On 31 October – 1 November 2019, at Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, CICP organized a conference on ASEAN-EU Relations: Navigating Divides, Deepening Cooperation. This conference serves as a reality check on the relationship between ASEAN and the EU and seeks to provide recommendations which lie as the foundation for future ASEAN-EU conference and dialogues. Scholars and experts from the US as well as the European and ASEAN countries provided their insights with regards to the realities of the ASEAN-EU relationship, its current equilibrium, the blunders of existing partnership and key areas of improvement, and the possible scenarios for the future development of the relationship.
During the conference, there was a general consensus that the ASEAN-EU partnership is timely crucial to strengthening the multilateralism and rule-based multilateral framework amidst the threat of rising protectionism and populism. Moreover, while the partnership between ASEAN and the EU is extensively emphasized on the economic dimension, there have been calls for the organizations to forge a strategic partnership that entails multi-faceted engagements in political security and non-traditional security issues, including cyber-security, climate change, terrorism, and the like. Despite these consistent calls and the existing mechanisms to elevate the ASEAN-EU partnership, the conference acknowledged that substantial efforts are needed for both organizations to overcome various hurdles marked by their respective internal challenges and external factors.
The outcome report of this conference is available in this link: https://cicp.org.kh/publications/outcome-report-of-the-conference-on-asean-eu-relations-navigating-divides-deepening-cooperation/
