ASEM’s tenth birthday celebrations will be in Finland which has the EU’s Presidency in the second half of 2006. Its capital Helsinki is gearing up to host the largest meeting at the level of Heads of State and Government in the history of the country. Approximately two thousand delegates and one thousand media representatives will gather for the sixth ASEM summit. There will also be a host of parallel meetings and conferences running in the beginning of September surrounding ASEM 6.

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) was officially established in 1996 at the first summit in Bangkok. ASEM is an inter-regional...

The last years have witnessed a number of key changes and challenges in international relations, especially in the security area. Disagreements have continued over unilateral enforcement action without the authorization of the Security Council, and UN reforms have moved to the centre stage of debate. Some regional organisations have also gone through rapid periods of change and reflection and member states of the UN or other international organisations have started to wonder whether they should fund multilateral organizations or bilateral approaches. Critical questions of leadership, efficiency, duplication, transparency, democratic decision-making and accountability are heard more often than ever.

Today’s organising...

The financial architecture of the Asian region is a cornerstone of competing political agendas: on the one hand, integration into the IMF/US global regime, and on the other, a more autonomous Asian regime more loosely connected and subordinated to the IMF. These competing agendas were clearly visible in the controversy over the introduction of an AMF and in the policy approaches of the US, Japan and other actors. The Asian financial crisis thus constitutes a focal point for financial integration models in the Asian region. As Maull points out: ‘International order will need to be multi-layered to be effective: given...

The invitation to the first East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005 once more highlighted India’s ambitions to become more closely associated with the dynamics of regionalism in East and Southeast Asia. This strategy started with the Look East Policy in the early 1990s following India’s comprehensive economic reforms after 1991. When looking at India’s foreign policy it is obvious that her quest for intra- and inter-regional politics is not a new phenomenon. Nehru had already been a champion of regional cooperation both within Asia and the de-colonized countries. But during the Cold War period India’s ambitions had...

Europe, as a geographic, political, security and economic entity has no rival in the world. The post-WW II security and economic environment posed serious questions as to the value of nation states seeking to remain apart and, when the multilateral system began to take shape, outside the scope of international cooperation. The European Union, over the course of the last 49 years, has sought to address these questions by at first co-ordinating and then integrating the nation states’ economies and political decision making structures into a regional grouping. Realising the success of this model, including in terms of the security...

One of the most critical changes in Chinese foreign policy over the past decade has been Beijing’s increasing interest in pursuing multilateral engagement and cooperation on a variety of global issues, a marked contrast from the country’s preference during the Maoist and Dengist eras for bilateral cooperation coupled with mistrust towards international regimes. With the turn of the century, as China continues to grow not only as an economic power but also as a political and diplomatic one, the effects of China’s institutional engagements are becoming more visible and relevant to the study of international organisations, regimes and regional cooperation,...

Latin America has been linked to China throughout its recent history. During the 1960s the Latin American communist parties participated in the ideological struggle between China and the Soviet Union; in the 1970s they regarded China as the paladin of the struggles of the Third World. In the 1980s South American countries began to feel the presence of a new China so concerned for its own process of economic modernization that it was beginning to compete with them for financial aid in the international organizations. As China’s economic growth accelerated in the 1990s, its exports began to inundate the markets...

It is now more than a decade since awareness in Europe grew that ‘the rise of Asia is dramatically changing the world balance of economic power’, as the EU’s New Asia Strategy (1994) phrased it. The first Asia-Europe Meeting, held in Bangkok in March 1996, was born out of Goh Chok Tong’s suggestion to bridge the gap between Asia and Europe by establishing an institutional framework for the two regions to systematically engage with each other. Many perceived ASEM 1 as a first step towards filling in the ‘missing link’ in the triadic international economic structure. Ten years later, however,...

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) was conceived in Singapore as an informal meeting between Asian and European leaders to enable the EU to engage dynamic Asian economies in a wide-ranging dialogue. The early 1990s saw the unilateral liberalization of various Southeast Asian economies and the opening up of the Chinese market. At the same time, the European Union was integrating further with the 1986 Single European Act and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. There were therefore strong economic reasons for the two regions to strengthen dialogue. The EU wanted to partake in the benefits of the strong growth in Asia, and not...

The purpose of the ASEM process is to help build a new partnership based on equality between Asia and Europe, to promote the democratization of international relations and to accelerate the development of multilateralism. China has been involved in the process from the very beginning, and has played an active role in it. It is therefore very important to analyze the Chinese public’s, elites’ and policy-maker’s views of the ASEM process. To some extent, it is their attitude and perception that influence the future development of the overall process. The research, supported by the Japan Centre for International Exchanges (JCIE),...