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In This Section
The "EU through the Eyes of Asia" Phase III Interim Workshop Hanoi, Vietnam 7-9 May 2008 The Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF), in partnership with the National Centre for Research on Europe (NCRE) and the School of Social Sciences and Humanities-Vietnam National University Hanoi co-organised an interim workshop for the country teams from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines involved in Phase III of the “EU through the Eyes of Asia” study. Themes covered during the meeting included:
Team members also participated in “The EU through the Eyes of Asia” book launch, a partnership between ASEF, NCRE, the School of Social Sciences and Humanities-Vietnam National University Hanoi and the Delegation of the European Commission in Vietnam. The event was opened by Prof. Pham Quang Minh, Dean of the Department of International Studies, School of Social Sciences and Humanities and Mr. Truong Trieu Duong, ASEF Board Governor to Vietnam . It featured keynote speeches from Ambassador Sean Doyle, Head of the Delegation of the European Commission in Vietnam and Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Kanh, Rector of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities. The event generated much interest from the international community in Hanoi. Members of the diplomatic community, the academe and the local media made up the approximately 50 guests that attended, underlining one more time the importance of the project and direct relevance of this study to stakeholders of Asia-Europe relations. The country team will reconvene for another interim workshop in Singapore on 1-2 August 2008. Intensive Co-operation with scholars from China
Within the framework of the EU-China-European Studies Centres Programme (ESCP), eight research fellows from China were visiting ZEI in 2007. Five of them came from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and three researchers came from the European Studies Centre of Sichuan University in Chengdu. Their research studies in collaboration with ZEI scholars focused on the further development of European Studies in China and the following topics: 1. The research study of the policies of EU and ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) toward China . Among the results of this research was the insight that although ASEM has already displayed its significance in the Asia-Europe relationship and world affairs since its creation in 1996, there are some shortcomings, inter alia a) the non-institutional approach and related matters of efficiency.; b) am imbalance between Asia and EU in light of EU enlargements; c) the low degree of public participation. 2. The impact of EU's eastward enlargement with a focus on governance matters. 3. The integration of the European financial market, with the focus on the history and actual situation of the European financial market as well as its implication on the financial market in East Asia and the inflation target policy of the ECB. 4. The 19th century European identity as embodied in literary and artistic developments and a semiotic hypothesis on European identity building. 5. The multilingualism policy and the cultural diversity in the EU.
Prof. Dr. Jian Shi (Director of the European Studies Centre at Sichuan University Chengdu) worked with ZEI and other European partners from University of Paris and the Free University Amsterdam on the final evaluation of the European Studies Programme in China and the future collaboration. Prof. Shi also finished two working papers, one on the free movement of workers and related policy issues in the context of EU eastward enlargement, the other on new tendencies in EU immigration policies.
Prof. Qian Yunchun and Li Jing ( Shanghai ) translated a ZEI Discussion Paper by ZEI Director Ludger Kühnhardt on the meaning of crises in European integration for publication in China .
See also the link of our partners: www.escsass.org.cn/en/show.asp
Other visiting scholars from Asia came in 2007 to ZEI from the Beijing Normal University, Taiwan National University and Seoul National University.
2nd ESiA Lecture Tour: The EU through the Eyes of China and Hong Kong Warsaw | Prague | Vienna | Budapest | Ljubljana | Cork 4-15 February 2008
• Is the EU a recognisable actor in the eyes the citizens of China and Hong Kong? • What are the most mentioned images of the EU in China and Hong Kong? • How would people in China and Hong Kong evaluate the current and future state of relationship with the EU? • How important is the EU to China and Hong Kong when compared to the United States and other neighbouring nations? • Has the enlargement process and other internal developments of the EU influenced how it is perceived by its Asian counterparts? • What are the major sources news and information about the EU in China and Hong Kong ? • Looking ahead, as the EU's relevance to China and Hong Kong is expected to grow, what are the opportunities and obstacles concerning the roles and expectations of the EU?
Dr. Chan delivered his lecture in Warsaw (hosted by University of Warsaw); Prague (hosted by Charles University Prague); Vienna (hosted by the Austrian Institute for International Affairs); Budapest (hosted by Corvinus University Budapest); Ljubljana (hosted by the University of Ljubljana); and Cork (hosted by University College Cork).
The findings presented in this lecture were part of a wider study initiated by ASEF and the National Centre for Research on Europe (NCRE) – University of Canterbury , to measure the media, public and elite perceptions of the EU in the Asian region. Implemented under the framework of ASEF's European Studies in Asia (ESiA) network, the first and second of the phases of the study involved China , Japan , Korea , Singapore and Thailand , from 2005-2007.
Thus, the lecture tour was also an opportunity to further disseminate the project findings by promoting the “The EU through the Eyes of Asia: Media, Public and Elite Perceptions in China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Thailand ”, the first major publication that resulted from this endeavour. For more information, please click here. Sofia, Bulgaria | 2005 An initiative by the Academia Sinica Europæa, the Euro-China Forum creates the conditions for dialogue between the two edges of the Eurasian continent.
Held o nce a year in a different European city, Chinese and European intellectuals, policymakers, opinion leaders, academics, economists and actors of the business community meet on the occasion of the forum in order to improve mutual understanding and to discuss issues of common interest.
The first forum in 2002 was organised in Barcelona. In 2003 in cooperation with the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, the forum traveled to Ireland 's capital Dublin. For its third edition, the forum took place in Sweden with the strong support of the Stockholm County . In 2005 the forum was co-organised with Casa Asia in Barcelona. The fifth edition took place in Sofia , Bulgaria. The 2006 forum was strongly supported by the Bulgarian government and co-organised by the Diplomatic Institute.
Five years old only the forum is gaining momentum. In the words of Minister Zhao Qizheng, former Director of the PRC's State Council Information Office: “The Euro-China Forum provides a platform for exchange and discussion, does enhance mutual understanding and makes great contribution to the strategic relationship on all fronts between China and Europe. The Euro-China Forum is gaining in influence”. Mr Laurent Fabius, former Prime Minister of the Republic of France wrote about the Forum: “We, Europeans and Chinese, should seize every opportunity to smoothen out potential frictions and to bridge the gap between the intensification of our commercial relationship and the weakness of our intellectual exchanges. In this respect, the Euro-China Forum plays a crucial part. And its influence keeps growing.”
However, much more work has to be done in order to deepen the relationship between the two civilizations. The Euro-China Forum is a process not an event: it will build on its past experiences and achievements and always keep an eye open toward the future. Click here to download a copy of the 5th Euro-Asia Forum Publication in PDF format. On 19 April 2007, members of the ESiA Advisory Group involved in the ongoing “EU through the Eyes of Asia” project, namely Prof. Martin Holland, Assoc. Prof. Kenneth Chan and Prof. Sunghoon Park, together with Dr. Natalia Chaban, were invited to present findings at a high-level European Commission (EC) meeting in Brussels , Belgium . Hosted by Mr. Janez Potocnik, European Commissioner for Science and Research, this meeting involved four EC Director-Generals (Research, Relex, Communications and EAC); members of the European Parliament; as well as the Chef de Cabinet for the Commission, Ms. Margot Wallström.
