Why do regional organizations share a number of key institutions and policies? Why do such organizations like the African Union try to look like a European Union? And why do we find the norms of the Helsinki Final Act in treaties of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)?  How much influence does European integration actually have on ASEAN? 

ASEAN, founded in 1967, has selectively taken over policies and institutions from a European context. The most recent example would be the goal of building an ASEAN Economic Community by 2015 and the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2008.  Dr Anja Jetschke contends that regional integration efforts in Europe have had a decisive but often unacknowledged influence on regional integration outside of Europe. She argues that existing theories of regional integration or cooperation fail to explain surprising similarities between the EU and ASEAN as regional organizations. Explaining these adoptions requires new analytical tools that can be found in the literature on diffusion. Adoptions can be motivated by a number of considerations: the search for good policy solutions or the desire for legitimacy and to belong to an international community. In each case, different rationalities apply, and understanding the dynamics within ASEAN and that of ASEAN’s interactions and cooperation at the broader regional and global level will be crucial.

Speaker

Dr Anja Jetschke is Margarete-von-Wrangell Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She received her PhD from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. During the academic year 2007-08 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, and from 2009-2010 a fellow at the Research College “The Transformative Power of Europe” at the Free University of Berlin. She is the author of a forthcoming book Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Her most recent research focuses on the model character of the EU for other regional organizations and its limitations. She has published in The Pacific Review, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and other journals.