THE PACIFIC SUMMIT : The Organization : The Appearance of Consensus Without Consensus : APEC’s fragile veneer will be put to the test by a proposal to embrace the aim of creating a free trade area.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, or APEC, started out innocuously four years ago as a non-binding, informal consultative process. But it shows signs of maturing into an influential multilateral organization--one that could help shape economic horizons not just for the Asia-Pacific region but also for the global trading system.

It’s not a smooth road ahead, though. Since its inception, APEC has been embroiled in a theoretical tempest. The issues at stake are abstract and subtle but nonetheless highly contentious.

Many critics have dismissed APEC as a superficial exercise in economic diplomacy, lacking the teeth necessary to act effectively as a policy-making body. At the same time, leaders in Southeast Asia have expressed fears of an insidious scheme to impose the rules of Western industrialized nations on the weaker developing countries in the region.

APEC, a forum that prides itself on the appearance of consensus, is caught in a tug of war between members who want to expand its role aggressively and those who want to keep it as vague and informal as possible.

Its fragile veneer will be put to the test this week in Seattle when APEC’s foreign and economic ministers will consider a radical proposal to change the structure of the group and embrace the aim of creating a free trade area in the region.

Whether or not the free trade plan is adopted, the fledgling organization is likely to continue developing form and substance. It may be only the pace that’s at question.

During its third annual ministerial meeting a year ago in Bangkok, Thailand, APEC crossed the Rubicon of institutionalization by deciding to establish a permanent secretariat in Singapore.

But to assuage concerns voiced by members of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), APEC leaders agreed to contain bureaucracy at the new secretariat.

“Everybody agrees the secretariat should stay lean and mean,” said William Bodde Jr., the American diplomat who is serving as this year’s executive director of the APEC staff, a one-year post that rotates with the group’s chairmanship between ASEAN and non-ASEAN members.

“The world doesn’t need another bloated international organization,” said Bodde, a former U.S. ambassador in the South Pacific. “We want to keep it small and effective.”

Bodde’s secretariat has a staff of 11 professionals, mostly mid-level government officials appointed by APEC members, and 13 support people. Their administrative mandate is to coordinate the activities of APEC’s 10 working groups and miscellaneous other committees, which are engaged in the nitty-gritty of promoting economic cooperation across the Pacific.

While APEC’s lofty aims are being mulled over in “senior officials” meetings four to five times a year, as well as in annual ministerial meetings, the working groups are performing more mundane tasks, such as clarifying trade data and surveying telecommunications systems in the region.

For concrete results, Bodde points to the recently published first volume of the second edition of an APEC telecommunications directory.

It’s a modest beginning, Bodde acknowledges, but it’s progress. This week in Seattle, reports will be submitted by the Regional Energy Cooperation working group and the ambitiously titled Investment and Industrial Science and Technology working group.

But the report most likely to make waves--and command the attention of the estimated 2,000 journalists expected to be covering the conference--will be the recommendations of the Eminent Persons Group, made up of prominent academics and business leaders from 11 APEC nations.

The panel, chaired by the American scholar C. Fred Bergsten, a former U.S. Treasury Department official who directs the Institute of International Economics in Washington, advocates an immediate agreement that APEC’s ultimate objective should be the creation of a free trade zone.

The 11 wise men, as the panel’s members are known, also would like the “C” in APEC to stand for “Community” instead of mere “Cooperation.”

“The time has come for APEC to adopt a bold and ambitious vision for the 21st Century: the creation of a true Asia-Pacific Economic Community,” the report declares.

How much support the proposal will have among APEC’s 15 members is unclear. Malaysia, the most outspoken critic of strengthening APEC’s mandate, had no representative in the Eminent Persons Group. (Nor did New Zealand, the Philippines or Brunei.)

Other important business for the ministerial meeting, Bodde said, will include consideration of a proposal for a new committee charged with forging a “trade and investment framework” for APEC. A vague draft resolution on the table calls for the creation of a “coherent APEC perspective and a voice on global trade and investment issues.”

“It sounds bureaucratic, but it has some meat in it,” Bodde said. “It moves APEC a step toward becoming a policy-making body.”

The more ambitious free trade proposal is likely to be sent to a new committee and studied in detail before APEC’s leadership makes any commitment to it, said U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor.

“We’re going to try to walk before we run,” Kantor said. “We can start on a trade and investment framework in the Pacific, but we’re not at this conference in Seattle going to be creating a free trade area.”

Yet resistance remains within APEC’s ranks to any shift toward policy-making activities. Such resistance muddles what might otherwise be a more clearly articulated trade and investment framework.

Southeast Asia’s elder statesman, President Suharto of Indonesia, has signaled a cautious attitude toward expanding APEC’s role--an attitude likely to prevail next year when Indonesia takes over the APEC chairmanship.

“APEC must not dilute the identity or restrict the role of the existing regional cooperative groupings. . . ,” Suharto said in a speech in Bali in August. The group should “take into consideration the prevailing differences of the economic growth levels and socioeconomic systems of countries in these regions.”

A more outspoken ASEAN leader, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, is vociferous in his protests against a stronger APEC and is registering his discontent by snubbing an invitation to join the Asian leaders’ summit with President Clinton on Saturday.

At the other extreme, Australia’s Prime Minister Paul Keating is a big proponent of putting APEC on a fast track. He was the first to publicly advocate step-by-step harmonization leading eventually to an Asia-Pacific free trade area--the idea now endorsed by Bergsten’s Eminent Persons Group.

(Keating’s predecessor as prime minister, Bob Hawke, proposed the creation of APEC and hosted its first meeting in Canberra in 1989.)

Bodde describes the wide gap in perceptions as “creative tension,” which he does not believe will damage a basic consensus to promote “open regionalism” and to discourage the formation of exclusionary trade blocs.

But the challenge of maintaining harmony among APEC’s diverse membership is likely to rule out steering the organization toward a broad agenda that would include political issues such as human rights and security.

Although some analysts see the potential for an Asian version of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which helped guide Eastern and Western Europe out of the Cold War, no such scenario is on the APEC agenda at present.

“We don’t discuss political issues at all,” Bodde said. “We stick to our knitting and talk about economics. We stay away from (human rights and security issues) because we have to stay away.”