Description
The past decade has witnessed EU’s momentous strategy and policy shift in trade interactions with ASEAN countries, which is characterized by the return of realism and geo-economic turn. Despite deficits and mixed records in terms of human rights, labor rights and environment sustainability among ASEAN countries, EU ambitiously speeds up negotiating bilateral free trade agreements with each individually and makes great progress after the failure of negotiating EU-ASEAN regional FTA as whole. Among existing scholarly discussions concerning this, EU as leading power in promoting normative value through carrying out its liberal trade strategy in the region are shed more lights on. The pragmatic perspective and its dynamic with normative one, however, is still relatively unexplored. Therefore, built upon more balanced framework ‘principled pragmatism’, this article will try to feature this important trade policy shift by EU and further explain what gives impetus to such a transformation. Drawing upon observations, interviews with stakeholders and context analysis of key agreement texts as well as meeting records, the article summarized three major findings. Externally, confronting with rivalry over trans-regional trade frameworks led by US and China like RCEP, CPTPP and IPEF, EU seeks for maintaining and enhancing its normative leadership in social standards, rule-setting role in global trade regime, and overall influence in Indo-pacific region. Internally, promoted by key EU member states, the stability and diversity of supply chain as well as lasting economic growth with the help of emerging economies under geo-political turmoil also motivate EU to build stronger trade partnership with ASEAN countries. More importantly, the article also argues that strengthening ex-ante effect of FTAs and adopting more policy-learning and dialogue oriented follow-up mechanism, enable EU to obtain more policy space and legitimacy to embed increasing pragmatism into promoting its normative value to ASEAN countries.