The meeting took the innovative form of a lunch-time briefing and following the formal presentations, there was an in-depth and extended debate and dialogue. The ESiA Team made policy recommendations relating to addressing the European Union (EU)'s profile in Asia and in particular how external perspectives on the EU may be able to contribute to the EU's current internal constitutional debate.
The meeting was organised and financially supported by European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST) and it is hoped that further collaboration can be promoted that maximises the joint impact of ESiA, ASEF and COST.
Click here to access the brochure presented to Commissioner Potocnik and participant profiles.
The Lifelong Learning Programme will replace previous education, vocational training and eLearning programmes which covered the period of 2000 to 2006, bringing together the four successful sub-programmes that the public is already familiar with, namely, Comenius (for school), Erasmus (for higher education, Leonardo da Vinci (for vocational education and training) and Grundtvig (for adult education) as well as the Jean Monnet programmes.
In recognition of the thousands of enthusiastic and ambitious projects supported by the EU in the field of education and training during that period, 100 success stories (20 each from Comenius, Grundtvig, Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci and Jean Monnet) have been identified.
Prof. Martin Holland, who is the Director of the National Centre for Research on Europe (NCRE), University of Canterbury, and holds the Jean Monnet Chair of Political Science (since 2001), is co-founder and valued partner of the ESiA initiative. His chair has been selected as one of the 20 success stories of the Jean Monnet programme in Europe and the rest of the world.
Since joining Canterbury 's academic staff in 1984, Professor Holland has been remarkably effective in developing European integration studies . The Jean Monnet Chair and teaching modules have been central to the establishment of Australaisia's first and only "EU Studies" undergraduate degree major involving 13 papers across 4 disciplines devoted to the study of the EU. The Centre has also initiated an EU curriculum initiative designed to generate an online database of core curricula. Furthermore, the Jean Monnet activities have been an important facilitating factor in the establishment in 2006 of the New Zealand EU Centres Network that now embraces 7 of the 8 universities in New Zealand and is dedicated to spreading EU courses and research through the country.
In addition to his educational activities, Professor Holland has been successful in creating a dynamic research team , notably within the framework of the Jean Monnet Multilateral Research Group on "The EU Through the Eyes of the Asia-Pacific". It was the first of its kind to examine the external perceptions of the EU in the Asia-Pacific in a rigorous methodological way.
ASEF and NCRE are currently undertaking an expansion of this project to include China (including Hong Kong), Korea, Japan, Thailand and Singapore . This phase of the project will be completed later this year, however, there are already concrete plans to further extend this project to include Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines in 2008. Click here to download the "Jean Monnet Success Stories: Europe for Lifelong Learning" brochure. Launch of the Database on Education Exchange Programmes (DEEP)
By Ms. Valerie Remoquillo Project Executive, People-to-People Exchange Asia-Europe Foundation ASEM's DATABASE ON EDUCATION Exchange Programmes (DEEP), a comprehens ive online portal on universities, student exchanges and scholarships in Asia and Europe , was formally launched on 13 April 2007, as a key event on the occasion of the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF)'s tenth anniversary.
DEEP
aims to provide general information and to promote greater awareness
of study opportunities and encourage mobility within the academic
community in Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) partner countries. The availability
of such information through the web will place
Around 60 guests gathered for the DEEP launch, which was opened by Ambassador Wonil Cho, ASEF's Executive Director. Together with representatives from the diplomatic community in Singapore , the DEEP launch was attended by representatives of Singapore higher education institutions, including the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and the Singaporean Institute of Management, as well as students from local secondary schools.
The DEEP exhibition, featuring computer terminals from which guests could browse and navigate the web portal, was staged for the entire afternoon of 13 April and was frequented by more than 50 visitors, some of whom also took part in the other ASEF commemorative activities.
DEEP is a partnership between ASEF and the International Association of Universities, the Academic Co-operation Association and Sequence Design International, expressed their commitment to work in partnership with ASEF to move forward with this pioneering effort.
DEEP was made possible with the generous support of the Japanese Government, represented at the launch by Deputy Head of Mission and Minister Mr. Hiroaki Isobe of the Embassy of Japan and former ASEF Governor for Japan , Ambassador Koji Watanabe.
The Database on Education Exchange Programmes (DEEP) is available at http://deep.asef.org
Regionalism in Europe and Asia after the Cold War
By Prof. Douglas Webber Professor of Political Science INSEAD Fontainebleau, France
The most powerful dynamic that has shaped the development of regional integration in Europe and Asia in recent times is the end or winding down of the Cold War. Despite the manifold divergences between European and Asian integration, this enormous geopolitical earthquake has confronted both regions with a range of fundamentally comparable challenges. This paper identifies five such challenges: changing regional distributions of power, democratisation pressures, accelerated economic globalisation, enlargement coupled with institutional reform, and US-led unipolarity in international (especially military) affairs. It discusses the nature and magnitude of these challenges, explores how regional organisations in the two continents have responded to them, and evaluates how overall the end of the Cold War has affected European and Asian regional (political) integration. It concludes that, while the end or winding down of the Cold War has naturally facilitated the geographic extension of integration processes, it has – particularly in Europe - heightened the obstacles to closer or “deeper” regional integration. Thus the impact of this turning-point in recent world political history on European and Asian regional integration has been highly ambivalent and it is by no means certain that we can look forward to a politically more highly integrated Europe or Asia .
Introduction It is a commonplace that the divergences between European and Asian regionalism outweigh their similarities. Compared with its Asian counterpart(s), European regionalism is notably much more highly institutionalised (at least in a formal-legal sense) and much more demanding in terms of the criteria that a candidate state must fulfil to qualify for membership. Compared with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union (EU) was historically also more inclusive in as far as, prior to the end of the Cold War, it organised all the big non-communist European powers (at least following the entry of the UK in 1973), while ASEAN did not integrate the economically most highly developed non-communist Asian states, first and foremost Japan. For all their other divergences, however, regional integration processes in Europe and Asia share common historical origins: they have their roots to a large extent in the Cold War, in the perception among the leaders of the non-communist states – in Europe in the 1950s and in Southeast Asia as the Vietnam War raged in the mid- and late 1960s - that they had to co-ordinate and to overcome their internal rivalries in the face of a common external threat to their security. It is hence understandable that the end or winding down of the Cold War raised fundamental questions about the future of this process in both regions. Not all recent developments in European and Asian regionalism are attributable to this one variable. One important other dynamic that has fostered the growth of regionalism, for example, has been an increasing crisis of multilateral trade liberalisation negotiations, which has spawned a growing number of initiatives to liberalise trade on a regional or bilateral basis. No attempt is made in this paper, however, to explore the role of this or other factors than the end of the Cold War in shaping the fate of regionalism in Europe in Asia. Implicitly at least the paper argues that once the direct or indirect impact of the end or “thawing out” of the Cold War on European and Asian integration has been taken into account, there is not too much left that can be attributed to other variables. The impact of the end of the Cold War on the paths followed by European and Asian regionalism has been fundamental, but the following analysis will try to show that this impact has also been highly contradictory, with the end of the Cold War strengthening and accelerating these processes in certain respects while weakening and slowing them down in others.
