5 - ASEM's Extra-regionalism: Converging Europe's and East Asia's External Projections toward Other Regions

Summary

World governance is in disarray as big powers disagree in their worldviews and multilateral organizations (mainly those of the United Nations and Bretton Woods) seem to lack effectiveness in many crucial issues. This gives rise to different alliances and the “coalitions of the willing” that may arouse uneasiness as we are now seeing over the pursuit of “regime change” in Iraq led by the U.S. However, new world regionalism that emerged in the 1980s (defined in part by its openness), and associated inter-regional alliances could become key to decrease anarchy around our inter-dependent, multi-level world. Of course, dynamic states of various shapes and sizes still form the cornerstone of global politics. But regional co-operation agreements have recently increased in such great numbers, scope, and diversity that it would be reckless not to try to accommodate them between a system of states and multilateral organization to improve global governance issues.

Europe and East Asia in the New Regionalism

Europe is often seen as the paradigm of new regionalism. The European Union (EU) regional project, originating in the 1950s among six countries, expanding to 25 over the years in the hope that peace can be further enhanced in the European region. There are inevitably uncertain aspects in such momentous evolution in international politics, but European states always seem to find a solution to move forward. The enlarged European Union is now finalizing a full-fledged Constitutional Treaty to rationalise its institutions and better manage its many internal and external prerogatives in broad political, economic, and social domains. Europe's rapidly evolving regional process has been serving both as a model and a challenge to the rest of the world, and nowadays many other regions are trying to formalize co-operation in a growing number of issues.

At the same time, the East Asian (ASEAN+3) regional process is advancing relatively fast to present an additional or alternative model to the new trend of multi-dimensional world regionalism. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the oldest regional organization in the East Asian region.