You may not like it, Europe, but this Asian medicine could help

This is not an accident. It is a result of the strategic incoherence in Europe's approach to its immediate environment. East Asian, meanwhile, is making relatively sound decisions.

There are several flawed elements in Europe's policies. The first is the belief that Europe can secure peace for itself by concentrating on internal unification and detaching itself from its periphery. To an observer from East Asia, these efforts -- whether on deepening unification through the Maastricht treaty or widening unification by including "similar" European countries -- seem akin to rearranging living room furniture while flood water coming in under the door.

It is puzzling that Europe is trying to draw up its ramparts, cutting off its neighbours from its growth and prosperity. By contrast, the strategic impulse in East Asia is to draw all societies into the region's dynamism, starting with Burma and Vietnam and eventually including North Korea.

Europe has no choice but to deal with three big forces on its doorstep which will not go away: Russia, Africa and Islam. The EU has had a marginally successful strategy toward Russia, although questions remain. But Europe's strategy toward Africa and Islam is fundamentally flawed.

In the long view, it might have been a strategic error to admit socially and culturally similar states into the EU ahead of Turkey. This sent a signal that no state in the Islamic world, no matter how secular or modernised, would be admitted into the house of Europe. An opportunity was lost to demonstrate that an Islamic society could cross cultural boundaries and become like any other modern European state.

The EU's snub of the Islamic world has been magnified enormously by European passivity in the face of the genocide in Bosnia. Few in the Islamic world (or elsewhere) can believe that Europe would have remained as passive if Muslim artillery shells had been raining down on Christian populations. It does not help that European governments condemn the reversal of democracy in Burma while endorsing a similar reversal in Algeria.

Such double standards are easily shrugged off by cynical, sophisticated Europeans. But they underestimate the enormous price Europe is paying for alienating a force, Islam, that it will have to live with for the next 1,000 years.

A second flaw in European strategy is the assumption that other countries will remake themselves into social models of Europe, that the natural progression of history will lead to all societies becoming liberal democratic and capitalist. For most Europeans this assumption was vindicated by the Soviet Union's collapse.

This profound belief in the superiority of the Western idea creates a unique weakness or blindness for Europe -- an inability to accept that other cultures or social forms may have equal validity.

A third flawed element is Europe's effort to lock in its high living standards by raising clever new barriers to free trade and by sustaining high subsidies.

Here the contrast between US and European policy is striking. The United States has taken a relatively bold leap by entering into a free trade agreement with Mexico, thereby crossing a cultural as well as a socioeconomic divide. In fact, it had little choice. If America did no export some low-paying jobs to Mexico and gain high-paying jobs in return, Mexico could not and would not stop exporting Mexicans northward.

The only permanent solution to illegal immigration into Europe is to export some low-paying jobs (in return for high-paying jobs) and enter into free-trade agreements with North Africa.

This strategy is more likely to work if the EU promotes, rather than hinders, global free-trade regimes that will integrate Europe and its neighbours into the rising tide of prosperity in the Asia-Pacific. But to allow Europe's neighbours to compete in their areas of natural advantage, European agricultural subsidies will have to go.

Within a few decades, as its neighbours (particularly Africa) soar, Western Europe will be confronted with impoverished masses on its borders. Increasing numbers will slip in, to join the millions already there, exacerbating serious social and political tensions. Unless these masses feel they are part of European prosperity in their home countries, they will feel that they have no choice but to move into the EU itself.

There is a danger that these flawed elements in European strategy will be exported to the rest of the world. In the long run, if Europe persists with an "Atlantic impulse" -- moving toward continental rather than global integration, exporting political development ahead of economic development while ignoring social and cultural differences and creating new protectionist barriers to lock in untenable welfare state policies -- it will lead to grief.

Were the EU to become totally preoccupied with its immediate problems, this would be a loss not only for Europe but for the rest of the world. Mankind could benefit immensely if a new synergy were created between the newly revitalised Asian civilisations and the rich creative heritage of Europe. To achieve this, Europe must learn to approach the world differently.

In 1994, the writer was permanent secretary in Singapore's Foreign Ministry, and was expressing a personal view. This comment was adapted by the International Herald Tribune from a paper he presented at the recent (1994) annual conference in Vancouver.

• In 1994, the writer was permanent secretary in Singapore's Foreign Ministry, and was expressing a personal view. This comment was adapted by the International Herald Tribune from a paper he presented at the recent (1994)annual conference in Vancouver.