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Pacific Community’ given that the Bush administration has indicated that it would put priority in
its foreign economic policy on the deepening of NAFTA with South America (Webber 2001,
364-5). Moreover, after the event of September 11 the U.S. has had to concentrate on a ‘war on
terrorism.’ Recently there has been no official statement from the U.S. that opposes APT or Asia-
only regionalism (see Moore 2004, 130-1).
Whereas APEC or the idea of a ‘new Pacific Community’ encountered a deadlock because
of its inherent limits and external shocks such as the Asian Financial Crisis, the incarnation of the
idea of EAEG or ‘East-Asianism’ is recently detected in the form of ASEAN Plus Three
(ASEAN + China, Japan, and South Korea, hereafter APT). Although APT is an informal
intergovernmental body just like APEC, it succeeded in gaining a critical momentum in a
relatively short time. APT was originally organized for policy coordination among East Asian
states to prepare for the ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) in 1996 (Webber 2001, 357). Its first
annual summit was held in Kuala Lumpur in 1997 and by the initiative of South Korea President
Kim Dae Jung, the East Asian Vision Group and the East Asian Study Group were established
(Moore 2004, 117-8). According to the final report of the East Asian Study Group that were made
public in 2002, they plan to develop APT summits into East Asian summits and finally an East
Asian Free Trade Area (Moore 2004, 118). APT members also reached an agreement to establish
a regional currency swap facility in Chiang Mai, Thailand in 2000 in order to protect themselves
from future financial crises (Grimes 2004, 193-4). As well, in Nov. 2004 ASEAN and China
agreed to create a Free Trade Area by 2010 and ASEAN is scheduled to start talks in early 2005
for the creation of an FTA with Japan and South Korea respectively (CNN.com 2004a, 2004b;
The Korea Times, 2004a).
Furthermore, the idea of an ‘East Asian Community (EAC),’ which is a formula similar to
the EU (e.g., a common market and a common currency), was first proposed by the former
Philippines President Estrada and this idea is recently gaining more and more supporters (Webber
2001, 341). Especially South Korean and Japanese governments expressed the idea that the
Convention