ASEAN Secretary General Le
Luong Minh yesterday stated that ASEAN
could resume its free trade agreement (FTA) talks with the EU. According to
the Nation, ASEAN could pick up its FTA talks with the EU after the
formation of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2015:
"Currently, ASEAN is too busy moving towards a single market under the 2015 target," he said. "But after the AEC has been achieved, then we should be ready for tighter cooperation with others, and the FTA negotiation with the EU is one of the top priorities after 2015."
Of course, the end of 2015
is also the target for completion of ASEAN’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
(RCEP) talks with its trading partners.
Hence by then ASEAN should have achieved greater progress on the
operation of intra-ASEAN trade (e.g., the AEC), as well as reached a common
position in dealing with trading partners (e.g., the RCEP), including the EU. Indeed, the AEC and RCEP are
self-reinforcing, as
trading partners will use the RCEP talks to prod ASEAN members to administer
the AEC more effectively.
The EU had initiated FTA
talks in 2006 with ASEAN, but they stalled.
Reasons cited included opposition in Europe on human rights grounds to
negotiating with the Myanmar government, as well as insufficient
negotiating infrastructure on the ASEAN side (e.g., who speaks for
ASEAN?). Eight years later, Myanmar has
changed to the satisfaction of most Europeans and the EU has spent millions of
Euros in development assistance for ASEAN to develop its institutions.
With the assistance of the
EU, optimistically, the RCEP talks and AEC implementation will have progressed
sufficiently for ASEAN to be able to resume its FTA talks with the EU after
2015. The
loss of Generalized System of Preferences trade privileges for Malaysia and
Thailand’s exports to the EU also should motivate these ASEAN members to the
negotiating table.
Or perhaps not. Although several ASEAN member states have
entered into FTA negotiations with the EU on a bilateral basis, only Singapore
has achieved an FTA with the EU, and even that was somewhat delayed. Without a fully functioning government, Thailand
cannot enter into FTA talks with anyone at the moment; FTA negotiations require
authorization from the Thai parliament.
Malaysia’s FTA talks with the EU have also stalled amid domestic
pressures, and EU FTA negotiations with Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam are
at varying levels of preliminary progress.
Secretary General Minh is
correct in his assessment that ASEAN can only resume FTA talks with the EU only
after 2015. Hopefully by then ASEAN will
have augmented its regional institutions sufficiently, and the ASEAN member
states will have resolved the domestic political issues blocking an EU-ASEAN
FTA. It may take a few more years to
reach that goal, but at least the EU and ASEAN are willing to put an FTA on the
table, something that the US can only offer in partial form (via the Trans
Pacific Partnership) and without a full mandate at the moment.
