To grasp the significance of the pledge, which was issued at a summit meeting of the 18-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, it is not necessary to understand the economic fine-points. The implications for increased trade and economic growth, though potentially huge, depend critically on follow-up decisions yet to be made.
What is most important about the summit declaration is that it marks a milestone in the advance of free markets that gathered force during the 1980s.
Countries such as China and Indonesia, which once stood in the forefront of the Non-Aligned Movement and carried much of its anti-capitalist baggage, are now politically committed to taking capitalism to unprecedented heights by totally dismantling barriers to foreign goods and investment.
Completely free trade is such an extraordinarily ambitious goal, even though the deadline of 2020 seems far off, that it strains credulity -- and reasons abound to question whether the countries involved can muster the political will even to come close to the target.
But an unmistakable signal was sent this week as Indonesia's President Suharto, who still chairs the Non-Aligned Movement, staked his prestige as summit host on getting his fellow APEC members to make the free-trade pledge and cajoled reluctant members to join the consensus.
It would be wildly premature to expect immediate economic results from Tuesday's declaration.
In a sign of the difficulties ahead, APEC members already are starting to jockey for advantage in nervous anticipation of next year's summit in Osaka, Japan, where the Japanese government is expected to produce a more detailed blueprint of the summit declatation for implementation.
The Japanese, along with the South Koreans and the Taiwanese, have quietly suggested that the plan's "scope" must be limited -- according to Western government officials, an indirect way of saying they are desperate to exclude sensitive agricultural products such as rice from new threats of import penetration.
Nonetheless, economists and officials maintained that the APEC leaders had set their policies clearly in the direction of freer trade and had given their subordinates strong marching orders to draw up an effective scheme of implementation.
For an eerie historical contrast, consider the conference of Third World leaders nearly 40 years ago in the Indonesian city of Bandung that put the Non-Aligned Movement on the world map. Theirs was the rhetoric of economic confrontation with the industrialized powers, the buzzwords being "anti-imperialism" and "anti-colonialism."
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