EU-ASEAN relations in the 2020s: pragmatic inter-regionalism?

The world in the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a proliferation of region-to-region institutional frameworks. There was a recognition that scale and leverage could create an advantage for economic relations, that security could benefit from cross-region dialogue and initiatives, and that some of the many global challenges, from global climate change to resource depletion, could be addressed more effectively at regional and even inter-regional levels. The EU-ASEAN dialogue itself presents an important model for inter-regional cooperation at the heart of these tangled institutional webs. This article assesses the ways in which the changing multilateral landscape and intra-regional crises within ASEAN and the EU have altered the relevance of inter-regional dialogue and initiatives.