Regional Integration and the End of the Cold War in Europe and Asia The end of the Cold War may be regarded as comprising three components or levels. At the level of ideology, it involves the effective abandonment or discrediting of the project or aspiration of building a political system in which the communist party exercised a monopoly of political power and an economic system based on state ownership and comprehensive economic planning. In the real political world, it involves the termination of communist one-party rule and in the real economic world the privatisation of property and liberalisation of economic activity. The end of the Cold War came very swiftly and abruptly in Europe. Within a period of just over two years, from the opening of the Hungarian border to Austria and the staging of free elections in Poland in the middle of 1989 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, all of the communist regimes in Europe collapsed and the entire former Soviet bloc embarked on a transition to market economics and liberal democratic politics. In Asia, the end or winding down of the Cold War has been a longer, more gradual and more attenuated process. Ideologically and in economic-systemic terms, the Cold War is arguably over, but, in as far as the communist political regimes in Asia have all survived, important political vestiges of the Cold War remain, as do two Cold-War-rooted issues, namely the separation of North and South Korea and China and Taiwan, that constitute significant actual or latent threats to regional peace and stability. The contrasting tempos at which the Cold War ended or wound down meant that this process had a more dramatic impact on the agenda of regional integration in Europe than in Asia. Nonetheless, albeit at a different pace and in somewhat different forms, the end of the Cold War has generated fundamentally similar issues with which regional organisations in both Europe and Asia have been forced to confront over the last 15 years or so and with which they are still grappling today. In my view, these issues are five-fold: they relate to (1) changing (actual or prospective) regional distributions of power , (2) democratisation , (3) globalisation , (4) the enlargement or “widening” and “reform” of existing regional organisations and (5) the emergence of US-led unipolarity in international military affairs.
Changing Regional Distributions of Power In both regions, the end of the Cold War has involved very important shifts in the actual or prospective distribution of inter-state power. In Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall immediately raised the spectre of German reunification and the issue of whether a future united Germany would be much more powerful than any other Western European state. In Asia, the rapid economic growth that began to develop in China following the market-oriented reforms introduced by Deng Xiao-ping raised the spectre of future Chinese domination of East Asia.
The post-World War II division of Germany had facilitated West European integration by reducing the old Federal Republic to roughly the same demographic size as the other big West European powers (France, the UK and Italy). Starting in November 1989, the extremely rapid process of German reunification raised strong fears among other EU member states as to whether the new united Germany would remain committed to the goal of closer European integration and/or aspire to becoming a hegemonic regional power. Within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall and after Chancellor Helmut Kohl famous 10-point plan for German reunification announced in the German Parliament in late November 1989, French President François Mitterrand was speculating ominously about a possible “reversal of alliances” in Europe, whereby France, the United Kingdom (UK) and Russia would form a coalition to balance and counter the power and conceivable hegemonic plans of a future united Germany. However, Mitterrand's blandishment of this threat in his meetings with German leaders was tactical. His goal, and that of most other EU governments at that time (but not Margaret Thatcher), was to contain German power by embedding the united Germany in a more tightly integrated Europe, in particular by accelerating the introduction of a single European currency, for which there was already a blueprint, but which, for domestic-political reasons, Kohl was reluctant to accept and for whose adoption no concrete timetable had yet been agreed. For Mitterrand, this was the project that best served the goal of tying down German power, because the Deutsche Mark was Germany's functional equivalent to a nuclear weapon. Under intense pressure after his 10-point speech to make a concrete gesture to underline the Federal Republic's continuing commitment to the European cause, and knowing that as one of the Allied Powers France retained the power in international law to veto German reunification, Kohl basically signed up to the single currency at the European Council meeting in Strasbourg in December 1989. The Euro may thus be seen as the product of an at least implicit Franco-German bargain whereby France consented to German reunification in exchange for Germany's agreeing to give up the Deutsche Mark. In this sense, the prospect of German reunification and the shift in the distribution of power in Europe it was thought this would produce led directly, via French diplomacy, to the realisation of the most significant project to forge closer European integration in the last few decades.
In the light of China's demographic preponderance in East Asia, the very rapid growth of the Chinese economy since the 1980s, especially when projected into the future, raised similar fears in East Asia concerning China's future regional role to those provoked by the prospect of German reunification in Europe. Like Germany's neighbours in Europe, China's neighbours have been confronted with the choice of whether to react to the rise of post-Mao China by trying collectively to balance its power by coalescing against it, to “bandwagon” with it (that is to say, to acquiesce in its domination of the region) or – as, apart from the UK, most other EU member states preferred to do vis-à-vis the uniting Germany – embrace and tame it by extricating it in a denser network of regional co-operation. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, with Malaysia and Thaksin's Thailand located towards one end of the spectrum and Indonesia and Vietnam towards the other, most neighbouring states have pursued an embracement strategy, as witnessed by ASEAN's involvement of China in the ASEAN+3 process, while hedging their bets by supporting a continued strong American military presence in the region. The creation – alongside the ASEAN+3 process – of the East Asian Summit, in which India as well as Australia and New Zealand participated, may also point to their pursuing a strategy of balancing Chinese power by incorporating India in regional co-operation.
At the same time, since the early 1990s, Chinese foreign policy has undergone a pronounced multilateralist and regionalist reorientation, in part because, through its rapid economic development, China has become much more dependent on the international economy, but also because China sees it as prudent to reassure its neighbours that it is a good and trustworthy regional citizen. The reciprocal will of China and its neighbours increasingly to engage each other has driven the widening and deepening of pan-East Asian co-operation over the last decade. A turning-point in this process seems to have been the constructive stance adopted by China in not devaluing its currency during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.
Democratisation Pressures Especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where the Soviet army had imposed communist regimes by force, the end of the Cold War also unleashed powerful forces of political liberalisation and democratisation. All of the former communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe underwent democratic transitions in a very short period in 1989 and 1990. The relationship between regional integration and democratisation is, however, complex and double-edged. Each has, in different respects, affected the other.
Arguably, in as far as it is comprised of liberal-democratic states and served as a “beacon” for the Central and Eastern Europe nations, the EU by its very existence, nature and relative success in promoting peace and prosperity in Western Europe helped to foster the demand for political liberalisation and democratisation. Certainly, the EU subsequently bolstered and reinforced processes of democratic consolidation by the whole panoply of agreements through which it provided financial and technical aid to the post-communist states, by making these states' future accession to the EU contingent upon their fulfilling stringent political criteria and then – two years ago – by accepting them as members. In this respect, the post-communist states followed a similar path to that taken earlier by the former right-wing-authoritarian-governed Southern European states, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
The political stability of many new post-communist democracies was menaced, however, by the mobilisation of ethnic, religious or communal cleavages. Where the latter were less intense and/or the affected states had a realistic prospect of EU accession in the not too distant future, they did not derail the process of peaceful democratic consolidation. Where, especially under conditions of economic hardship and dislocation, they were more intense and/or the EU's means to constrain the behaviour of the new popularly-elected political elites were more limited, notably in former Yugoslavia, democratisation fuelled escalating inter-ethnic, inter-religious or inter-communal violence and bloodshed. The wars in former Yugoslavia negatively affected European integration in two ways. First, they elongated the time horizons in which most of the former Yugoslavian republics could aspire to join the EU and thus braked the EU's widening. Second, despite the fact that none of the former Yugoslavian states was yet an EU member, the EU's manifest incapacity to intervene to put an end to the bloodshed provoked a grave crisis of credibility for the organisation. The yawning gulf between the EU's lofty ambitions and the resources it could mobilise to accomplish them turned the “hour of Europe” into its humiliation.
