It's time ASEM played a bigger role

Asia-Europe Meeting offers unique platform for open, high-level brainstorming on big challenges facing the world

The Asia-Europe Meeting is the right platform for a conversation on shared global challenges. With Britain's planned exit from the European Union, the world economy in poor shape, and growing inequalities and discontent with globalization on the rise, the organization of Asian and European leaders that met in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia, on July 15 and 16 has acquired greater importance.

Add to the list the increasing disconnect and mistrust between governments and citizens - especially between leaders and youths - rising populism, fears of uncontrolled immigration and terrorism, it becomes clear that these leaders have their hands full.

Asian leaders and policymakers may believe most of these issues apply only to Europe. The truth is otherwise. Brexit has highlighted the strength of these and other preoccupations among Britons (and other European voters), but many people across the world also share them.

Asia is as unequal a continent as Europe. Both continents have winners and losers of globalization and both face threats from terrorists. Populist politicians may be making headlines in Europe, but they exist in Asia, too. So leaders in Asia and Europe need to build stronger connections with young people and respond to their worries about education, jobs, exclusion and marginalization.

ASEM offers a unique platform for open, no-holds-barred, high-level brainstorming on such issues. In fact, it is the need for such conversations that led to the creation of ASEM 20 years ago - and such conservations are likely to make ASEM geo-strategically relevant again.

The emphasis of ASEM stakeholders - including policymakers, members of parliament and civil society, academics and think tank representatives, as well as young people and business leaders - should now be on new ideas and increased connectivity as part of a potent recipe for injecting new energy and dynamism into ASEM.

Interestingly, China's focus on connectivity - through transport links, educational ties and digital information highways - has revitalized ASEM discussions. Transforming ASEM into a network of ideas and initiatives will give Asia-Europe ties a geo-strategic raison d'etre that it had lost over the past two decades.

Asia-Europe connectivity is now a fact of life, and reinforcing it through stronger institutional, infrastructure, digital and people-to-people linkages is emerging as a central element of efforts to rejuvenate ASEM.

ASEM has met many of its original goals by providing Asian and European leaders with opportunities to better know each other, encouraging greater people-to-people understanding and providing the two continents with avenues to explore new areas of cooperation in political, economic and social fields.

Also, meetings among business leaders, parliamentarians, academics and civil society members - and young leaders - have allowed ASEM to enhance Asia-Europe understanding and upgrade the quality and diversity of intercontinental conversations.

While these connections are important, ASEM can do much more by playing a more central role than it has so far in generating, nourishing and disseminating new ideas about living and working together in a globalized world.

This requires the setting up of an "ASEM brain trust" or network of think tanks, which can transform ASEM into a marketplace for ideas and initiatives. Proposals and ideas generated by such a network should be fed directly into the work of senior ASEM officials and the activities of other stakeholders. Such tasks could be performed by an ASEM coordination center that has been recommended by Mongolia.

This combination of ideas and connectivity allowing for a permanent circulation and exchange of thoughts, knowledge, experience and expertise could revive ASEM. This would help increase the understanding of a complicated and turbulent world.

The author is policy director of Friends of Europe, a think tank in Brussels. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 07/22/2016 page8)