Continent SEAPac

Professor Ron Crocombe, a prominent name in Pacific Studies, made a public presentation last Monday at the American Memorial Park Visitors Center on the trends in Pacific Islands’ economic, social, political and strategic relations. His thesis is that until the 1970s, islands in the Pacific looked toward and related to their former colonial administrators. In the more than three decades since, regional organizations have emerged, particularly in the area of civil society, with an enormous network pulling the Pacific region toward a more Asian axis that extends from Tokyo to Sydney and all points in between. Thus, a hyphenated geographical designation called Asia-Pacific.

The last quarter of the 20th century was declared as ushering the Pacific century. In the 80s, the frequency of commercial flights crossing the Pacific exceeded those crossing the Atlantic. The mercurial rise in trade between the tiger economies of Asia and the nations of the Atlantic rim preceded the inevitable awakening of the dormant giant stretched between the Pacific and the Tian Shan. China has since become the largest trading partner of the world’s preeminent economy of corporate America, tying the monetary system of the United States in a symbiotic relationship to its own.

Professor Crocombe’s talk reminded me that geographical images are, of course, human creations, as are political boundaries. In my youth, it struck me as odd that cousins between Basilan and Sandakan in the Sulu archipelago who have traded peacefully for centuries would suddenly find themselves politically at odds because the emerging national identities emanating from Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila were not in sync. The superficial divisions previously imposed by the contending interests of the Dutch, the British, and Spain left a defining shadow that cast apart the destiny of a region which formerly shared a common history. Add to that the pro-colonial definition adopted by the UN to keep sacrosanct the former colonial boundaries doomed the subsequent partition of the sub-Asian continent, the Middle East, and many States in colonial Africa into outbursts of civil strife, tribal contentions, and bloody military confrontations.

It is the tendency of the human psyche to dichotomize. Many departments of liberal learning still divide the world’s culture between the oriental and occidental traditions. The East/West dichotomy was rudely awakened by the new assertiveness of the hemisphere South. Post-WWII divided the world between the communist Reds and the democratic Blues, until Sukarno said, “Yo!” and the non-aligned nations started lining up. It has been said that the mark of an educated person is the ability to complexify that which seems too simple, and simplify that which appears to be too complex, in illuminating the nature of a situation.

For many years, the widely used Mercator projection of the world map favored the interests of the North. Though cartographers has updated their products, it still a familiar occurrence to meet U.S. citizens who think Rio de Janeiro is only a few miles south of Pensacola. Fortunately, the Apollo picture of the earthrise has helped rectify the inaccuracies of commonly held images. The proliferation of the bumper sticker, “Think globally, Act locally,” did create for us the sense of a global village, but the situation still begs the practical question of how to organize the points in between the “blue” planet and my local village in San Vicente.

In the 70s, among a few colleagues gravitating toward the global offices of the Institute of Cultural Affairs birthed by the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago and now domiciled in Brussels, we began creating a geo-social grid of the planet that is at once symbolic and functional. Our categories were not just geographical in the physical sense but socio-political as well. We recognized the confluence of ethnicity and culture, history and destiny, politics and economics of a people on the move. We began with the big picture.

Global hemispheres numbered three: East, West and South. Each had three continents totaling nine. The West has continents North America, Europe, EurAsia (Warsaw to Vladivostok). The East, SEAPacifica (South East, not Southeast, Asia), SubAsia, CentralAsia. The South has Latin America (not South America, for it includes Central America and the Caribbean), Southern Africa, NASWA (originally, NAME, but the Middle East was only Middle to southern Europe, and Southwest Asia is more inclusive of the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula and points east of the Suez).

Many recognized the rationality of the designations but claimed that to artificially impose categories over natural boundaries is not scientific. Until one considers that Europe is but a western protrusion of the Asian continent, artificially set apart by an imaginary line from the Urals to the Dardanelles, compliments of Aryan-centric Europe. The Brits would be properly horrified at that suggestion but they can keep their upper lip. We may point out that the 140-mile Suez canal hardly constitutes a continental divide, nor are the Americas disconnected, the canal in the isthmus of Panama notwithstanding. Like any other human discipline, geography is hardly exact science!

Charting the rest of the planet to its logical conclusion, we designated six areas per continent to total 54, naming them by their preeminent metropolitan centers. So, for North America, we have Areas Vancouver, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, New York and Montreal. Continent SEAPac has Areas Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney and Suva. Dividing each Area into six Regions, again, designating each region by their preeminent urban centers, there were 324. Area Hong Kong has the regions of HK, Kaohsiung, Taipei, Manila, Cebu and Davao. Dividing further into smaller units, regions have metros, then polises, stakes, wards, and finally, neighborhoods. With a global population of 6 billion, there would be two and a half million neighborhoods at 2500 persons each. We figure, given the democratic trend across the globe, local communities of twenty-five hundred persons is a manageable size!

Viewed from space, there is not much earth on Earth. Less so on continent SEAPacifica. Area Suva is a wide expanse of water that has the regions of Port Moresby, Agaña, Colonia, Apia, Papeete, and Honolulu. This Geo-Social grid of the planet in no way negates Professor Crocombe’s thesis. It rather enhances it in that it helps me locate myself sitting here on Saipan within the urbanization forces that has characterized our time, sort out the dynamic strands between Nippon and Down Under, rather than follow the stale relationship lines dictated by the colonial past.

Saipan relates to Area Tokyo big time which means that if I were a visitors’ industry marketer, I would pay attention to the regions of Osaka, Tokyo and Sapporo, along with Pusan, Seoul, and even Pyongyang, to be futuric about it. Already, neat regional divisions do not follow political lines. Shanghai and Guangzhou have become our neighbors, bloodlines of the Qin and the Han increasingly becoming kin. Vladivostok may very well veer into the Pacific trenches notwithstanding its rail line connection west of the Uralskije Gory! And what have we here? Across the PIC in San Antonio is the new Troika Club! We already sell Billabong t-shirts, and our nannies from Nepal and ‘Pinas have bachelors’ degrees! Asia-Pacific is not a blob, it is a free market force in poetic motion!

‘Asia-Pacific’ is too nebulous a term. Ask me where I live and I’ll tell you: planet Earth, sphere East, continent SEAPac, area Suva, region Agaña, metro StaR (Saipan, Tinian, Rota), polis Saipan, stake Southern, ward District 1, neighborhood San Vicente. Soon, when I get my GPS reading integrated, we’ll have state-of-the-art geography lessons in sixth grade!

(Strictly a personal view. Vergara writes a weekly column for the Saipan Tribune.)