Despite the existing fault lines and fragilities, the wide expanses of the Pacific basin may be viewed as one of the more successful regions in the world economy. The admirable efforts undertaken by APEC to drive greater economic openness, the success of ASEAN as a model of regional integration across the Global South as well as the emergence of megaregionals such as RCEP and CPTPP have all delivered important contributions to regional economic growth and trade. The question to be addressed in this article is whether such a cooperative framework in the Pacific that targets open trade through the Free Trade Area of the Asian Pacific (FTAAP) could be taken as a role model and replicated to a degree in the coastal regions of the Indian ocean and the Atlantic. With such oceanic platforms already established and institutionalized (particularly with respect to the Indian and Pacific ocean regions), this track of economic partnership may be rendered more effective in driving global economic growth through establishing cooperative linkages within the Pacific-Atlantic-Indian ocean triad.
Perhaps the most feasible replication of a Pacific-style cooperative arrangement similar to the FTAAP model is observed in the Indian ocean. As with the Pacific, ASEAN as a regional bloc is also present in the Indian ocean region (several of its members such as Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia have outlets into the Indian ocean) and it may hence play its constructive role in bringing existing regional integration projects into closer coordination. Furthermore, much like in the case of the Pacific with APEC, there is also a pan-regional organization for the India ocean region called the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), established in March 1997 to foster regional economic cooperation and sustainable development among the coastal economies of the Indian Ocean. The IORA platform and the entire region of the Indian ocean rim economies could explore the pathways to greater connectivity with APEC and the Asia Pacific, given such crucial linkages between the two regions such as ASEAN as well as RCEP, whose expansion trends are increasingly gravitating towards South Asian economies in the Indian ocean region such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
In the Atlantic basin, there is no pan-regional organization such as APEC in the Pacific or IORA in the Indian ocean – in terms of institutional platforms there is the ZOPACAS organization that focusses on the security and sustainable development in the South Atlantic region. One of the recent developments in this area has been the emergence of the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation (PAC) launched by the United States in 2023 with the key priority being cooperation in environmental policy and blue economy areas. However, the Trump administration has effectively withdrawn the US from this platform and no PAC ministerial meetings have been held under Trump’s presidency. This in turn calls for creating a comprehensive Atlantic-wide platform similar to APEC and IORA with due focus not only on environmental cooperation, but also trade and investment. Such an arrangement – perhaps referred to as the Trans-Atlantic Partnership (TAP) – may need to be driven to a greater degree by the developing economies in the region with a linkup or integration with the ZOPACAS platform.
Within the Atlantic region there may be numerous pathways to building a pan-oceanic economic platform, with one of the possibilities being via exploiting the already established and previously explored routes connecting the North American economies of the US and Canada with Europe (the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) launched in 2017 may serve as one of the pillars) as well as South-South linkages between Mercosur and AfCFTA as well as South Africa and Brazil. Subsequently, bringing the Northern and the Southern parts of the Atlantic into closer partnership would build additional lines of economic cooperation in the region along the North-South axis. There may also be options associated with building North-South bridges directly in the region, including via the recently attained EU-Mercosur trade agreement.
The main policy rationale for oceanic platforms would primarily relate to the environmental sphere – in particular it would provide for greater continuity of environmental policy coordination space across the continental terrain (within the respective RTAs) and across the trans-regional/trans-continental expanses of the oceanic platforms. This in turn would provide for complementarity in environmental policy coordination in terms of intra-continental and inter-continental sustainable development policy frameworks. In particular, this combination of continental and cross-regional/continental policy coordination could provide for a more effective resolution of challenges facing coastal economies with respect to climate change, global warming and rising sea levels. Perhaps most importantly, an inter-connected system of oceanic platforms (perhaps also encompassing the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean in addition to the Atlantic-Indian Ocean-Pacific triad) would provide for a unified global system of marine environment protection that in turn will be critical for addressing such challenges as illegal fishing or ensuring greater uniformity in deep sea mining regulation.
In the trade sphere, oceanic platforms are set to provide a major boost to closer economic cooperation across regional integration arrangements (integration of integrations route). They may also open more scope for building resilient regional/trans-regional supply chains, with inland/landlocked territories obtaining greater possibilities for outward/extra-continental trade access via a wider array of maritime routes and more developed transportation/logistical infrastructure in coastal regions. At the same time, the advancement of oceanic platforms may also engender tensions between intra-continental and inter-continental economic integration/liberalization – a way to resolve this tension would be a sequencing of economic integration that prioritizes intra-continental consolidation with subsequent scope to actively pursue the trans-regional/oceanic platforms track.
Overall, the Pacific model if replicated across the Indian and Atlantic ocean regions could open the path to closer economic integration across such oceanic platforms. This process of closer integration and cooperation could be greatly facilitated by other tracks of regional cooperation, including the integration of integrations route and hemispheric governance. In particular, the formation of a cooperative platform in the Southern Hemisphere would significantly improve the prospects for Indo-Pacific connectivity, while the formation of a Western hemispheric bloc (perhaps in a reincarnation of the FTAA project that is more palatable for the South American economies) would significantly strengthen the basis for such oceanic projects as FTAAP and the pan-Atlantic platform. A more integrated economic space across the Western and Eastern hemispheres would further facilitate greater cooperation and interaction between the pan-oceanic platforms of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. As a result, hemispheric and oceanic platforms can complement and reinforce each other within the future global governance construct, creating a more tractable and parsimonious pattern of 4 hemispheres and 3 oceanic platforms in contrast to the current spaghetti-bowl of hundreds of treaties and agreements across hundreds of economies.
In the end, there may be various gateways to advancing global economic cooperation – rather than the top-down model of global institutions such as the WTO being the sole driver of liberalization impulses, there may be case for creating a multi-track framework for market openness that is based on closer economic partnership between regional integration arrangements (integration of integrations) as well as hemispheric and oceanic platforms. This diversified set of pathways to globalization and trade liberalization creates additional back-up options for the world economy to surmount the gridlocks in global/multilateral institutions. Contrary to hemispheric platforms, oceanic platforms have already progressed significantly in terms of their institutionalization – as is the case with IORA and APEC in the Indian and Pacific oceans respectively. Bringing such oceanic platforms closer in terms of trade cooperation, building supply chain resilience as well as environmental policy coordination would open an important new dimension to building cooperative frameworks in the world economy.
Yaroslav Lissovolik, Founder, BRICS+ Analytics
Image by Mapswire via Pixabay