In Asia's Season Of Summits, India Can Make Unique Contributions

For one, Asia’s large and formal groups have too many players, and often the wrong ones. It is, for example, inexplicable that APEC, which purports to be Asia’s leading economic forum, includes Papua New Guinea and Peru but not India, whose economy dwarfs nearly all of the group’s members in size and significance.

But more than the question of membership, APEC is large and unwieldy. And so like many of Asia’s regional groupings, it mismatches countries of widely varying sizes, endowments, and capabilities.

When groups grow too large, they tend to privilege form, not function. Senior officials meet, and that is a good thing. But when ritual predominates, groups of countries rarely find the means to take serious collective action in the face of urgent problems.

That is precisely what has happened through most of Asia’s recent crises. In the tsunami of 2004, the East Timor crisis of 2006, the avian influenza epidemic of 2007, the Myanmar cyclone of 2008, and an array of other natural disasters and crises, regional institutions were overshadowed by ad hoc international responses, frequently led by the United States.

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