Nation's rights not only shown by ally ties

Recently, Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Hung-mao (田弘茂) personally announced to the media that Taiwan was establishing mutual representative offices with Egypt. Tien described the event as a major diplomatic breakthrough for Taiwan.

This is true to an extent. To maintain its status as a sovereign state in the international community, Taiwan needs bilateral diplomatic ties to demonstrate its capacity to enter into relations with other states and its status as a subject of international law. For this reason, the establishment and consolidation of any bilateral relations are of major significance.

However, safeguarding a nation's rights and demonstrating the capacity to enter into relations with other states, as well as being a subject of international law, are typically manifested through the behaviors and practices of intergovernmental organizations.

In other words, apart from bilateral state-to-state relations, the most important elements of a state's affairs in the international arena include equal participation in intergovernmental organizations, establishing rules with other states, managing matters of mutual concern and settling disputes through agreed-upon dispute settlement mechanisms.

Intergovernmental organizations are really the locus to enhance a state's rights.

After withdrawing from the UN in 1971, Taiwan for the first time, in the face of Beijing's presence and harassment, equally and fully participated in multilateral negotiations for a period of three and a half years up to the Sept. 4 adoption of the multilateral Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific. Taiwan thus became a member of the intergovernmental Commission for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific, with the signing of two international agreements, witnessed by more than 20 other national delegations.

However, it was difficult to understand why Tien, who has expressed a willingness to put more efforts into NGO activities and even has taken the initiative to set up a task-force committee within his ministry to promote Taiwan's participation in international NGOs, does not seem to attach any importance to a major substantive breakthrough by Taiwan in an intergovernmental organization. The chairman of the council of agriculture, Taiwan's highest-level executive authority of fisheries, has also shown little interest in this big step.

Exercising its weight as one of the world's six largest fishing nations, Taiwan has participated in the creation of an intergovernmental organization. Attention and understanding from the Executive Yuan as well as the fisheries and diplomatic authorities are crucial to demonstrating Taiwan's determination to play a leading role in the development of this international organization, and display Taiwan's capability to contribute to the conservation and management of international fisheries resources.

Whether Taiwan will make similar gains in the future in international organizations of fisheries and other policy domains will depend on the Executive Yuan's policies and resources dedicated to such efforts.

High-level policymakers should also understand that, compared to the illusive rise and fall in the number of diplomatic allies, participation in multilateral intergovernmental organizations provides a much more stable guarantee of a country's substantive rights.