Negotiating free trade area agreements: Comparing the EU-ASEAN FTA and ASEAN-Japan comprehensive economic partnership agreement negotiations

• Main Author: Mangado, Darren de la Torre
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: International Relations
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/11737
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Doha multilateral trade negotiations impasse prompted major economic players to compete with each other in negotiating free trade area agreements(FTAs) with strategic economic partners to maintain their competitive edge in international trade. Both the European Union (EU) and Japan negotiated with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for the FTA. However, the EU-ASEAN FTA negotiations collapsed two years after the negotiations were launched in 2007 while the ASEAN-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (AJCEP) negotiations were successfully concluded in the same year. The literature explains the different outcomes, in economic terms, as an issue of comparative advantage; in political terms. as a measure of the EU's and Japan's sensitivity towards the different forms of governance of their respective trade partners. The literature usually considers ASEAN as a passive recipient of an FTA supposedly sponsored by its potential major trading partner. This paper probes the collapse of EU-ASEAN FTA negotiations and the success of AJCEP negotiations. It forwards that ASEAN asserted Third World development agenda - defined in the context of collective self-reliance - in its FTA negotiations. The EU failed to acknowledge this on the premise that the Third World project is already irrelevant, and continued with FTA negotiations as if they were multilateral trade talks, while Japan adopted a more flexible and responsive approach that accommodated ASEAN's Third World agenda.