Europe and East Asia: Comitology versus guanxi?

Europe and Asia pride themselves on their different histories and diversity of cultures. Nevertheless, on both sides of the Eurasian landmass not only increased trade integrates economies, but also enhanced communication brings people(s) together in unprecedented numbers, over or without borders. How do they relate to each other, and how do they organise their fast advancing integration processes? Joint institution-building or balance of power, what allows success when and where? Some compare underlying trade agreements to messy ‘spaghetti-bowls'; others call them ‘stepping-stones' to master globalisation. Europe went from ECU to euro and is now slowly emerging from the western crises. Financial crises hit Asia already in the late 1990s, but is there a way to an ACU and more integration also here? We seem to have expanded networks from bilateral exchanges of goods to regional value chains of production. At the same time, we have to open up to omnilateral governance at higher level in order to preserve our common global goods, starting with the earth's environment. In our highly interdependent world, so-called ‘national sovereignty' - often an obstacle to peace, not only in Europe - hardly holds water anymore, neither upstream towards global nor downstream towards local governance. As we learn sharing of information through the internet, likewise enhanced communication empowers more political participation devolved from the national level. From personal relationships of ‘guanxi' to supranational committees of experts, today's technology can render decision-making more transparent and hence political for all. Against this background, the guest speaker will discuss:

‧ Economic and political integration/cooperation between and within Europe and East Asia

‧ Pros and cons of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements

‧ Globalisation and its governance.

Dr Wolfgang Pape is a retired European policy expert for the European Commission (EC). He held a number of positions during his 30-year career with the EC including Principal Administrator in charge of international aspects of small and medium-sized enterprises for the Directorate-General for Enterprise; First Counsellor for the EC Delegation in Tokyo and General Manager of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation for DG Relex (now known as the European External Action Service), after work in charge of its ‘EU-Asia Strategy'. Since retiring from the European Commission he has worked as a Research Fellow for the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels and held a fellowship at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP) in Seoul. A part-time lecturer on European Union and Asian affairs at universities and institutes in Europe, China, Korea, Japan as well a free-lance writer, he is currently a visiting fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Academia Sinica in Taipei.