Barun Roy: Country roads, highway dreams

ASIA FILE

It has taken 45 years for the nations of Asia to absorb the idea of a pan-Asian highway and sign an agreement to build one. What is one supposed to make of it? Commitment to Asia? Keenness to reach out to neighbours?

And it's only the agreement. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), which has nurtured this idea over all these years, says the hardest part is yet to come.

The nations must first build or upgrade road segments within their geographical boundaries to common international standards, and those standards have to be agreed among the participants.

They must then establish the links that are now missing at their borders, which will demand, from some of them, a lot of good neighbourliness and political courage. And once the network is established, if it is established, the participating nations must also evolve common border-crossing rules and vehicle insurance requirements. That's not going to be easy.

Above all, would each participant have the same sense of urgency? Twenty-three of the 32 participating nations, including India, signed the agreement in Shanghai last month, so it is technically enforceable.

But who's going to enforce it? ESCAP can't dictate governments. Will there be a separate Asian highway authority to oversee its implementation? We don't know. It's more likely that the project will be left to the mercy of individual participants and each will like to move at its own pace and will.

Having been "bogged down" under the political differences of the cold war era, the Asian highway idea was revived in 1992 with the launch of ESCAP's Asian land transport infrastructure development project.

Nine more years passed before Asian ministers, at a meeting in Seoul, "recognised and endorsed" the need to formalise the project. It took another two years for them to approve the final text of the intergovernmental agreement that was finally signed in Shanghai.

Why can't the Asian nations be a little more enthusiastic about a project that's designed to promote Asian unity? Why can't we rally strongly behind the one thing that could be a convincing reflection of our common destiny?

Despite what ESCAP says, the proposed 140,000-km. network is still a long way off, and it could easily be years before one could actually get into a car in Tokyo and drive through the vast expanses of the Asian continent all the way to Istanbul and on through Europe to London.

Is it because, despite the inspirational hyperbole, the Asian nations can't trust each other? Or is it because they have little faith anymore in such symbolic gestures of unity?

It could be both. When Kakuzo Okakura, the famous Japanese orientalist, published The Ideals of the East in 1906 and asserted to the world Asia's unity of mind and spirit, Asia was struggling to free itself from the shackles of imperialism. Against a common enemy, the idea of a common destiny became not only attractive but also immensely desirable.

A lot of people believed him when Okakura declared in his famous opening paragraph: "Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas.

But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life."

But as imperialism waned and political ideologies became important as vehicles of nationalist self-expression, the commonness of the dream was no longer valid. There was no common goal to pursue. And when, over the years, political issues became secondary to economic ones, each nation felt obliged to fend for itself.

As global markets opened and became more lucrative, the incentive to think alike and act alike disappeared. Today, an act of cooperation is likely to be regarded as a surrender of one's advantages.

There's an irony in all this. The "single ancient Asiatic peace" that Okakura spoke of, which he believed was incapable of producing "a hard and fast dividing line", has actually fractured around its "different characteristic blossoms." Okakura would certainly have been disillusioned to see this.

On the other hand, it's the maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, traditionally understood as being essentially fractious, that have started to come together and are one by one obliterating their dividing lines.

The Asian highway may eventually get built. But will it ever have the emotional appeal that's turning Europe into a close network of nations?