ABSTRACT
To what extent can East Asian regionalism be compared to European regionalism? Is it possible that practitioners and analysts of regionalism in one part of the world can gain valuable lessons from the developments of regionalism in another part of the world? These two questions lie at the heart of this chapter. It has to be noted that apart from a few notable exceptions East Asian policy makers and analysts of East Asian regionalization and regionalism have not generally taken their cue from the European experience. As this chapter will demonstrate there are some significant differences, especially in terms of leadership, between the two approaches to regionalism and there are, therefore, good reasons why East Asian leaders have failed to use Europe as a model for regional development. Yet emphasizing the dissimilarities should not blind practitioners and analysts to some important lessons that can be gleaned from the other region. Two examples are explored in this chapter. First is the possibility that there may be what scholars of European integration have referred to as a ‘spillover effect’ created by the Chiang Mai Initiative and the Asian Bond Market Initiative whereby cooperation on these essentially technical issues might encourage greater East Asia-wide cooperation on other issues. Second is the question of whether the approach to the implementation of agreements in trade in services in East Asia could be instructive for European Union (EU) members as they attempt to implement their own agreements.
