Marty Natalegawa’s Speech on IISS Conference; A Transcription

Thank you very much john, Excellencies, the friends and colleagues. I’d like to begin by joining other [..] spoken before me in thanking the IISS and especially of course of host government, the government and people of Columbia for their hospitality and the warm welcome that have been extended to all of us here in the beautiful city of Cartagena.

May also begin by paying tribute to the tremendous intellectual leadership that the IISS has shown over the years in promoting the dialogue, in promoting cooperation in many parts of the world, not least in the Asia Pacific and through this meeting between Asia Pacific and Latin America as well. I’ve been asked to speak this morning little bit on the issue of an agenda for Trans Pacific Cooperation. I believe this is a very timely and important subject matter. Not least because of the geopolitical and the geo-economic shifts that we are seeing throughout the world marked among others by the increasing prominence of countries of Asia Pacific and of course countries here in Latin America.

And therefore what we do as regions; the Pacific, Asia Pacific and Latin America will have implications far beyond our own shores, it will have implications globally and therefore we have an opportunity here to get it right and therefore making a meaningful impact on global developments. I’d like to begin with the thought I have shared yesterday as well, in wanting to promote or identify a Pacific agenda, one must not be remised of the already existing agenda and processes that is prevalent within our region. And in mentioning them now I am not trying to discourage further efforts between the communications between the Pacific, Asia Pacific and Latin America, but simply wanting to place our current efforts in a wider context. So that we ensure that there is a value adding contribution that we will be making. I am most familiar, naturally speaking, of the various efforts that ASEAN has made in our part of the world; the so called ASEAN led-processes or efforts that demonstrate ASEAN’s centrality in architecture building in East Asia.

                                                                              Source : liputan6.com

All of you in this room no doubt are very familiar with the ongoing ASEAN community efforts that is now to be completed at the end of this year, in 2015, after more than a decade of efforts, an ASEAN Community, the economic domain, political-security domain as well as in the social-cultural domain. An effort that it has been consuming all countries in ASEAN. But beyond our own internal ASEAN efforts, ASEAN has at the same time been facilitating and initiating several processes the so-called ASEAN+1’s with China, with Korea, with Japan, Australia and others. ASEAN+3, the East Asia Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum, whether it [would] be on political-security issues and as well not least on economic and trade facilitation efforts.

Many of you would be familiar for example with the current ongoing efforts on the Regional Comprehensive Partnership that ASEAN is initiating with the dialogue partners and which is also set to conclude or to make substantial progress  by the end of this year. I mentioning those again to illustrate how congested and how prolific is this type of architecture building efforts in the eastern part of our Pacific. Of course beyond ASEAN we are familiar with other processes; APEC, with this effort through promotion of the free-trade for the Pacific idea. The TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership, (to be continued..)