Lien Chan (連戰) reportedly has been happy that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has recently been talking about integration with China. We presume he will be less so now it has become more apparent what Chen means. Given that Chen's remarks were made almost at the same time as Lien relaunched his confederation idea, we speculated as to whether there was a narrowing of the gap between the DPP and the reunificationist parties such that something along the lines of a Taiwan consensus might be emerging. Apparently not, if the result of a meeting between Chen and his advisers last week is anything to go by.
According to Peng Min-ming (彭明敏), one of the senior presidential advisers at the meeting, the retention of sovereignty is fundamental to Chen's idea which seems to knock the confederation idea on the head.
What the president seems to have in mind is something in the nature of the EU, a slow economic integration which may lead to members sharing some aspects of sovereignty in the future while retaining enough essential aspects of sovereignty to classify as independent states.
That is all very well but it seriously misunderstands the evolution of the EU, as do most attempts to cite European integration as a possible example for Asia. After all, what was essential to the EU's early success was the determination of France and Germany, in the ashes of post-war Europe, to make sure that they never went to war again. It is almost impossible for those brought up in the peace and prosperity prevailing in Europe in the last 50 years to conceive of what an enormous remolding of both national and individual opinion this entailed, involving as it did the deliberate rejection of future conflict by strongly nationalistic countries, many of the leaders of which had fought each other bitterly only 10 years before, whose fathers had fought each other -- with even greater ferocity -- and whose grandfathers had also engaged in mutual slaughter. The EU was not the result of a group of European countries thinking they could become more prosperous by working together, but was born out of the kind of trauma one might associate with a near-death experience and amounted to almost a sense of religious conversion.
The truth is that there is no sense of quasi-religious mission between any Asian nations to permanently avoid future bloodshed through economic integration. And certainly the renunciation of violence as a means to achieve diplomatic ends is not a concept on Beijing's mental map. The point here is that in the EU's case it was the desire for peace which spurred economic integration. Taiwan's hope is that economic integration will breed a desire for peace -- something far from proven as the end of the last great wave of globalization in 1914 bloodily showed.
Peng questions, however, and we agree, whether there should be any talk of integration at all, at least for the moment for two reasons. First, Taiwan has an opportunity with the incoming Bush administration to improve its position, but that improvement might be endangered by sending confused messages which suggest that reunification in some form or another might not be quite as anathema to Taiwanese as it in fact is.
Secondly, the US' annual decision on what arms to sell Taiwan is scheduled for March. Once again, why imperil Taiwan's prospects of getting the means its needs to adequately defend itself by suggesting that some kind of rapprochement might be around the corner. Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) leadership was always weakened by the KMT's lip service to a reunificationist ideal and this had extremely negative consequences for Taiwan during the Clinton administration. We can only hope that now that Clinton is -- thankfully -- gone, Chen won't let similar mixed messages and cross purposes weaken the relationship with the administration of George W. Bush.
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