ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at the role that Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) assumes in the European Union (EU)'s political and institutional system. The EU maintains a permanent dialogue with a number of groups of states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as in Europe. The individual EU members are partners of ASEM and not the European Community, which normally represents the EU members in formal external relations comprising legal commitments. As an informal political dialogue, ASEM forms basically a state-to state structure, where the EU member states participate in their own capacity. A clear linkage to the formal EU-Asia relations can also be seen in the fact that issues related to ASEM are, along with other Asian policy issues, prepared in the Asia-Oceania Group. The more binding decisions a dialogue is set to achieve, the more the EU is involved as a collective actor on the basis of the structures for common policy-making.