The European Union, United States and Asean: Challenges and Prospects for Cooperative Engagement in the 21st Century

The dawn of the 21st Century has witnessed fundamental changes in international relations affecting major, medium and small powers, as well as regional groupings in Asia, Europe and North America. Since the end of the Cold War some twelve years ago, regionalism has evidently emerged as an alternative to power configurations shaped earlier by bipolarity. Europe, in particular the European Union, began to re-examine its historical and cultural ties to Asia-Pacific balance of power. The United States remains the primary actor energizing trans-Atlantic as well as trans-Pacific interactions, especially after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks against America, while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), for its part, is now engaged in the process of consolidating Asean-10.

This book therefore examines the political, cultural, social, economic, and strategic dimensions of EU-US-Asean interaction in the new millennium. The fifteen essays focus on the challenges and prospects for cooperative engagement by all three actors as they attempt to shape their regional strategic environments to address both traditional and non-traditional security issues in the 21st Century. While there is greater need for sensitivity to the individual interests and challenges faced by each actor, there is also a consensus that long term solutions to regional and global stability and prosperity are better founded on strategies based on comprehensive security. It concludes on the note that the enhancement of trilateral interactions in a transforming strategic context requires bold new approaches that enable cooperative engagement to achieve common security at the national, regional and global levels.