The Nature of The East Asia Community
The shape of the East Asia Community remains something to be defined in the future. The issues being explored at this stage deal with whether there will be a Community which must be resolved prior to understanding what it will look like.
Some have linked the EAS with a future broader Asian Economic Community like the European Community. However some commentators see this an overly optimistic vision and it is plainly in the very distant future if it is to occur - the European Community has taken decades to reach its current shape, had greater early drive for its creation and more coherence between its members (ASEAN alone is composed of democracies, dictatorships, capitalist tax havens and communist states).
On any view community building is not a short term project. However after the second EAS the Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh was confident that the EAS would lead to an East Asia Community. China had also apparently accepted this was the case.
If achieved the Comprehensive Economic Partnership for East Asia (CEPEA) would be a tangible first step in the community building process. The Second EAS and Third EAS seems to have increased confidence in CEPEA but is still only a proposal.
For the moment currency union, as distinct from the Asian Development Bank proposed Asian Currency Unit, is not even being pursued within ASEAN, much less the broader members of the EAS.
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