February 11, 2011
Source: The Jakarta Post
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Enhancing ASEAN-EU cooperation
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU) celebrate their 30th anniversary of cooperation in 2007. In the last thirty years, the relations between the two regional groupings have been marked with some achievements and drawbacks. For ASEAN, the EU has been an inspiring model to strengthen its own regional integration. Likewise, the strengthening of regional integration in the Southeast Asian region has also been one area that the EU lends its support to ASEAN. ASEAN and the then European Economic Community (EEC) began their informal relations through the 1972 Special Coordinating Committee of ASEAN (SCCAN), which also made the EEC as ASEAN's first dialogue partner. Subsequently, the ASEAN-EEC Joint Study Group was formed to explore areas of cooperation between the two regional groupings. The formalization of ASEAN's relationship with the EEC was finally formalized in 1977, and was institutionalized three years later, or in March 1980. Despite the long-standing partnership between the two regional groupings, ASEAN has featured little in EU's foreign policy focus. Indeed, the EU has been giving more attention to the trans-Atlantic relation with the U.S., whilst, amongst the developing world, this regional grouping has lend more support to the development of countries in Africa, Caribbean, and the Pacific (ACP). The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), a forum that involves both EU and ASEAN, apart from the Northeast Asian countries, for instance, has not progressed much because of the different opinion shared by the two regional groupings over certain sensitive issues, such as Myanmar's membership in ASEAN. However, EU's increased interest to ASEAN in recent years has been due to the rise of ASEAN's profile in international relations. At the same time, ASEAN has also managed to rise as the key regional grouping that plays pivotal role in Asia's political-economic relations. In the area of political and security cooperation, ASEAN remains as the key actor for EU to engage itself with Asia. Moreover, ASEAN's significant role in maintaining the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) process, which is a relatively important security forum in the Asia-Pacific that involves the participation of key major players in the world, should have increased the stature of this regional grouping in the eyes of EU's policy-makers. Meanwhile, in the economic front, ASEAN has become the key hot-spot in the Asian region. For example, many key economic players in the world are increasingly keen to forge free trade agreement (FTAs) with either ASEAN, as a regional grouping, or with its member countries. The U.S., Japan, China, South Korea, and even the EU's immediate neighbor, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA -- with member countries of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Finland), have all either implement or are planning to pursue bilateral free trade agreement with ASEAN and / or its member countries. ASEAN and EU are also planning to forge an FTA with an ongoing trade action plan, known as the Trans-Regional EU-ASEAN Trade Initiative (TREATI), which was signed in 2001. This trade action plan mainly reflects the intention of both regional groupings to expand trade and investment ties, as well as providing the necessary framework for dialogue on various trade-related issues, such as market access, trade facilitation, investment, etc. The EU is currently ASEAN's third largest trading partner, after Japan and the U.S., with a total trade of US$ 99.6 billion in 2004. The EU is also contributing about 35 percent of total FDI in ASEAN, or about $20.3 billion. With this in mind, ASEAN policy-makers saw the need to expand trade and investment through an FTA arrangement with the EU. However, if ASEAN is to learn anything from the EU, it is the persistence of the latter to pursue an inward-regionalism strategy, which is characterized with, inter alia, heavy protectionism, that should be taken into consideration. During its infancy, in particular, the EEC stepped up its efforts to diversify production in all of its member countries. Member countries of EEC gave efforts to converge their foreign economic policies at the regional level prior to pursuing external economic adventures with the rest of the world. In contrast, ASEAN is one of the most open economic regions in the world, with much of ASEAN economic integration initiatives are used to facilitate the operation of non-ASEAN transnational corporations instead of its own economic actors. The EU, as the world's most sophisticated regionalist entity, also has a geo-strategic interest in promoting a world system based on "regional powers". This post-Westphalian world view currently differs from the neo-Westphalian world view of the current U.S. administration, in which a unipolar dominant nation underpins the world system. As the world's leading "regional power", the EU has long provided benchmarks for regional organizations such as ASEAN on how to deepen regionalism. Policy-makers and intellectuals within the ASEAN region often made references to the European integration process when discussing about the ASEAN regionalisation process. Despite this, key figures in ASEAN believe that the paths pursued by the EU and ASEAN are differed, and it is unlikely that ASEAN integration will turn into something that is achieved by the EU. Indeed, whilst the EU undertook the institutional building process, ASEAN remains in existence in the absence of strong regional institution. Whilst the EU remains as the key inspirations for the deepening of ASEAN regionalism, there is also much that the EU can learn from ASEAN. As with the EU, the regionalisation process in Southeast Asia has been the manifestation of state-driven project. Along with ASEAN's efforts to launch the ASEAN Community in 2015 and the ASEAN Charter, which is to be agreed by ASEAN leaders at the next ASEAN Summit, on November 2007, in Singapore, there has been a change of perception amongst policy-makers in the region on the need to make the Association as a people-based organization. Although civil society participation in ASEAN's decision-making process can, and should, be very much improved, civil society participation in the ASEAN Charter process is an initial step to achieve such an objective. This type of activity should serve as the model if the European constitution is to be re-introduced in the near future. Alexander C. Chandra is an Observer on ASEAN Affairs. Christopher Dent is Senior Lecturer at the Department of East Asia, University of Leeds . (The Jakarta Post). |
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