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The Pacific Versus the Atlantic
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20413 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
2,581 Words |
| Author
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Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin is an International Fellow at the Pepperdine
University School of Business and Management and a Senior
Fellow with the Center for the New West in Denver. He is the
coauthor of the Third Century; America's Resurgence in the
Asian Era, and his next book, tribes, will be published this
fully by Random House. |
The negative publicity surrounding resident Bush's recent trip to Asia has obscured the increasingly critical economic as well as security role of the region for the United States. Most particularly for American business, the Pacific region represents both the critical center for the competition with the world's ascendant economies as well as the greatest potential growth market.
Although interest in Europe is understandable, given the dramatic political events there in the last three years, the economic and demographic realities increasingly suggest the primacy of Asia. We have heard much of the great opportunities in Europe, with reports usually uncritical promising economic growth of 5 percent per annum.
Yet already the European economies, including that of Germany have been falling into recession, belying any claim that they have developed any greater intrinsic economic power over the past few years. By contrast, the emerging powers of the Pacific, particularly outside Japan, remain on the world's most dynamic growth course.
Unfortunately, American businessmen perhaps preferring the comforts of Europe to the uncertainties of Asia have largely failed to recognize these facts. In the first half of 1990 Europe consumed nearly half the U.S. industrial investment abroad, twice the number of projects in Asia. Indeed in 1991, for the first time since 1984 Europe replaced Asia as the world's leading recipient of direct foreign investment.
Only in the past few months, with European growth rates far more modest and the problems facing the continent more obvious, has the pace slowed down. The Euro boom may not go bust, but it simply has not had the essential staying power suggested by its promoters.
But, for the sake of argument even if the world develops the way, the euro enthusiasts suggest, it does not bode well for the United States. According to Jacques Attali, one of the key advisers to Franaois Mitterrand, Europe's rise would usher in a new era in which North America would become the odd man out between East Asian under Japanese control and the two new "core" regions of Europe; America would become a granary like Poland was to Flanders in the sixteenth century.
Turning sadly inward, as Attali sees it, the United States would be left in the sunset. And in such a world, with Europe as a dominant power, what would be the place of the
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