The relationship between democratisation and regional integration in Asia is a great deal more muted than in Europe. The communist political regimes in Asia – China, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea – have all withstood the shock of the end of the Cold War while undertaking, as in the case of China, radical changes or, in the case of North Korea, only very limited changes in their economic systems. As is well-known, ASEAN has always upheld the doctrine of mutual non-interference in member states' domestic political affairs and never required aspiring member states to be liberal democracies. Only recently, in respect of Myanmar, where the military junta allowed free elections in 1990, but refused afterwards to accept their results and put their winner under long-term house arrest, has ASEAN ventured, albeit without any visible success, to try to persuade a member government to implement liberalising or democratic reforms.
Indirectly, however, the end of the Cold War had a powerful impact on authoritarian non-communist rule in ASEAN's biggest member state and primus inter pares , Indonesia. The processes of trade and financial globalisation that the end of the Cold War accelerated (see next section) contributed to Indonesia's enmeshment in the Asian financial crisis that started in Thailand in 1997. More importantly, the end of the Cold War made the Clinton administration in the US much more indifferent to the fate of the Suharto regime in Jakarta. The tough conditions imposed on IMF loans to Indonesia helped to undermine Suharto's rule and pave the way for the country's democratic transition in 1998-99. However, Indonesian democratisation took the lid off various pent-up conflicts in Indonesia that the Suharto regime had suppressed by force. To the economic crisis were added the “haze” crisis, which symbolised the post-Suharto government's weak law-enforcement capacity, the East Timor crisis, and violent inter-communal conflicts in numerous parts of the archipelago, including Sulawesi, the Spice Islands and Kalimantan. The preoccupation of the post-Suharto governments with the management of these crises and conflicts immobilised Indonesia's regional diplomacy and for several years becalmed and discredited ASEAN. In the way that they created hitherto non-existent space for the political mobilisation of inter-communal or inter-ethnic cleavages in Indonesia and former Yugoslavia, democratisation processes had a paralysing impact on regional political integration in both Asia and Europe during the post-Cold War era.
Accelerated Trade and Financial Globalisation Economic globalisation, defined as the growth of the volume and velocity of cross- relative to within-border exchange of goods, services and capital, did not originate with the end of the Cold War. Fuelled by technological changes that reduced transportation and communications costs and aided by the international institutional framework set up principally by the United States (US) after the World War II, globalisation had been advancing for several decades before the Cold War ended. However, with the collapse of the communist bloc in Europe and the opening of the Chinese economy from the late 1970s onwards, economic globalisation accelerated sharply. Within no more than about a decade, the international economy expanded to incorporate a large part of the globe and a large part of the world's population which had been marginal or peripheral to it for several preceding decades.
The Cold War had divided Europe and Asia more deeply than any other of the world's regions or continents. As post-Cold War intra-regional economic interdependence has grown, so governments in both regions have come under greater – but variable - pressure from transnational business interests to reduce cross-border barriers to economic exchange. In the EU, this pressure has fostered a large number of initiatives that build on the 1992 project adopted in the middle of the 1980s and extend the scope of the single European market. The most recent of these initiatives is the highly controversial “Bolkestein directive” to liberalise the internal services market. Proposed directives to harmonise takeover rules to create a free internal market for corporate control and to harmonise corporate governance structures have also been highly contested, because, in contrast to trade liberalisation, these threaten to undermine many of the specific and divergent incarnations of capitalism that had developed historically in the member states. In ASEAN, business pressures for internal trade liberalisation have been considerably weaker – there has been no effective “ASEAN” business constituency to sponsor such projects. Stronger pressure for such measures has come instead from Japanese and American multinational companies. Projects such as that to harmonise foreign direct investment rules have been supported by ASEAN governments autonomously of business interests because they fear that otherwise foreign direct investment will be displaced to China. This fear may also account partially for the ASEAN states' interest in the formation of an ASEAN-China free trade zone; although on the Chinese side this project may be more strongly motivated by expectations of geopolitical than material economic advantage.
International financial flows have grown more rapidly than any other form of cross-border economic exchange. With them has come, other things being equal, a greater potential for international financial crises that can disrupt intra-regional exchange-rate parities and trade. In Europe, the European Monetary System (EMS), a system of fixed exchange-rates, and, with it, the single currency project managed to survive two bouts of extreme turbulence in the foreign exchange markets in 1992 and 1993, albeit at the cost of sterling's exit from the system and a widening of its currency fluctuation bands. Although geopolitical motives were most influential in the birth of the Euro, this project was also conceived as a means of pre-empting European currency crises and providing a solid underpinning of the single market, which could otherwise unravel under their impact. A single currency could also forestall possibly disruptive consequences for European exchange-rate parities of fluctuating levels of confidence in the American dollar and thus enable the EU member states to insulate themselves better against the effects of US economic policy (see below).
Monetary co-operation in Asia was non-existent prior to the 1997-1998 financial crisis. Rather, in Asia, the crisis spurred first proposals for forging closer regional monetary and financial co-operation, particularly because there was a widely shared resentment among political and business elites as to the timing and conditions of financial aid provided to crisis-hit countries by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). If Japan's initial proposal to create an Asian Monetary Fund, opposed by the US, failed, the ASEAN Plus Three countries did adopt a currency-swap agreement in 2001 to ward off new such crises. Meanwhile, the creation of an Asian Currency Unit, which could be a precursor to the regional co-ordination of exchange rates, has reached the regional political agenda. Whereas in Europe trade integration historically preceded monetary integration, in Asia the sequence, shaped by the financial crisis, has been the reverse. However, Asian monetary integration is still not as highly developed as it was in Europe in the early 1970s.
This pronounced inter-regional divergence in the achieved levels of integration notwithstanding, money is the sector in which the most notable integration projects have been realised following the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, however, the political conditions for the further liberalisation of intra-regional exchange have grown more difficult in both regions. In the context of persistent relative economic stagnation, public attitudes towards the Euro have grown significantly more critical. The expansion of the Euro beyond the original 12 member states has ground to a virtual halt while a debate has been triggered as to whether, on account of its miserable economic performance, Italy in particular may be forced to abandon the currency. As indicated by the result of the French referendum on the proposed constitutional treaty, the unpopularity of the original Bolkestein directive in most of the old member states, and perceived public hostility among the latter to the introduction of free labour movement with new member states speak an unequivocal language: there is, at least in the EU old member states, a growing backlash against further internal market liberalisation, which has come to be associated with stagnant or declining incomes, higher unemployment and growing insecurity and income disparities . The evolution of attitudes towards greater market liberalisation in Asia is more difficult to assess, as in most Asian states freedom of political expression is more limited than in Europe. Since the announcement of plans for a whole plethora of trade liberalisation projects linking the ASEAN members and also the “Plus Three” countries as well a few years ago, however, progress in these projects' actual implementation has been fitful and uneven. Many seem to exclude or likely to exclude variable, but significant numbers of “politically sensitive” sectors, such as agriculture, for example, in Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, the military coup that deposed the Thaksin government in Thailand in 2006 threatened to deprive ASEAN of one of the organisation's two strongest proponents of regional trade liberalisation. Enlargement and Reform of Regional Organisations Enlargement is the issue with which the end of the Cold War has most clearly and unequivocally confronted existing regional organisations. In Europe, the passing of the Cold War reduced the constraints on the foreign policy autonomy of several states sharing borders with former communist bloc countries, facilitating Austrian, Finnish and Swedish accession to the EU in 1995. German reunification had brought former East Germany into the EU already in 1990. Very quickly, most of the other former communist states were drawn closer to the “old” EU through the Europe agreements that began to prepare them for eventual entry, which materialised for the three Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia in May 2004. Bulgaria and Romania will accede to the EU in January 2007. By then, the number of EU members will have grown during the post-Cold War period from 12 to 27. But, while the number of member states will have more than doubled, their combined population will have increased by only about a third and the EU's wealth by no more than about one-tenth. Hence, the post-Cold War enlargement has shifted the balance in the EU from the bigger to the smaller and from the richer to the poorer member states.
