Regional organisations as trade diplomats: comparative analysis of the European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Trade Diplomacy

This thesis offers a novel way of understanding regional organisation (RO), not just as an actor in international relations, but more specifically a trade diplomat. States’ practice of negotiating trade relations using their respective regional organisations are becoming prevalent and amongst these regional organisations, the European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) stand out in terms of their contribution to global output and global trade growth. Coincidentally, the EU and ASEAN also represent two different spectrums of regional governance, one characterised by the transfer of limited state sovereignty to a supranational institution and the other by the continued resistance to transfer any state sovereignty to a higher institution. The EU and ASEAN, then, represent two compelling cases of RO’s external trade relations.

In explaining this phenomenon, this thesis adopts the concept of trade diplomacy and proposes a new framework since previous studies either focus only on individual states or view trade relations independently of the political or foreign policy context. Utilising a hybrid inductive-deductive approach and building from several streams of literature, document analysis, and research interviews, this research offers a three-element framework to explain RO’s trade diplomacy consisting of trade actorness, processes, and goals. Applying this framework to the EU and ASEAN, it identifies key differences and similarities between the two. Further examined, differences between the EU and ASEAN’s practices of trade diplomacy can be attributed to three internal determinants: their institutional, political, and economic differences while their similarities are products of external environments, namely changes in the global-regional landscape and their inherent need to be recognised due to their status as non-traditional actors in IR.

The final research output is a comprehensive model of RO’s trade diplomacy and the internal/external factors affecting the practice. Although this research contributes mostly to the field of trade & economic diplomacy, several of its outcomes will be of interest to scholars of comparative regionalism. Specifically, for its empirical findings, this research is the first to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of how and why ASEAN manages its external trade relations the way it does.