East Asian Community

East Asian Community (EAC) is a proposed trade bloc for the East Asia countries that may arise out of either ASEAN Plus Three or the East Asia Summit (EAS).

The idea of establishing a trade community within East Asia has had a long history. Beginning in the 1940s, Japanese occupation in East Asia was followed up by the creation of an Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere consisting of Asian nations. This idea was unsuccessful as it largely existed as an ideology to allow Japan to exploit the rest of Asia and partly instigated the Pacific theatre of World War II. However, the intention of Asian integration did not end following the Japanese defeat.

In 1990, Malaysia proposed a creation of an East Asia Economic Caucus composed of the then-members of ASEAN (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand), the Peoples' Republic of China, Japan, and South Korea. This was also a failure since it faced strong objections from Japan and the United States.

After a series of failures, ASEAN and its neighbors created another regional grouping the ASEAN Plus Three, established in 1997 and institutionalised in 1999. The significance of this grouping was demonstrated in the response to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. ASEAN Plus Three appeared to take the role of community building in East Asia.

In 1999, a Joint Statement on East Asia Cooperation was issued on the topic of East Asian integration by ASEAN.

In 1998, ASEAN Plus Three established The East Asian Vision Group of eminent persons which reported in 2001. In turn in 2001 the East Asian Study Group was established. In 2002, ASEAN Plus Three received the Final Report of the East Asian Study Group. This included a recommendation to establish an East Asia Summit.

As a result, the status of ASEAN Plus Three is unclear with the existence of the more recent East Asia Summit established in 2005 following this process and involving all the members of ASEAN Plus Three, together with India, Australia and New Zealand.

The shape of the East Asia Community remains something to be defined in the future. The issues being explored at this stage deal with whether there will be a Community which must be resolved prior to understanding what it will look like.

Some have linked the EAS with a future broader Asian Economic Community like the European Community. However some commentators see this an overly optimistic vision and it is plainly in the very distant future if it is to occur - the European Community has taken decades to reach its current shape, had greater early drive for its creation and more coherence between its members (ASEAN alone is composed of democracies, dictatorships, capitalist tax havens and communist states).

On any view community building is not a short term project. However after the second EAS the Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh was confident that the EAS would lead to an East Asia Community. China had also apparently accepted this was the case.

If achieved the Comprehensive Economic Partnership for East Asia (CEPEA) would be a tangible first step in the community building process. The Second EAS and Third EAS seems to have increased confidence in CEPEA but is still only a proposal.

For the moment currency union, as distinct from the Asian Development Bank proposed Asian Currency Unit, is not even being purused within ASEAN, much less the broader members of the EAS.