Seen purely in a New Zealand context, next weekend's Asia Pacific economic cooperation conference in Auckland is a landmark event. After 15 years of radical deregulation of the New Zealand economy by governments of both of the country's leading parties, a nation which spends most of its time on the geopolitical periphery has the rare experience of playing host to a major international organisation whose sole raison d'etre is the continuing promotion of such deregulation on the global scale.
For New Zealand's politicians, therefore, the Apec conference is an opportunity to lay claim to international vindication for a policy of sustained domestic economic liberalism which has had few equals anywhere in the world.
Free trade has been and remains intensely controversial in New Zealand, not least in the shadow of the country's impending general election in November, but its success in supplanting mid-20th-century welfare capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s is a matter of record. The presence of presidents Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton helps to make the Auckland summit a pivotal event, both in the run-up to the election and in the country's wider history.
Large countries can, perhaps, afford to be blasé about the coming and going of such international gatherings.
For New Zealand, the Apec conference is tantamount to an international verdict on the direction the country has taken since 1984, when the then incoming Labour government devalued the currency by 20%, removed exchange controls, deregulated financial markets and embarked on a root-and-branch monetarist restructuring which has been continued with equal fervour by successive National governments from 1990 onward.
Today, Jenny Shipley's National government boasts that what critics denounced as "the New Zealand experiment" has proved itself after what the OECD describes as the most comprehensive economic restructuring undertaken by any member country in recent decades. Others are less confident, especially in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis. Critics such as the author Bruce Jesson retort that the country has become "a shambles", with low growth, rising national debt, increased unemployment and historically high crime levels. Business confidence has begun to grow again this year, but the widespread prediction that Labour will return to power in November seems to signal a new uncertainty.
Fully aware of the symbolic importance of the moment, however, the Shipley government has invested heavily in its year in the chair of Apec.
While pressing ahead with aims of expanding business opportunity and strengthening markets, the government has also made the winning of public support for the conference an explicit political goal, and has grabbed the opportunity to mount a major international diplomatic and public relations effort to exploit Auckland's few days in the public eye.
Shipley's aim is to persuade the New Zealand electorate that all this effort has a meaningful end product. "When Apec speaks with one voice," she says, "it is a powerful voice indeed, for together we represent half the world's output and population, and its leading industrialised and developing economies."
The problem for Shipley and Apec alike is that this claim is not easily sustained. Apec's record of achievement is in fact extremely modest, and while a small nation such as New Zealand understandably seeks to make the most of its moment in the centre of the international stage, there is little evidence to support the claim that Apec is, has been, or ever will be a major and cohesive force on the world economic stage.
Auckland marks the tenth anniversary of Apec, an organisation which was formed in 1989, largely at Australian instigation, with the aim of binding Australia and the United States more closely into what was then seen as an Asian economic block.
Those efforts culminated in Apec's 1994 declaration at Bogor, Indonesia, largely crafted by Washington, which adopted a set of "non-binding investment principles" to achieve free trade in the region by 2010 for developed member economies and by 2020 for developing members. But the momentum for liberalisation through the region slowed dramatically in response to the Asian economic crisis, and last year's summit at Kuala Lumpur was dominated far more by calls for economic cooperation.
Apec has probably outlived any broader usefulness that it may once have had. Its 21 member states are in many cases thousands of miles apart from one another, have little in common, and have only modest trading relationships. As an international trade forum, it is overshadowed by the World Trade Organisation, which did not exist in 1989, and which will begin to strengthen its own role still further later this year when negotiations begin in Seattle on tariffs in agriculture, services and industrial goods.
As it happens, however, two important international discussions will take place in Auckland. Yet, neither the first meeting between Clinton and Jiang since the bombing of the Belgrade embassy, nor the behind the scenes arm-twisting on Indonesia over East Timor, is in any sense an agenda matter for an organisation which constantly protests that it is purely a trade discussion body.
Such meetings could take place under any convenient aegis. The truth now seems to be that if Apec did not already exist, there would be little reason to invent it.