At the time that the enlargement process was initiated, there was a fairly broad consensus among the existing member states that, despite the innovations contained in the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the EU treaties had to be revised again prior to the entry of the former communist states to ensure that with an increasingly diverse membership the EU would still be capable of making decisions. This conviction led to the intergovernmental conferences from which the Amsterdam and Nice treaties emerged in 1997 and 2000 respectively. The more strongly “pro-integrationist” governments viewed the provisions of these treaties as inadequate to avert decision-making paralysis in an enlarged EU. Italian and Belgian governments, along with the European Parliament, insisted that they would not approve the Central and Eastern European enlargement without more far-reaching treaty changes. At the Laeken summit of the European Council in 2001, the Belgian, French and German governments sponsored an initiative to make a fourth post-Cold War attempt to revise the EU treaties. The task of drafting a new EU “constitution” was assigned to a “European Convention”, which produced a draft document for negotiation in a new intergovernmental conference. The “Constitutional Treaty” that emerged from this process has meanwhile been approved by a majority of member states, but was defeated in popular referenda in France and the Netherlands. This was not the first occasion on which a referendum on a proposed new European treaty had failed. Denmark voted initially against the Maastricht Treaty and Ireland against that of Nice. In both these cases, however, arrangements could be found to placate enough of the treaties' opponents to get these “no” votes overturned in a new referendum. However, the causes of the Constitutional Treaty's rejection in France and the Netherlands are so disparate and the treaty lends itself so little to any “bending” that this treaty will hardly be able to be rescued in the same way that its two predecessors were. As treaty changes must be approved by all member states, this treaty has virtually no chance – in its existing form – of being ratified. The fact that the treaty was voted down in France, with Germany the traditional locomotive of the integration process, is particularly damaging to prospects of treaty reform, as it will tend to discourage any future French government from re-engaging in this process. The treaty reform process is now in an impasse from which it is not easy to envisage how it will escape. In the short term, European eyes are fixed on the upcoming French presidential elections in April/May 2007. In as far as neither of the two Presidential front-runners is zealously pro-European, however, it is unlikely that the post-election political constellation in Paris will produce a bold new bid to launch the EU on a path towards much deeper integration.
Optimists argue that the EU has reached a more or less “stable” constitutional state and that the decision-making process continues to function satisfactorily on the basis of the Nice Treaty despite the increase in the number of member states from 15 to 27. Certainly the legislative process has carried on generating outputs at much the same rate as before 2004. Given the obviously high level of political difficulty of negotiating and securing the approval of a new treaty in 27 member states, if the feared paralysis scenario should indeed materialise at some stage, the most probable result would be the development of a new debate about a more “differentiated”, “multiple-speed” or “variable-geometry” Europe, whereby, as with the case of the Euro and the Schengen Agreement on the dismantlement of border controls, not all member states would participate in new integration projects. Not much progress could be made in this direction, however, unless there were close Franco-German co-ordination and these two former lynch-pins of the integration process could recover their old roles as “opposing poles” whose compromises could provide the focal point for an accord between a larger group of “pro-integrationist” member states.
Compared with that of the EU, ASEAN's post-Cold War enlargement process was much more straightforward. The “post-communist” Southeast Asian states had no Copenhagen criteria relating to democracy, human rights and market economics to fulfill and no large existing corpus of regional law that they had to adopt and be capable of enforcing. Nor did existing ASEAN states have to carry out obligations to the prospective new member states comparable to those carried out by the old EU member states vis-à-vis the newcomers in terms of market-opening and financial transfers. ASEAN's enlargement process took place correspondingly faster than the EU's, notwithstanding the fact that Cambodia's accession was delayed by two years following a semi-coup in Phnom Penh shortly before the country's scheduled entry in 1997. As in Europe, however, the end of the Cold War and its consequences, notably growing regional economic interdependence, which the Asian financial crisis underscored, fuelled changes in the conception of the appropriate geographical boundaries of the “region” to be integrated. Starting in the early 1990s, ASEAN started to develop and intensify consultations with states surrounding Southeast Asia. This process led to the first meeting of the ASEAN+3 at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur in 1997. During the subsequent decade, efforts to forger closer integration within the ASEAN and between ASEAN and the “Plus Three” have proceeded more or less in parallel. However, ASEAN is evidently concerned thereby to preserve its separate identity, not to forfeit control of the regional integration process to the economically far more powerful Northeast Asian states, and not to be merged or submerged into a larger East Asian regional entity. Moreover, the discussion about and creation of the East Asia Summit, in which India, Australia and New Zealand were invited to participate, exposed divergent preferences among the ASEAN Plus Three states as to the boundaries and identity of the region – preferences that may be a surrogate for divergent fears - or levels of discomfort over the prospect - of future Chinese domination of a “smaller” East Asian grouping.
The ASEAN enlargement process also generated concerns about the organisation's future capacity for joint policy making and action and – particularly because it brought into the organisation some states with highly authoritarian political regimes – conflicts about the viability or appropriateness of its traditional norm of mutual non-interference in member states' domestic affairs. This conflict ignited over the Thai government's advocacy of the concept of “flexible engagement” that, if adopted and practised, would have qualified ASEAN's non-interference norm. In practice, this conflict was won by the advocates of the status quo, although the behaviour of the military regime in Myanmar keeps the issue on the regional agenda. The greater diversity in terms of economic development levels in the enlarged ASEAN also threatened to raise the threshold for market liberalisation within the region. This concern – shared especially by the more strongly market-oriented member states, notably Singapore and Thailand - led to the economics ministers' approval in 2002 of the principles of “10 minus x” or “two plus x” for ASEAN economic co-operation to facilitate more rapid integration among subsets of member states. The “10 minus x” and “two plus x” concepts are ASEAN's functional equivalents to differentiated or multi-speed integration in the EU. However, to circumvent the higher consensus requirements for region-wide market liberalisation in Southeast and wider East Asia, pro-liberalisation states, led by Singapore, have more frequently reverted to the negotiation of bilateral agreements with willing partners both inside and outside the region. In both Europe and Asia, the logic of widening has prevailed over that of “deepening” in the post-Cold War era. This outcome has heightened the threshold for adopting region-wide common policies. Both ASEAN and the EU have increasingly opted to preserve their capacity to forge closer or deeper integration despite widening by creating space for the formation of “coalitions of the willing”. It is hardly possible to say yet to what extent this growing practice will succeed in reconciling widening and deepening. Such practices were hitherto legitimised with the argument that the states left out or behind would later be willing and able to “catch up”. The longer that they are not, the more difficult it will become to sustain this position, which will then become a fiction, and the greater will become the likelihood that such projects produce lasting divisions in the originally conceived region rather than closer integration.
