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The Working Papers Series on Comparative Regional Integration Studies is devoted to the study of regional integration from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It covers theory, empirical work and policy analysis, and includes contributions on the political, economic, social and cultural aspects of co-operation at the level of both macro-regions and micro-regions. While committed to the highest academic standards, the series aims to be accessible to policy-makers and practitioners and seeks to encourage informed debate on comparative regional integration.


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20.04.09

W-2009/5: The Asean Community: Dilemma's of a Shallow Trading Club

By: Jacques Pelkmans

After three decades of growing 'economic and development cooperation' as well as regular, institutionalized foreign policy consultation between the EU and ASEAN, the two can be regarded as distant but warm friends. ASEAN has embraced the EU as a Dialogue partner and ensured its membership in the Asian Security Forum. ASEAN and the EU have founded ASEM and are strong supporters of the Asia – Europe Foundation. Even in the WTO, ASEAN has helped the EU in the late 1990s to push through the Financial Services Agreement, after the US had basically refused to act on it. Already since the mid-1980s, numerous programmes, workshops, business summits and other initiatives have promoted business links between companies of the two regions, while fostering FDI into ASEAN.

 

 

In those many years, the ASEAN region as a collection of fast growing and promising economies has had its fair share of attention of European business. Also the trade relationship has developed in a very healthy way despite setbacks like the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

 

 

Against this positive backdrop, this essay focusses on ASEAN as an organized grouping. The 42 years history of ASEAN since the Bangkok Declaration shows beyond a trace of doubt that ASEAN has grown into a significant organisation with considerable achievements. With the Bali summit of October 2003, ASEAN decided to build an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), heralded as a further deepening of AFTA (ASEAN Free Trade Area) and a widening of the latter's scope. The very name of this ambitious initiative and the design in the wording of Bali is  reminiscent of the EEC, its design and to some extent its developed practices. The  question which drives the present essay is whether this ASEAN ambition is really appreciated in Europe for what it is, rather than uncritically taken for an adapted imitation of the EU as a model. I shall first pose two inconvenient questions, namely whether Europeans understand ASEAN, including AFTA, and whether ASEANs understand the EU?  Following a few brief remarks about the recently adopted ASEAN Charter, I shall make the economic case for an AEC and discuss four strategic choices which must be addressed consistently and credibly. It is valuable to clarify that for none of those choices the EU can serve as a model for ASEAN. It is therefore pointless for ASEAN to regard the EU as a model for their integration.  Nevertheless, the logic of the announced AEC would force ASEAN to transform itself further than it thus far has been prepared or capable of doing. In that process the EU can be most useful with technical assistance in e.g. technical barriers removal, customs procedures and automation and a range of other areas. This valuable, seemingly low-key work is the true support of ASEAN as a trading club. Its impact in markets is broadly positive, without any of the ASEAN delusions about the EU and of the EU dreams about setting the benchmark for economic integration in ASEAN.

 

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