 Toward the Asian Union?.
Washington DC - In the last decade, and following the financial crisis that hit economies throughout the region in 1997, Asian countries have grown increasingly integrated into the global stage and, even more significantly, have engaged more closely among themselves. Asia’s New Regionalism is the title of a new book by Ellen Frost, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC and a former counsel to the United States Trade Representative under the first Clinton Administration. “This is a very slow-moving but profoundly strategic development going on in Asia,” said Frost at the book launch co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and Asia Society. In her latest study, the Peterson Institute’s fellow offers a broad overview of the continent’s history, politics and economy, and depicts the emergence of two Asias; maritime Asia and Asia Major. Maritime Asia is “the vast sweep of coastline and water connecting central and southern India, Southeast Asia, China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.” Here integration is happening spontaneously, driven by individuals through mercantile exchanges, foreign investments and travel. Maritime Asia provides the ground for Regionalization, the process that is knitting the economies and societies of the region closer together. Asia Major instead “is a political construct. It is the locus of planned integration driven by national governments,” a top-down process that Frost calls Regionalism. Regionalism has taken the form of a series of multilateral forums, such as ASEAN (the Association of East Asian Nations) and its most recent version ASEAN+3 which includes China, Japan and Korea. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is another example of a security-related intergovernmental organization that binds together China and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Meanwhile, levels of trade and financial exchanges are proof of the parallel process of Regionalization. Data released by the Asian Development Bank shows that the share of intraregional trade as a percentage of total exports from Asia rose from 26.2% in 1985 to 37.3% in 2005. Similarly, according to a study by Rabin Hattari and Ramkishen S. Rajan, two research scholars at George Mason University in Virginia, intraregional Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) had grown to make up 40% of total FDIs to Asia by 2004. These political and economic trends, although separate, are progressing hand in hand and could encourage some to believe that Asia is on its way to a “European Union-style” integration. 
In 2004, Norbert Walter, the Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank Group, wrote that “Asia is a logical candidate to take a leadership role in the reform of global currency markets- by creating a common Asian currency.” Dr. Walter set a potential deadline at the year 2025. In 2007, the Asian Development Bank launched a two-year assessment project aimed at studying Asian emerging regionalism on the premises that “Despite their diverse economic structures, income levels, and resource endowments, Asian economies are starting to use closer regional ties to provide a new platform for their development process.” In spite of the optimism, observers in Washington DC are inclined to warn against the overestimation of the state of integration in Asia. “The governments are happy with the status-quo,” Ellen Frost told Washington Prism in an interview. “Nation states are not going away any time soon,” she emphasized.
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