East Asian Regionalism and EU Studies

This article examines the development of Asian regionalism and the scholarship on regionalism in Asia in relation to EU studies. It provides a brief overview of the development and relative successes to date of East Asian regionalism. It then examines scholarship on the East Asian region — the principal approaches, concepts and methods before moving on to ask what, if anything, scholars of EU studies can learn from scholarship on the East Asian region and what, if anything, scholars of the East Asian region might learn from scholarship on the EU. It seeks to establish some pathways to deeper dialogue between scholarly understandings of the EU experience of integration and the East Asian experience of regionalism, aiming to contribute to comparative regional integration analysis. It argues that the key characteristic of European integration theory is an ‘institutions plus embedded norms’ framework and that the distinguishing feature of East Asian regionalism is a framework of architecture based on open economic regionalism, normative priors and security imperatives.