On 22 December 2009, EU member states approved the launch of bilateral negotiations with ASEAN countries, starting with Singapore, which according to the EC is ‘the EU’s most important trading partner among the ASEAN countries’, with around €55 billion of bilateral trade. EU Trade Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner stated that ‘creating new business opportunities for European companies in the dynamic ASEAN countries will strengthen the competitiveness of manufacturers, farmers and service providers in the EU’. While the EU’s ‘ultimate goal’ was a comprehensive region-to-region agreement, Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner argued that ‘today’s decision … will allow us to move forward and re-engage with this important region through negotiations with individual ASEAN member states’. After the US and China, ASEAN is the third most important international market for the EU.
This step follows a lack of progress since 2007 in region-to-region negotiations. The EC’s aim in the new bilateral process of negotiations is to ‘lower or abolish the currently existing tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade and investment in many ASEAN markets’. The EC sees these bilateral agreements as ‘valuable building blocks’ towards reaching a comprehensive region-to-region agreement.
Europa Press Releases Rapid, press release, IP/09/1991, 22 December 2009
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1991&f...
ICTSD, Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest, Vol. 14, No. 2, 20 January 2010
http://ictsd.org/i/news/bridgesweekly/68317/
The decision by the EU to launch negotiations at the bilateral level highlights the intrinsic difficulties in seeking to negotiate region-to-region agreements with groups of countries of diverse sizes and varying levels of development, and whose own integration process as a group is till in its infancy. Similar difficulties have been faced in an ACP context, with the west African, central African and eastern and southern African regional EPA negotiating configurations all finding it difficult to reach common regional negotiating positions on the collective tariff offers to be made to the EU.
The EU’s decision to switch to bilateral FTA negotiations also needs to be seen against the background of the entry into force on 1 January 2010 of the China-ASEAN FTA agreement and the phenomenal growth in China-ASEAN trade in the last ten years. This has seen China become ASEAN’s third most important trading partner after Japan and the EU.