Building the Northeast Asian Community

Abstract

Asia is one of the most socio-politically divided regions in the world. Without regional cooperation, it faces difficulty in the world market, sometimes receiving unfair treatment. Asia contains more than half of the world’s population, but Asian countries have a relatively small share of international organizations. Given these facts, it is meaningful to explore the need and legal basis for a Northeast Asian Community (NEAC), which would be an economically integrated regional trade association composed of Korea, China, and Japan. Within the last decade, the possibility of an East Asian regional trade agreement (RTA) or a much broader Asia-Pacific integration has been debated exten-