Introduction: ASEM and interregionalism

The second Asia‐Europe (ASEM) meeting took place in London in April 1998 in very different circumstances from the first, held in Bangkok in 1996. The Europeans had then been motivated to build stronger links with rising Asian interests, addressing the developmentalist states of the region as equal and perhaps superior partners. By the spring of 1998 the Asian financial crisis had transformed the situation, and ASEM II became a forum in which conformity to neoliberal principles was pressed upon them. It seemed at the time that the European Union was bidding to define and claim leadership of a new regime of global economic governance along systematically neoliberal lines. However, as the crisis spread and deepened, and the political, economic and social consequences spread through Southeast Asia in particular, it became clear that even if such a global regime could be defined, significant doubts surrounded the ability and the will of leaders in the region and beyond to implement it. If the ASEM meetings could be considered as a component part of a larger architecture of global economic regulation, then they remained as much an index of the extent of the problem, as an outline of the eventual shape of the solution.