The prospects of the East Asian integration process and of its supranational institutions in light of the experience of the European regional integration

The purpose of this article is to examine to what extent the European integration experience is relevant for the construction of a future regional supranational institutional framework monitoring and regulating the regional integration process currently taking place in East Asia. The following analysis will highlight three fundamental differences between the two regional integration processes. The first one lays in their main underlying microeconomic dynamics, their different sequence in time and how they shape regional institutions. The second is the level of symmetry and homogeneity within the groups of economies involved in their respective regional integration processes, in terms of economic size, technological capabilities and political weight. This paper will demonstrate that these macroeconomic and macro-political configurations can create more or less fertile conditions for the emergence of regional supranational institutions. The last difference is the geopolitical context and particularly the existence of a third party able to foster the construction of regional supranational institutions. The analysis of these differences and how they affect the institutions of a region will underline why the East Asian integration process is unlikely to reproduce the European supranational institutional development model, hence disregarding purely cultural integration factors