| Summary/Abstract |
The European Union has struggled for a long time to increase the international profile of its foreign policy. The intensity of the EU’s foreign policy has been a function of the speed and efficacy of its own internal integration programs. For instance, the Single European Market (SEM) program pursued during the period of 1986–1992 took a substantial amount of time and resources of the EU policy makers, thereby leading to a temporary vacuum of EU’s foreign policy especially vis-à-vis countries geopolitically remote to the EU, including the Asian region. The adoption in 1994 of the New Asia Strategy (NAS) was a welcomed move by the EU to reinvigorate its relationship with Asian countries that had been showing an increasing strategic value since the mid-1980s. The USA also adopted an aggressive Asia Strategy under the name of Big Emerging Markets (BEMs) strategy around the same time, through which the US administration designated 17 big emerging markets as priority economic (and political) cooperation partners. In fact, 12 of 17 BEMs were Asian countries, which signaled that Asia was rediscovered and the USA and the EU started competing for a strategic leverage in the Asian region.
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