiations for the TPP or a similar free-trade zone as a vital step towards creating trans-Pacific institutions in which both superpowers have a say in writing the rules. Then the Pacific’s future will be as bright as its name implies.
Dig deeper
Under American leadership the Pacific has become the engine room of world trade. But the balance of power is shifting (Nov 2014)
Pacific history has been defined by bullies enforcing their rules (Nov 2014)
China and Japan agree a welcome—and long overdue—detente (Nov 2014)