The challenge of enlargement that the end of the Cold War placed on the agenda of both regions has also – especially in Europe – raised issues of regional identity. Not least as Europe has no sharply distinguishable physical border to its east, where does Europe end? If the geographical boundaries of Europe cannot be easily defined, should and can Europe be defined in terms of culture, values and/or the traits of political and economic systems? Europe's identity crisis has been made all the more acute by the issue of prospective Turkish accession to the EU. The prospect of the accession of a large, relatively poor, and (despite the secular constitution of the state) overwhelmingly Muslim country joining the EU – a project that European foreign policy-makers embraced especially ardently after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a means of pre-empting a feared “clash” of Western and Islamic civilisations - is currently opposed by large numbers of citizens in the existing member states. Opinion surveys in the old member states as well as polls of the motives of opponents of the Constitutional Treaty in the French and Dutch referenda attest to a strong sense of enlargement fatigue. Among citizens of at least these states, support for not only the deepening, but also the widening of European integration is waning.
In Asia, where civil society is weaker and public perceptions of the ASEAN and its enlargement processes are neither as visible nor as politically consequential as in Europe, governments are on the whole less constrained in their choices over widening and deepening than are their European counterparts. However, the “enlargements” of ASEAN pose a more acute challenge for the organisation's cohesion than does enlargement in Europe for that of the EU. Prior to its post-Cold War enlargement, the EU had developed a large corpus of regional law ( acquis communautaire ), strong and accepted treaty provisions and supranational organs to interpret it, and the administrative capacity to enforce it through the bureaucracies of the member states. This heritage bolsters the cohesion of the EU (and the integrity of European law) by reducing the probability that member governments will be tempted or able to cheat and “free-ride” on the others. ASEAN and its offshoots (ASEAN+3 and prospectively the EAS) share neither a large body of existing laws or binding decisions, nor strong impartial or “third-party” organs of dispute resolution, nor, given the weak administrative capacities of some member states, favourable conditions for ensuring the implementation of joint decisions. The “ASEAN Way” of mediating conflicts by the informal exercise of peer group pressure had an uneven record even in the old ASEAN. The likelihood that it will suffice for this purpose in a bigger and more diverse East Asian regional organisation – and that member states will therefore be willing and able to bind themselves to pursue common policies - is bound to be lower. Short of the development of stronger third-party/independent organs of dispute resolution, political integration in Asia will rest on rather unstable, shaky foundations.
US Unipolarity in International Military Affairs Internationally, the end of the Cold War had two relevant consequences that have shaped the course of important aspects of regional integration in Europe and Asia. First, with the Soviet Union having collapsed, Japan in deep economic doldrums during the 1990s, and Europe economically relatively US and any other state or bloc of states, especially in terms of military power projection capabilities, increased sharply. The international balance of power tipped decisively towards US-dominated unipolarity. Second, several international security crises that had their roots in the decline or end of the Cold War and the old bipolar world intensified or exploded. These involved either multinational states (such as former Yugoslavia) that had been held together mainly by the fear of superpower military intervention, states (such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq) that could no longer be disciplined by a superpower patron (in this case, the Soviet Union), states (such as North Korea) that no longer benefited to the same extent from superpower protection and had to make their own way in what they perceived as a hostile environment, states (such as Iran) that had broken away from their former patron and tried to form a new force in international politics, or terrorist groups (such as Al-Qaeda) that had been formed in their combat against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and, after having humbled the Red Army there, now turned against the last remaining superpower, the US.
These two consequences of the end of the Cold War posed one fundamental challenge to states and regional organisations in Europe and Asia: To what extent should they develop their own collective capacities to respond to such crises or rely upon the US to manage them? Or, in the language of (realist) international relations theory, to what extent they should try to “balance” the US or “bandwagon” with it? Both regions ended up deeply divided over the issue of relations with the US. Correspondingly, neither has yet developed a significant collective capacity for crisis intervention and management that would enable it to act autonomously of the US.
In as far as the old EU states were all explicit or implicit allies of the US and virtually all of the post-communist candidate states were eager to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well as the EU, relations with the US should have been a less divisive issue in Europe than in Asia, where important vestiges of the Cold War have persisted. However, the first big post-Cold War regional security crisis, the wars in former Yugoslavia, provoked strong tensions between Europe and the US as well as within the EU itself. The Yugoslavian wars made the Europeans painfully aware of their dependence on the US for the management of such crises and of their need to develop their own collective military deployment capacity if they wanted to safeguard their interests where these diverged from the US'. The military intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which was conducted overwhelmingly by American forces, persuaded the main EU member states of the need to develop an own European rapid reaction force that could be deployed in crises in which the US did not wish to become involved. Especially given constraints on public spending and the unpopularity of defence spending in Europe, however, progress in actually developing such a force has been slow.
This decision – taken at the EU's Cologne summit in 1999 – pre-supposed a consensus among the “big powers” in the EU – France, the UK and Germany – that at least for some limited purposes the EU should not rely on the US to manage “out-of-area” security crises that affected European interests. The “Saint Malo” declaration between the UK, the US's staunchest European ally, and France, traditionally its most critical or ambivalent one, had paved the way for this initiative. Intra-European divergences over relations with the US, its role in providing European security and the orientation of American foreign policy were still manageable. Following the September 11 attacks and especially the decision by President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, however, deep splits opened up between those governments – the majority – that supported the invasion and those, the minority in 2003, led by France and Germany, that opposed it. Underlying the different choices made on this issue by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac were fundamentally different attitudes towards a US-led unipolar world: Blair accepted the US's dominant position in international affairs and sought to influence American foreign policy from the inside; Chirac did not, he rather aspired to a multipolar world in which French foreign policy would be less constrained by the US. If, under the weight of the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War and Bush's foreign policy unilateralism, critics of the intervention among EU governments have become more numerous than they were at the time of the Franco-German-Belgian “Chocolate Summit” in 2003, trans-Atlantic security relations continue to be a highly divisive issue in the EU and, other than in humanitarian or peacekeeping missions, Europe is collectively not much more capable of deploying military force independently of the US now than it was 15 years ago.
