Külpolitika - A Magyar Külügyi Intézet elméleti-politikai folyóirata - 1988 (15. évfolyam)

1988 / 1. szám - A tanulmáynok orosz és angol nyelvű tartalmi kivonata

During the 1970’s and the 1980’s attention was focused on the region’s economic potential, for the countries situated there (mainly along the western basin of the Pacific Ocean) hgve been able for long years to register economic growth rates well above the world’s average. Headed by Japan, those countries have managed to offset, quickly and effectively, the negative effects of the world economy (primarily the two oil price explosions) and to increase their respective shares in world trade.

From the second part of the 1960’s (since Great Britain’s entry into the Common Market), Australia and New Zealand have reoriented their external economic relations to the Pacific region at a quickening pace, with their economies developing, even if not without setbacks, mostly at rates exceeding the OECD average.

The western littorals of the United States and Canada have been developing at faster rates than the other parts of those countries, with the greatest weight represented by the most prosperous industries (computer technology, cosmonautics, nuclear energy industry, biotechnology, etc.).

With a view to speeding up its economic growth, the Soviet Union has set the goal of developing its littoral regions with inadequate infrastructures along the Pacific, where still considerable raw material deposits can be expected to lie unexplored.

China is seeking to modernize its processing industry, or to expand its capacity (by partial reliance on foreign capital). Its economic relations with countries of the region is rapidly widening in scope.

Creation of external and internal conditions for peaceful economic activity may permit a dynamic economic growth in the countries of Indo-China as well.

. The study goes on to review the evolution of theoretical concepts concerning the widening and deepening of cooperation between the region and the countries involved as well as the practical steps taken in that direction. The historical review is followed by a thorough exposition of Japanese and US policies in this regard.

While the objective economic processes in the region justify keeping wide-ranging cooperation on the agenda, the existing concepts and the moves already taken point to the danger of an anti-communist, self-contained regional economic grouping and a new longterm politico-military block emerging. All these reasons combined to dictate the need for elaborating the concept of a new type of open cooperation comprising all states of the region.

This was also reaffirmed, in his 28 July 1986 speech outlining Soviet policies towards the region, by Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the CPSU, saying that „we have accepted without bias” the idea of economic cooperation in the Pacific region... and „are ready to join in reflections about the possible bases of such cooperation, provided of course, that cooperation is conceived of, not in terms of a block or an anti-socialist scheme imposed by someone, but as one resulting from free discussions subject to no discrimination whatever”.