East Asian Futures

The EU has often been taken as the role model for regional integration and co-operation. For many admirers of the EU, this was entirely appropriate, as the EU’s very existence seemed to mark an epochal shift in the nature of the international system (Manners 2002). While there are still important points of comparison (Murray 2010), the EU’s current problems mean that one might be forgiven for thinking that the attractiveness of regional co-operation has diminished markedly of late. One might be right. For some observers, it is now the West that should be learning from Asia, rather than the reverse (Mahbubani 2012). Plainly, the EU’s problems have caused many observers to reconsider the benefits, much less the inevitability, of regional integration — especially the sorts of technically and politically complex agreements that underpinned the common currency. While there is now even less appetite in the East Asian region for such ambitious projects, as we saw in the previous chapter, there are still compelling reasons for putting in place at least some forms of cooperative arrangements, especially in areas where earlier inadequacies and vulnerabilities have painfully been exposed. At some level, therefore, East Asian regionalism is an idea that refuses to go away.