Divergent attitudes among the EU's big powers over the US's world role, the relative weakness of the EU states' military intervention capacities and Europe's consequent continuing dependence on the US in this sphere place important limits on the scope for closer military-security integration in the EU. However, along with the perception of a common security threat posed by the Soviet Union and the settlement of bilateral territorial conflicts, such as that between France and Germany over the Saarland, the strong post-World War II American military presence in Western Europe, which secured the West European states against each other as well as the region as a whole against the Soviet bloc, created a very propitious environment for European integration in other policy domains. States tend not to integrate as long as they view each other as mutual security threats and are therefore mutually distrustful. In this regard, the conditions not only for security, but also for wider political integration are much less favourable in Asia than in Europe. No common perceived external threat unites East Asia, numerous territorial conflicts pitch states in the region against each other, and the US' military presence, while arguing fulfilling a stabilising role, secures some states (Japan, South Korea) against others (China, North Korea), but does not provide a reciprocal security guarantee as it does in Europe, where EU membership is almost contiguous with the NATO.
In this, compared with Europe, much tenser and more conflictual security environment, the potential for intra-regional conflict and divisions over US unipolarity and foreign policy is much greater. Moves towards closer regional security co-operation, which began with the creation of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1994, have remained very limited. The most striking manifestation of such co-operation has been on the issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, on which the regional big powers (while differing over the more fundamental issue of the regime's existence and survival) share at least a limited common interest in curbing Pyongyang's behaviour, facilitating the staging of the Six-Party-Talks. However, it is uncertain how long these talks – in which the chief protagonists are the US and the North Koreans - will continue and still more uncertain whether they may be transformed into a permanent forum of security co-operation in Northeast Asia as some have mooted.
The American invasion of Iraq divided East Asian governments largely between the US's traditional regional “friends”, on the one hand, and traditional “foes”, on the other, although China left over the task of orchestrating international opposition to the US to a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. The relatively low-key stance adopted by China over the Iraq War probably averted as intense a polarisation over the issue in East Asia as in Europe. Indeed, pursued as part of its long-term strategy of “peaceful development”, Chinese diplomacy appears to have aimed to avoid any major confrontation with the US at the same time as forging closer ties with Southeast Asian states and reassuring them as to the benign nature of China's future foreign policy intentions. It has tried to advance this agenda by offering and concluding “strategic partnerships” with several states and pledging to settle bilateral disputes peacefully. Chinese foreign policy towards Southeast Asia, the role it has played in the conflict over North Korea's nuclear weapons programme and its concern to avoid an overt confrontation with the US have helped to keep East Asian security on a more even keel than it otherwise would be. However, uncertain to varying degrees as to how far they can trust an increasingly powerful China, most Southeast Asian states are “hedging” their bets by simultaneously maintaining, reviving or forming (closer) security ties with the US or, like Singapore, pursuing a self-avowedly “promiscuous” foreign policy aiming at developing close ties with as many big powers as possible and ensuring that they all have a stake in regional security and stability. Moreover, in recent years, owing to conflicts over attitudes to the history of bilateral relations, the shifting bilateral balance of power, ongoing maritime territorial disputes, and growing competition for access to indispensable overseas natural resources, Sino-Japanese relations have become more rather than less antagonistic. Perceiving a growing Chinese military threat to its security, Japan has strengthened its security alliance with the US. Given the inevitable centrality of these two countries in Asian affairs, there can not be a major increase in the pace and level of political integration in the region without a prior transformation of Sino-Japanese relations. Such a transformation presupposes more than a secret or implicit undertaking by the new Japanese Prime Minister not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine (again). Nor can it be engineered by growing economic interdependence alone. Rather it requires a great and sustained joint effort of political leaders in both countries to achieve an historical reconciliation that will transform mutual distrust into mutual trust.
Conclusion The decline and end of the Cold War has profoundly shaped the course of regional integration in Europe and Asia over the last 10 to 15 years. This paper has identified and analysed five key challenges that this geopolitical turning-point posed for pre-existing regional organisations. These have responded to these challenges by both widening to incorporate new members, extending integration into new issue-areas, and, in the case of the EU, by revising the treaties incrementally to facilitate and expedite the adoption of common policies. The organisations' record in handling these challenges has, however, been uneven. In particular, the (short-lived?) rise of US unipolarity has divided both regions deeply and neither has been able significantly to enhance its collective security crisis management capabilities or lessen its dependence on the US as the primary provider of regional security. The crises in post-transition Indonesia and Yugoslavia – where democratisation unfroze latent inter-communal conflicts – testified to both the ASEAN's and the EU's impotence in this regard and dealt a heavy, although perhaps not lasting, blow to both organisations' credibility.
The challenge that these organisations have best managed is that of enlargement. Under different conditions and at slightly different speeds, both the EU and the ASEAN have opened their doors to the neighbouring (not in all cases entirely) post-communist candidate states. The Central and East European enlargement of the EU especially constitutes an immense historical achievement, which may extend the zone of democratic capitalist stability in Europe from the former inner-German border and the Berlin Wall up to borders of post-Soviet Russia. ASEAN has not only absorbed the Indo-Chinese states (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), but also piloted the extension of the integration process north towards China, Japan and South Korea, none of whom participated in Cold War-era Asian integration and now conceivably west towards India and south towards Australia and New Zealand as well.
Hitherto, the post-communist enlargements have not come at the cost of the “depth” of integration in either region. In particular, in Europe, the reunification of Germany actually served as a catalyst to a radical deepening of European integration by facilitating and accelerating plans for the adoption of a single currency now used by 12 of the 15 “old” member states. By and large, however, in both regions the enlargement process has outpaced that of the reform of pre-existing decision-making procedures and norms. The probability that over the long term the member states of the enlarged regional organisations will be able to adopt effective common policies under existing norms and procedures or alternatively to reach a consensus to reform decision-making norms so that such policies will be able to be developed, let alone implemented, has declined with enlargement. This is especially the case in Asia, where the levels of socio-economic and political diversity and therefore also potential divergences of interest between states are higher than in Europe and the capacity of regional organisations to ensure the compliance of member states with common policies or decisions, where they have been able to be adopted, is lower.
In the EU, growing decision-making deadlock as a consequence of the priority that enlargement has effectively enjoyed over institutional reform is likely to exacerbate an already existing imbalance between “negative integration”, the abolition of barriers to cross-border exchange, and “positive integration”, the development of common policies that intervene in the workings of the market. Whereas, by making the adoption of common policies more difficult, enlargement without institutional reform militates against further “positive integration”, it leaves the scope for greater “negative”, i.e. market-liberalising, integration largely intact, because, under the EU treaties, the European Commission, in conjunction with the European Court of Justice (ECJ), has significant powers to liberalise markets without having to seek approval from the Council or the European Parliament.
