ABSTRACT
The Draft Charter of the East Asian Community employs the concept of East Asia, which is also related to the membership of the Community. To identify such basic principles, the drafters studied national constitutions, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) documents and international treaties subscribed to by most of the states of the region, and summarized their salient points into broad but feasibly acceptable principles. This chapter explores the current features and problems of East Asian regionalism from a comparative perspective and in particular from a lawyer's comparative point of view. The East Asian states' attempt to form macro-regional frameworks based on the concept of 'open regionalism' is a typical example. The insistence on national sovereignty by East Asian states is not surprising, because in this region many states experienced colonization until they attained their independence in the middle of the twentieth century.
