Europe and the Asia Pacific : two regions in search of a relationship

Globalization, driven by corporate entrepreneurship and international communication advances, is undoubtedly intensifying worldwide interconnectedness, but it cannot totally eliminate either the legacies of history or the realities of geographical and cultural distance. Certainly not in the case of Europe and the Asia Pacific, two regions whose relationship during the twentieth century suffered from the vagaries of both mutual antagonism and mutual neglect. The relationship moved from exploitative, informal, and formal colonization through the traumas of decolonization and reduced contact to the often far-from-creative tension derived from competitive commerce.2 In the past two decades, the relationship has been dominated by the business of doing business, and, although political and security concerns did begin to grow slowly in importance as the Cold War wound down, they have failed to displace economics as the central element of the relationship. In sum, the relationship has remained a distant, irregular, and lopsided one. This chapter examines the prospects for the two regions in terms of developing their inter-regional relationship and their respective roles in the changing global order.