This growing imbalance between negative and positive integration in the EU represents a growing threat to European integration, because and to the extent that it fosters rising public disaffection with “Europe”. The days when there was a “permissive consensus” in favour of closer integration among the publics of the EU member states have long since passed. The EU is in the grip simultaneously of “deepening” and “enlargement fatigue”, as reflected in the growth of critical public attitudes towards the Euro, the Constitutional Treaty, the 2004 round of enlargement and the prospect of Turkish accession and in the rising tide of support for Euro-sceptical national-populist parties in many EU member states. The fact that this sentiment and support for such movements appear to be particularly strong among the working and lower middle classes and those who feel economically and socially most insecure and threatened by globalisation and market liberalisation suggests that this trend is indeed related to the growing imbalance between negative and positive integration. Whatever its causes, however, this trend, if it should continue and intensify, may jeopardise even the existing level of European integration. Asia and the already highly integrated Europe may both be hard pressed in future to advance regional integration much beyond its existing levels. Click here to download the full article in PDF format. The Impact of Security Co-operation on the Regional Integration Process in Europe
May-Britt Stumbaum Resident Fellow German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP)
With security having been the raison d'être for European integration, functional co-operation in the field of security has developed into a major impetus for regional integration in the European Union (EU). The practical experiences made due to the helplessness when being divided e.g. in the run-up to the Iraq war, but also during the EU's missions starting in 2003, have constituted a driving force for policy-making and further institutionalisation and hence regional integration in the field of security. Ongoing
co-operation is leading to an increasing convergence of threat perceptions,
but also of strategies and doctrines, reflected in similar security
concepts all over Europe . Practical experiences made on the ground
during the EU missions that started with the Congo mission in 2003
led to a progressing harmonisation of processes across the EU member
states and a f
The following article will shed light on the impact of functional co-operation on regional integration in Europe. After a short historical overview over the basis of security co-operation in Europe, the article will focus on the experiences made within the framework of the EU's European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) that pushed for further evolution in this policy field as well as on the impact functional co-operation has been having on the development of further integration in European security and on regional co-operation.
Historical Overview of European Security Before assessing the impact of functional co-operation in European security affairs on regional integration it is important to define the key terms – regional integration and security. In this paper, regional integration is defined as a process by which (neighbouring) countries voluntarily and increasingly co-operate in order to achieve common regulations in one or more policy areas and an ever more institutionalised association to provide mutual benefits and to prevent conflicts.
Defining security, the notion of the term has changed over time during the evolving, incremental process of European regional integration. Since the 1950s, Western Europe's security mechanisms were developed over time in order to cope with the Cold War challenge of a bipolar situation with the Soviet Union on the other side. The enemy – apart from an persisting subconscious fear of a re-emergence of Germany – was a state-like entity (Soviet Union and, consequently, its Warsaw Pact allies) from which a conventional attack with tanks, etc. plus the potential use of nuclear arms was expected. Accordingly, the strategies chosen encompassed deterrence, détente, dialogue and integration, with the adequate institutions designed: The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the European Community and the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). With the end of the Cold War and hence the end of the bipolar confrontation, the security landscape has changed significantly. While the desire for an Immanuel Kant's “perpetual peace” or, Francis Fukuyama's “end of history” was great, experiences showed that the Cold War had left a legacy of small scale wars, ethnically respectively religiously driven and had given the stage to emerging non-state actors that engaged in asymmetrical warfare in the form of terrorist attacks. The war in the Balkans but also September 11 terrorist attacks in the US , and the subsequent terrorist attacks in Madrid and London illustrated the change in threats and challenges. Subsequent analysis for the causes and cures for the new challenges led to the development of “extended” security concepts in Europe and elsewhere. Terms for this new concept range from the “New Security Concept” to “comprehensive security” and an “extended security term” (“ erweiterter Sicherheitsbegriff ”). All of these new concepts emphasise the changing nature of risks and threats in the 21 st century, underlining the pre-eminence of international terrorism, the influence of non-governmental actors and the asymmetrical character of new confrontations. They also include challenges that go far beyond purely military concerns, such as demographic shifts, spreading pandemics and securing natural resources. Furthermore, they all agree that the challenges of today are global in nature and require concerted responses by the international community. Security Institutions in Europe after the end of the Cold War – OSCE, NATO and the European Union Along with a redefinition of the very concept of security, the institutions to cope with the new challenges tried to adjust adequately. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and the European Communities (the EU from 1993) all broadened their membership and the range of their activities to cope with the new challenges and to remain relevant and hence continue its existence.
CSCE / OSCEAs the mechanisms of “soft diplomacy and co-operative strategies” proved to be inadequate to cope with the outbreak of the war in Yugoslavia in summer 1991, the CSCE was turned from a “Conference” into a permanent organisation, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE was tasked with early warning mechanisms, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation. Its work was upgraded by an increased number of meetings of the Committee of Senior Officials (CSO) and the application of more competences to enable the CSO to deal with crises occurring in-between high-level meetings. After the experience of the Serbs blocking the decision-making process in 1991, the OSCE foreign ministers also introduced a deviation for the CSO from the consensus rule: declarations and communiqués could, in cases of grave violations of CSCE obligations, be made without taking into account the voice of no more than one state (“consensus minus one rule”). Beyond these measures, the Conflict Prevention Centre (CPC) received additional competences, including the ability to offer field missions. A Consultative Committee for security-related negotiations, a network for better communication between the foreign ministers and an Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (replacing the Warsaw-based Office of Free Elections) were established. Despite this broad range of activities, the most prominent activities of the OSCE today are its election observations.
NATO A major cornerstone in Europe's security architecture remains NATO: Although the institution has been fighting to redefine its purpose since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, it remains the most durable, institutionalised exchange platform between Europe and the United States (US) and the most experienced and best equipped military alliance. While keeping the US in Europe , it also strives against a renationalisation of defence policy. NATO has been struggling with the redefinition of its tasks, its membership and its relevance, first and foremost for its most important member, the United States . Along with the US ' changing shift of attention towards the Middle and the Far East, the US demanded for a fairer “burden-sharing” (yet not for a “decision-making sharing”). The European Security and Defence Initiative (ESDI) was developed to build up a “European pillar” within NATO, an effort to increase European capabilities within the alliance. This desire was further fleshed out in the Defence Capabilities Initiative (DCI) of the Washington DC Summit in 1999 and the following Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC) at the 2002 summit.
From an organisation nicknamed “No Action Talk Only”, NATO has transformed into an expeditionary and operating alliance. Apart from new capabilities commitments, that still need to be fulfilled so far, the US also demanded NATO to become more flexible in its areas of activity, approaches and tools – not only to operate “out of area”, but also to provide flexible, fast, stand-by units: The NATO Response Force, comprised of air, naval and land forces, can number up to 25,000 troops, deployable after 5 days of notice and self-sustainable for up to 30 days. Beyond this, NATO has extended its member ship by including all post-communist Central European States and has also set up institutionalised relationships with non-members through the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme as well as a Russia-NATO Council and a Ukraine-NATO commission.
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The
2nd ESiA Lecture Tour titled “The EU through the Eyes of Asia: The
Case of China and Hong Kong” was delivered by Dr. Kenneth Chan of
Hong Kong Baptist University, China . It examined the significance
of Europe and the European Union (EU) to the citizens in China and
Hong Kong, comparing perceptions regarding the EU among the media,
general public and elites in the two locations. Key questions that
were addressed included: 
The
European Commission has recently integrated its various educational
and training initiatives under a single new umbrella programme called
the Lifelong Learning Programme. The new programme has a significant
budget of nearly €7 billion to be spent over the period of
2007 to 2013. It provides opportunities for people at all stages
of their lives to pursue stimulating learning across Europe. 
university
students in Asia and Europe in a better position to make the necessary
assessment of possible benefits of studying in the ASEM countries.
urther
institutionalisation in the field of security policy. With security
being the foundation for the EU's continuing prosperity, functional
co-operation has not only turned out to be the only way to go in
this very sensitive, jealously guarded policy field by nation states,
but has also been leading to further regional integration in the
security field and hence for further regional integration in Europe.