The Gary Null Blog

Wednesday 16 November 2011

by: Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus 

http://www.truth-out.org/puzzling-persistence-apec/1321561579

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation has just concluded its annual summit in Honolulu, once President Obama’s home turf. It will probably be most remembered for the traffic jams it created in the Waikiki Beach area, to the consternation of residents and tourists alike.

APEC’s continuing existence is a puzzle to many, for APEC’s record of irrelevance is rivaled by few other international forums. It was not always so. I still remember the early 1990s, when APEC was one of the key battlegrounds against neoliberalism and free trade. The Uruguay Round of negotiations was stalled, and President Bill Clinton proposed and pushed for the Asia Pacific Free Trade Area as a U.S.-centered trading bloc that would counter the European Union if the Uruguay Round failed.

That first effort to create an APEC FTA failed, when the Osaka Summit in 1995 affirmed that liberalization would be carried out “voluntarily, flexibly, and in a non-binding fashion,” a position that had been pushed by key ASEAN countries along with Japan.